In the weeks after 9/11, I found myself thinking like this:
It’s true that the open society we have in America made us vulnerable to the kind of infiltration-attack that the terrorists pulled off. In a xenophobic, totalitarian state, it would be much harder to get foreign sleeper agents in place to execute that kind of attack. People of potentially dangerous nationalities could simply be excluded from the state. That, after all, is a defensive tactic that has been used by many societies in the past (e.g., the Spainish expulsion of the Moors after the liberation of Spain from Moorish domination). But we’re not that kind of society, and our openness to other societies leaves us vulnerable to this kind of infiltration.
But in addition to the free movement of people, the openness of our society also means something else: the free movement of information and resources. We have all kinds of innovation in this country, both technological and economic, that is simply impossible in closed societies. That’s why our military and our economy are so much stronger than others. It’s the reason that we won the Cold War and the Soviet Union didn’t. The free flow of information and resources in America let us overmatch the Soviet Union, which as a closed society simply couldn’t keep up in the end.
So the openness of our society leads to both its vulnerability and its strenth.
The same applies to the situation we presently face with al-Qa’ida. Our openness allowed 9/11 to happen, and it allowed all of the really cool munitions we used to liberate Afghanistan (the supposedly geographically invincible country) in a matter of weeks.
So, as I put it at the time: “Our openness means that you get to take a poke at us . . . and then that we get to drop daisy cutters on your head.”
HERE’S AN ARTICLE from someone on the Muslim side of the divide who acknowledges something akin to the same thing.
Fascinating read.
He argues that a clash of civiliations is indeed afoot, but that it is a clash destined to be won by the West, that Islamic society is simply incapable of keeping up in the end. It is, from an American perspective, a hopeful recognition that 9/11 represented not the advent of a massive, unending clash between the West and Islam, but the last gasp of a dying Islamism against an unstoppable West.
Openness’ll do that for ya.
