As a little boy, six or seven, I had an illustrated book of
jokes, where all the punchlines had been dramatized by a
cartoonist. There is one image that I have never forgotten. A boy
is standing, leaning casually against a tall building, looking like
a little wastrel up to no good. A respectable looking man passes
and says, “Hey, kid, what are you doing here?” The snotty answer:
“Holding up this wall.” When the man tells him to scat, he shrugs
and obliges. Sure enough, the house comes tumbling down around his
feet.
This scene is replayed many times in life. People drop some
small activity that they thought was peripheral to their life and
suddenly their whole world unravels. Some small rule is dropped in
a school and it changes the entire atmosphere of the place. A
society abandons a seemingly minor element in its culture and
unwittingly attenuates its essential character.
And then there’s the good side of the coin. Forces of great
malevolence and danger are sometimes brought down by something
relatively neutral. The classic American example was the undoing of
major gangsters, masters of murder and mayhem, by convicting them
of tax evasion. In like fashion, I would venture to assert that the
weird and wicked Mr. Ahmadinejad will be brought down before very
long, and not because of the great dangers that he truly poses.
His regime signed its death warrant this week. Not by developing
nuclear weapons, which is a real fear. Nor by dispatching Hezbollah
terrorists to badger the civilized world, also a legitimate threat.
But by passing a breathtakingly imbecilic law to
require Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians in Iran to wear colored
badges on their clothing. Once the law is signed and enforced, Iran
will cross over into a zone of pariahdom that will leave it morally
defenseless against whatever sanction or force we throw its
way.
This is a great irony of our era, but no less true for all that.
We suffer from a lack of consensus about ends. The world has no
sense of shared mission in a spiritual way. It cannot be said that
there is a shared vision of the future that unites, say,
Switzerland and Saudi Arabia. The last vestige of such a
commonality exists in a loose extra-national confederation between
serious Jews and Christians, who have a very similar moral sense
and whose sharpest point of divergence concerns the identity of the
Messiah — a debate that both sides have agreed to let God settle
in His own good time.
Beyond that, we seem to be surrounded by a strange agglomeration
of secularists and killer fanatics. And, perhaps unpredictably, the
secular types have proven to be finicky about condemning the
beliefs of even the worst offenders. Their virtuous side of “Live
and let live” makes a gruesome merger with their vicious side of
“There is no truth worth our lives” and leaves them in passivity,
even paralysis. They are too discomfited by the role of having to
draw lines between ideologies. It emerges that there is no unity in
action against the spewers of evil because there is no unity of
commitment to good.
There has been one fragile area of universal agreement that has
held up for a century or more, often under severe strain. It covers
the spectrum of tactics rather than purposes. The Geneva Convention
is its highest embodiment, while its sparks provide what life still
stirs in the carcass of the United Nations. This concord between
nations holds that whatever it is that you’re fighting for, however
noble, you have to figure out how to get it done without hacking
off limbs of soldiers or harming civilians or burning people’s
homes down indiscriminately or starving them. Without challenging
purposes, we eschew these tactics.
We see this dramatized in the War on Terror. It is desperately
difficult to get anyone to join a battle against a particular
combatant. But they can be enlisted in a campaign against a tactic.
The War on Terror is not a war against anybody; it is a war against
a tactic. It presumes a doctrine that declares terrorism to be an
invalid tactic for achieving any desideratum. This accounts for all
the anomalies in public opinion; everyone agrees we must fight
“terror,” but they are reluctant to identify particular groups or
nations as targets.
One tactic that has no defenders outside the asylum is
decorating people with colorful badges singling them out as
abhorred castes. Iran had a chance at bluffing and posturing its
way into the club of nuclear powers with a strategy of weaving
between exaggeration and denial. But no one will tolerate
color-coding. Those badges are a red flag, an Amber Alert and a
black mark all at once. Its house must come tumbling down.
