Blind To the American Idyll

By Richard Cohen

Thursday, September 27, 2001; Page A27

It was always Ronald Reagan's fantasy that Mikhail Gorbachev would see America as he did. He wanted the Soviet leader to look down, as Reagan himself did from his helicopter, and see a countryside of private homes "with little backyard swimming pools." This was Ronald Reagan's America and to see it, he thought, would convince anyone -- even the leader of the "Evil Empire" -- of the virtues of our system.

That "fantasy" -- at once naive, at once unrealistic (Reagan himself recognized that), was also quintessentially American. Who could not believe that to see this country was to love it? All Reagan was saying was what my immigrant grandmother used to say in her own way: "Only in America."

What scares us now, what terrorizes us and just plain mystifies us, is that 19 men did see America, did live among us, did have a house in the 'burbs, did shop at the supermarket, did work out at the gym, did go about their business without surveillance, did live where they pleased and not in some ethnic ghetto -- did do all that and yet, in the end, acted no differently from the way that someone who had never seen America, and hated it out of ignorance, would have acted.

In fact, it is impossible not to conclude that the terrorists absolutely loathed what they saw -- and, if a guess is permitted -- hated themselves for occasionally availing themselves of America's goodies, maybe a forbidden taste of liquor, maybe something raunchy on a cable channel. They remind me in this regard of men who pick up someone for sex -- and then beat that person up afterward. It is as if they are cleansed by violence.

In these ways, the terrorists and their sponsors are different from our conventional foes. The communists, our enemies for so long, were not all that different from us in an important regard. Their pitch to the noncommunist world was not that they would make it less free and more constrained by custom -- the aim of Islamic extremists -- but that they "ostensibly shared ultimate goals of freedom, equality and prosperity."

That quotation is from a 1993 article in Foreign Affairs magazine by Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard University. It was titled "The Clash of Civilizations?" and it created such a stir that Huntington was invited to the State Department to brief the planning staff. It also was widely criticized as overly broad and too stridently written. Essentially, it foresaw a clash -- or clashes -- between the Christian West and much of the rest of the world, in particular Islam.

I concur in some of the criticism, and yet a rereading of the article shows that much of it has held up. Huntington noted that many of the most active participants in fundamentalist movements "are young, college-educated, middle-class technicians, professionals and business persons." That certainly fits what we have learned about the 19 terrorists who died in the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. They were not the suicide bombers of Israel -- poor, urban and undereducated. The hijackers had been to colleges or technical schools and were sufficiently Western to meld into American society.

Huntington observed that the more contacts these extremists have with Western culture, the more it "invigorates differences and animosities" that "stretch back deep into history." To the cultural fanatic, familiarity -- Western music, clothes and reverence for the individual -- breeds a seething contempt that is indistinguishable from madness.

Huntington's categories, while useful, are contradictory. The stern Islam of Saudi Arabia is not the same as the more moderate Islam of, say, Malaysia. Turkey is not Sudan, and the Muslims of the Palestinian diaspora are not the same the world over. In many cases, the differences are greater than the similarities.

And yet, there is enough in the Huntington article to explain why U.S. strategists talk of a long war. Huntington and Osama bin Laden are in agreement on one point: Whatever happens to bin Laden or, for that matter, the Taliban, the cultural roots of this conflict will persist. When bin Laden says, as he has, that even if he is eliminated others will come forward, this madman is merely restating what a foremost academic has put in more conventional language.

Ronald Reagan's self-admitted "fantasy" seems now to be the product of a quainter, less-threatening era. It was based on the notion of commonality, a shared cultural outlook in which we all wanted more or less the same thing. Our new enemy is different. He cannot be persuaded. He must be fought.