Jihad vs. McWorld Read Online Free Page B

impoverishment—both material and spiritual—will be the common lot. That is the hard lesson of interdependence, taught by terror’s unsmiling pedagogues.
    To declare interdependence, then, is in a sense merely to acknowledge what is already a reality. It is to embrace willingly and constructively a fate terrorists would like to shove down our throats.Their message is: “Your sons want to live, ours are ready to die.” Our response must be this: “We will create a world in which the seductions of death hold no allure because the bounties of life are accessible to everyone.”
    Such grand notions must start with the mundane, however. America is perhaps the most parochial empire that has ever existed, and Americans—though harbingers of McWorld’s global culture—are the least cosmopolitan and traveled of peoples who husband such expansive power. Is there another democratic legislature that has so many members without passports? There is certainly no democratic nation that pays a smaller percentage of its GNP for foreign aid (a third of what other democracies pay). And for a remarkably multicultural nation, how is it that the American image is so monocultural, its inhabitants so averse to the study of foreign languages? Such a nation, even if it cultivates the will to a constructive and benevolent interdependence, will have a difficult time meeting its demands. Military strategists complain America does not speak the languages of its enemies. In America’s universities, they no longer even teach the languages of its friends. Too many Ph.D. programs have given up language requirements, often allowing methods or statistics courses to take their place. Statistics may help us count the bodies, but it will do little to prevent the slaughter.
    In the wake of two centuries of either isolationism or unilateralism, with only a few wartime pauses for coalition building and consultation, the United States is today inexperienced in the hard work of creative interdependence and international partnership. When America discerns problems in international treaties (the Kyoto Protocol, the land mine ban, the International Criminal Tribunal) and cannot negotiate its way in, it simply walks out. When international institutions such as UNESCO and the United Nations and international conferences such as the racism discussions in Durban resonate with hostility (as they often do), the United States withdraws in arrogant pique instead of participating with a view toward making its influence felt. The missile shield with its attendant requirement that we abandon the ABM treaty is a typically unilateral and hubristic instance of America’s inclination to go it alone. Aside from its technological infeasibility—if we cannot keep terrorists off airplanes or individual “sleepers” from engaging in biological and chemicalwarfare, how can we imagine that we can intercept multiple warheads and their multiplying decoys without a hitch?—the missile shield once again isolates America from a world it ought to participate in in changing. In Ronald Reagan’s vivid fantasies that resonated so powerfully with the American public, a virtual bubble would envelop the good nation and keep it safe from foreign nightmares. But the nightmares have come to our shores in the bright light of morning, and there is no shield against their terror except a confrontation with Jihad’s complex global genealogy.
    Technology is at best a tool. It is a peculiarly American conviction that engineering can take the place of human ingenuity and action in warding off trouble. Smart bombs are given preference over smart people, missiles that think take the place of policy makers who judge, electronic listening posts replace culturally and linguistically adept human agents. Technology is the last redoubt for our vanishing independence, the means by which America aspires to keep alive the fading dream of sovereign autonomy. Yet technology itself, like the science from which it