Distance and presence, territory and emotion, were woven
together for me on 11 September. I was traveling in New Mexico, but, being
Danish and jetlagged, my familiarity with American landmarks was hazy, and it
took me a minute or two to grasp that the burning tower on the morning news was
neither a movie nor an image from some sporadically industrialized Third World
country, but one of the World Trade Center towers. As far away from New York as
Santa Fe might be, I discovered when I returned to Copenhagen a week later that,
in terms of American localities, I was considered to have been ‘there’, in the
USA, at the time of what was not only the largest military attack on US soil,
but an event whose symbolic significance was impossible to underestimate.
Watching the media discourse unfold over the next
couple of days, I found myself not only in a territorial limbo, stretched
between American presence and New Mexican distance, but emotionally suspended
between a lacuna of disbelief, sadness, and tragedy and an eerie sense of
Baudrillardian vertigo as repetitious footage, logos, and slogans mediated the
events. Turning to the theories of security I had been taught as my academic
basis, I found that they offered little help in speaking about the human
devastation that had taken place. The disciplines of International Relations and
Security Studies have witnessed heated debates over the past 15 years, yet both
rationalists and poststructuralists seem to have reached a silent agreement that
personal experiences, histories, and geographical affinities
are irrelevant to the pursuit of the Academic Enterprise. Although the
theoretical tools were readily at hand, I felt they came with an inappropriate
distancing.
Perhaps, it began to occur to me, the key to my
ambiguity lay with the seeming impossibility of uniting individual experiences
with collective security discourses. Being in the USA, but far from New York,
and only on a one-week road trip, was symbolic for my own attachment to the
United States. As the terrorist plot was unfolded, nodes in my past were strung
together: Surveillance cameras had captured Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari
on the morning of 11 September as they embarked on their flight from Portland,
Maine, a town in which I had lived, on and off, for three years; Boston’s Logan
Airport had been my destination for an endless number of flights; and, now, I
was traveling with an American from New York whose brother had worked at the
World Trade Center but who had luckily been late coming into work. Yet even as I
heard that NATO had declared the attack as falling under Article 5, and even
though, as a Dane, I was thus, technically, at war, I found that the ‘we’, even
of those voices warning against bombing the civilians of Kabul and scapegoating
Arab-Americans, was an American one within which I had no place. As the
following days took us to sacred dirt at the chapel of Chimayo, ancient ruins at
the Bandelier National Monuments, and landscapes out of Verhoeven’s Starship
Troopers, all of them places which spoke of a common humanity, I began to
wonder if a radically new security imaginary was in the making and what the
consequences would be.
When Bush finally appeared from his rabbit hole in
Nebraska to speak on the night of the 11th, the only politically pregnant
statement was his attempt to save the territorial principle by declaring that
there would be no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbored
them. Yet assigning territorial grounding to terrorism was destabilized as the
identities and trajectories of the hijackers were uncovered: Mohamed Atta, his
cousin Marwan Al-Shehi, and Ziad Samir Jarrah had lived in Hamburg for years,
studying at the city’s technical universities, and many had spent enough time in
the USA to take flight training classes. Judging from sheer territorial
presence, Hamburg and Florida offered more grounding than Afghanistan.
A double epistemological media move followed. One
centered on understanding the mindset of the terrorists. What, in short, would
drive human beings not only to sacrifice their own lives, but to take thousands
of others to their deaths? Who were the terrorists? Also, how would ‘we’
distinguish prospective terrorists from ‘us’? Danish coverage focused in
particular on the group from Hamburg, where it was noted that these men were
well educated, polite, and liked amongst professors and students at the
Technical University; that they seemed reasonably integrated. Nothing had given
an indication of raving, bearded fundamentalists out to preach and destroy – how
could one know how many would still be amongst ‘us’, in Germany, France,
Denmark, and Florida? As a bearded and skeletal John Walker appeared from the
camps of captured Al-Qaeda fighters in early December, the terrorist enemy
within was matched by the traitor abroad. Was the young Walker an example of
affluent American teenagers drifting through the grand mall of extracurricular
activities, where choosing the aisle of fundamentalist pro-Islamic studies was
as plausible as the skateboarding ramp? Or did he embody not the absence of
faith and determination but its very affirmation in a society devoid of a larger
politico-religious narrative? The liminal location of John Walker vis-à-vis the
US body politic brought forward not only the specter of Cold War surveillance,
but also George Kennan’s concern for the vulnerability of US society at the time
of a growing Soviet threat.
As 2002 begins, the USA’s discursive and military
strategy would appear largely successful. The eluded capture of bin Laden
notwithstanding, the Taliban has been dethroned, an interim Afghan government
installed under Western guidance, and the release of the bin Laden tape brought
apparent evidence of him masterminding the attack. Atta’s German residency and
Walker’s US upbringing could presumably be left as stray nodes in the unfolding
of the success of the War on Terrorism.
But claims to victory might still be proved illusive:
not only because of the Bush administration’s own reiterations that confronting
bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and Afghanistan is merely the beginning of a longer battle
against terrorism; not only because of the aggravation of a refugee situation in
a region already on the verge of destabilization; and not only because creating
a politically stable Afghanistan with respect for women’s rights and a
non-drugs-based economy appears a daunting challenge; but perhaps most of all
because the recourse to the language of war has been preconditioned on a
conception of security which deems deterrence a viable military strategy.
Deterrence, whether in the form of the classical balance of power or in the
nuclear rendition of planetary destruction, is conditioned upon a subject who
observes and rationalizes material capabilities and territorial advances. But
this assumption was undermined by bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and the 9/11 hijackers.
The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were not about seizing
territorial control, nor about overthrowing the US government. Classical
security thinking presumes that the opponent’s goals are either explicitly
stated or can be deduced from a realist ontology, but bin Laden and the Taliban
have been notoriously vague, blending general anti-globalization discourse with
more specific attacks on Israel’s status.
Intimately tied to the rational subject of deterrence
is also a belief in the fear of destruction. Nuclear deterrence/destruction was
believed to work – by those who believed that it did – by being Mutually
Assured. The hijackers’ suicide as the route to martyrdom was seen as
fundamentally clashing with this conception: If my destruction is the ticket to
a privileged place, what is there not to be embraced? It is not that sacrifice
itself is alien to the Western mind, as evidenced in the patriotic willingness
to give one’s life in defense of the body politic as well as the recent heroism
of the New York Fire Department and the New York Police Department. But this
Western form is seen – in contrast to the Taliban’s – as being activated only
when (territorially) provoked.
Does this imply that clashing Huntingtonian
civilizations won out after all, that the Islamic civilization is particularly
violent, especially towards the West? Or is there a path other than war, a way
to honor individual losses, as chronicled in daily 9/11 obituaries in
the New York Times, while acknowledging that security policies by
their nature must evolve around collectivities? When I visited Ground Zero in
early November – prior to the erection of viewing platforms – the smell was
nauseating and the visibility poor. A high fence encircled the site from a
distance; the buildings gone, the tapestry of flags, cards, flowers, and names
on the fence itself imprinted the physical and emotional void. Walking silently
by, I felt somewhat uneasy. I was not sure if I were gatecrashing a funeral –
after all, no Danes were killed – or if the human connection lay within a
recognition of common vulnerability: across imbalances of power, across military
capabilities, and across the analytical imagination.
Assoc. Prof. Lene Hansen
Department of Political Science
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
NOTE: The author is grateful for insightful
comments from J. Peter Burgess and John Phillip
Santos.