The McNamara Complex

Abstract

Shortly after attacks on World Trade Center and Pentagon I was participating in a panel discussion at Massachusetts institute of Technology (M.I.T.) called Technology, War and Terror. Although panel had been billed as a teach-in, discussion was remarkably depoliticized. There was strikingly little analysis of United States policy in Middle East and considerable talk of technocratic measures U.S. might take to prevent future terrorist attacks-- measures that ranged from improving airport security to enhancing development in Third World so that there would be less poor people who felt left out of great leap forward of globalization. Finally, an M.I.T. physics student approached microphone and solemnly asked panel if it wasn't true that problem was not just Osama bin Laden, but, more broadly, irrationality. Describing presumed Islamic fundamentalism of terrorists as just one manifestation of irrationality, he suggested that M.I.T. had a special calling in struggle against irrationality and that we all now had an obligation to fight terror by challenging irrationality wherever we found it-not least in attachment of some members of M.I.T. community to religious belief. Looking into face of student I was reminded that rationality can itself become a fetish. certain kind of attachment to rationality in West can become so hyperbolic that it itself becomes-like logical sophistry of scriptural fundamentalists and legal strict constructionists recently described in Vincent Crapanzano's recent book on literalism as a cultural style (Serving Word: Literalism in America from Pulpit to Bench)-a form of irrationalism wrapped in garb of rationalism. This Western fetishization of a spurious rationalism has been quite apparent in reactions to what, using a bland and colorless term for an epochal moment, we seem to be learning to call the events of September 11. Thus many pundits, from The New York Times' Thomas Friedman down, have opined that terrorists were not impelled by actual political grievances but by an atavistic reaction against rationalist modernity. As Friedman himself put it, this is not a of civilizations-the Muslim world versus Christian, Buddhist and Jewish worlds. The real today is not between but within them-between those Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Jews with a modern and progressive outlook and those with a medieval one.1 In a similar vein, Salman Rushdie has argued that attackers of World Trade Center were animated by A loathing of modern society in general and that they seek the closing of those [Islamic] societies to rival project of modernity.2 The crimes of September 11, such pundits keep telling us, were not really gestures of resistance against U.S. intervention in Middle East or deluded expressions of solidarity with long-suffering Palestinians, but were senseless manifestations of derangement of a certain kind of Islamic mind by its encounter with modern West. This theme is further driven home by incessantly repetitive media evocations of Taliban as ultimate ambassadors for a reactionary traditionalism that bans everything from television to mini-skirt. This is a media frame that exonerates U.S. policymakers from their partial responsibility for derangement of Afghan society in 1980s when, treating other people's country as a square on their cold war chessboard, they helped construct very forces we now fear and deride, and it is a frame that reprises stale dichotomies between tradition and modernity that were essential to modernization theories of 1960s and are now, at least within academy, largely discredited. Within frame attacks of September 11 emerged not from a of interests, nor even from Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations, but from a between rationalist modernity and irrational tradition. …