Ethics Newsline®

George Moffett, former diplomatic correspondent and Middle East correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, is the author of Critical Masses: The Global Population Challenge. He served in the Carter White House, where he worked on the Panama Canal treaties. Now president of Principia College, Dr. Moffett was interviewed by telephone on October 3 in his office in Elsah, Illinois, by Rushworth Kidder.

Kidder: As a result of these attacks, what do you hope will change for the better in our country and the world over the next decade?

Moffett: Our national conversation since September 11th has focused on two things that are important, but not the third thing that might be most important. [First], retaliation — how do we do it? What do we do if we have the good fortune to track Osama bin Laden down? Second, prevention and security measures — get tighter doors on the cockpits, and so on.

The third element is the question of what prompts people to do the things that they did on September 11th. There’s not enough disposition to ask why the attacks occurred, why they drew support from so many people in the Middle East, north Africa, and the [Asian] subcontinent, and how we should proceed from here.

There are certain things that we can’t change. I don’t think that we’re ever going to change Osama bin Laden and those close to him. I suppose the fact that we’re rich is not something we should or need to change, [even though] that fact provokes a good deal of envy that spills over into outright hatred. And I’m not sure that we can do much about the whole process of globalization with which the United States is so closely associated, and which seems to run roughshod over cultural traditions in parts of the world.

But I think there are a couple of factors we can control. One of those is our general lack of sensitivity toward the needs of millions of people around the world who live on the hard and very cold edge of desperation. What is it that turns people to political radicalism? Until we understand [the answer], we will never be able to address the causes of terrorism, and we’ll [instead] be focusing exclusively on consequences and preventive measures.

[The answer] has a lot to do with the failure of secular governments in many developing nations — failure to provide enough houses, food, security, and, in particular, jobs. One can’t spend very much time in the Middle East, and other nations, without being powerfully aware of the desperation that comes when huge proportions of a nation’s population, especially the younger cohorts, are unemployed. [They] may forever be unemployed, for all sorts of reasons having to do with economic inefficiencies, bureaucratic stagnation, and perhaps political corruption and overpopulation. [So] it’s not hard to understand the powerful attraction that Islamic fundamentalism and other forms of fundamentalism have over people who simply see no alternative in life.

We certainly cannot [correct those problems] alone. We can probably only make a dent. An expression of good intentions may well be a step that will help us. Right now, on a per capita basis, we spend fewer dollars on foreign aid than any developed country — actually by a good bit.

Another factor that we are going to have to take very seriously now has to do with a perception out there that the United States has been a principal obstacle to Palestinian nationalism. [There is] a feeling that our policy is too closely joined with that of the Israelis, and that we have lost our role as honest broker and as peacemaker in the region.

These two issues come together most graphically in the tiny patch of [largely Palestinian] real estate called the Gaza Strip. When I was a correspondent in the Middle East ten years ago, the population of the Gaza Strip was 600,000 people. Today [it] is over one million. It has the fastest population doubling rate in the world — about 15 years. Half of the population is under the age of fifteen, and the water table in this parched land is fast diminishing and will soon be salinated.

One could safely say that 15 years from now, packed with two million desperate people, the Gaza Strip is going to make history, and it’s probably going to be some worrisome history, because it’s a critical mass that’s developing in a very dangerous way. [So] if we ask the question, “How can it be that young men will die for the sake of making a point,” maybe that answer [is that] the next world looks much more attractive when this world is filled with such a sense of desperation.

[We need to be] playing a much more active role than we have played before, getting to the heart of the whole question of whether there should or should not be a Palestinian state. And then, simultaneously, [we need] to focus much more seriously on addressing the sources of the most extreme poverty in the Gaza Strip, which doesn’t really have an economic base of its own, and can survive only if workers from Gaza can integrate themselves into the Israeli economy.

[An] interesting thing one sees traveling around the Occupied Territories explains a bit about what’s going on here. In household after household one sees, prominently displayed on mantle pieces, expended tear-gas canisters. [They were] used by the Israelis against the Palestinians, [and] all of them [are] stamped with large letters, “Made in the U.S.A.” That’s how these associations are made in the minds of the Palestinians. And even though my guess is all but the most extreme of them would eschew the methods used by Osama bin Laden, it is why many of them find themselves expressing support.

Kidder: What do you see as the changes for the worse that may be coming in this country and abroad?

Moffett: I would isolate one thing in particular that concerns me, and that is a tendency to indulge in a kind of excess of patriotism in times like this. I want to qualify that quickly. It is very understandable that all of us are feeling a bit besieged right now, and when our nation is under attack, it is surely not surprising that we come together, that we take stock of who we are as a nation and the extraordinary things that this nation is built on that have been a great blessing to the world. [But] there is a point at which the expression of patriotism and nationalism can become a substitute for clear-headed analysis. I think it’s comforting, to a degree, to believe that the people who perpetrated this attack hate us because of our democracy and because of our virtues. [But] I don’t think it’s the fact that we have a congress that bothers so many people, but the fact that we’ve been — in their eyes — so insensitive to their needs. My concern is that an environment of excessive patriotism may not be conducive to the formulation of sound policy. We [need to] take care not to replicate the mistake of America’s enemies — who tend to see things in strictly black-and-white terms — and [not] to lose our ability to gauge the nuances that are so crucial as we size up the appropriate response in a world so filled with amazing complexities.

I am seeing people stop and think more deeply than they have thought before, and more deeply than they would tend to think in the midst of normal day-to-day circumstances about what it is about the United States and its value system that is important. [But] the real paradox here is that when people look at us from the outside, they judge our values by the culture we disseminate — television, and movies, and so forth — which is not a very accurate reflection of what’s going on.

Kidder: Finally, this question of the indicators. What are you going to be watching to see whether your hopes or your fears are coming true?

Moffett: I will be looking for three things in particular, one of which I’m beginning to find. That is a very healthy deliberateness as the administration weighs its next move. The president’s actions have lagged a bit behind his actually very effective speech of [September 20]. I think that’s good, because it suggests the extraordinary complexities of the situation are being carefully evaluated. [Another thing] I suspect is being evaluated is the great possibility that the law of unintended consequences could kick in if we gauge our moves inaccurately. Case in point: There is a distinct possibility that Osama bin Laden will be a much more potent, evocative symbol dead than alive. He may be a figure to whom more dispossessed and deprived Third World citizens will rally, if he’s made a martyr by the United States.

Kidder: Like the image of Che Guevara.

Moffett: Exactly, only much more so, because it’s writ so much larger on the world stage right now.

[We also need to be] sensitive to the way in which we forge a coalition. One need only look at just how we approach the whole issue of shoring up the Northern Alliance. If you look closely at [their] human rights record, you say to yourself, These are not necessarily people who will represent an improvement. [By supporting] them, you could exacerbate the crucial tensions that exist right now between India and Pakistan, because India supports the Northern Alliance, and Pakistan does not. I do take some heart here that the subtleties and the nuances are being given close attention in Washington.

The second thing on my list I haven’t found yet, and that is in American press, especially television journalism. In recent years [it] has reduced the size of its windows on the world, a point which is epitomized by the new format that CNN has gone to, in which every half hour they feature the world in one minute — the “Global Minute,” typically [having] to do with a flood in Bangladesh or a typhoon in Singapore. [We're] not getting the exposure, through the press, to world circumstances. What happens is that we’re caught by surprise by the very kind of thing that’s happened over the last three weeks.

The third thing is a reassessment of American policy in the Middle East. Historically we have said the expansion of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories is a detriment to peace. I think that does not reckon with the powerful emotions that are stirred in the territories by the extension of those settlements. Every time a new settlement goes up, the Palestinians lose faith that Israel and the United States are serious about the possibility of Palestinian sovereignty over any of that territory. This is one area where we have a certain amount of leverage, where we could make a policy change that would result in constructive moves that will ease the tensions. If we do, there will be a couple of significant results. If we are seen playing a more neutral role, we will be easing the pressure on moderate governments in the region whose support we so badly need. That will give us more diplomatic maneuvering room — not only dealing with this crisis, but perhaps dealing with future crises.