The algebra of infinite justice
As the US prepares to wage a new kind of war,
Arundhati Roy challenges the instinct for vengeance
Arundhati Roy
Saturday September 29, 2001
The Guardian
In the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11 suicide attacks on the Pentagon and the World
Trade Centre, an American newscaster said: "Good and evil rarely manifest themselves as clearly as they
did last Tuesday. People who we don’t know massacred people who we do. And they did so with
contemptuous glee." Then he broke down and wept.
Here’s the rub: America is at war against people it doesn’t know, because they don’t appear much on
TV. Before it has properly identified or even begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy, the US
government has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled together an "international
coalition against terror", mobilised its army, its air force, its navy and its media, and committed them to
battle.
The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it can’t very well return without having fought one. I
f
it doesn’t find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one.
Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we’ll lose sight
of why it’s being fought in the first place.
What we’re witnessing here is the spectacle of the world’s most powerful country reaching reflexively,
angrily, for an old instinct to fight a new kind of war. Suddenly, when it comes to defending itself,
America’s streamlined warships, cruise missiles and F-16 jets look like obsolete, lumbering things. As
deterrence, its arsenal of nuclear bombs is no longer worth its weight in scrap. Box-cutters, penknives,
and cold anger are the weapons with which the wars of the new century will be waged. Anger is the lock
pick. It slips through customs unnoticed. Doesn’t show...
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