In Tuesday’s Boston Globe, reporter David Filipov filed a report from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, under the headline IN UZBEKISTAN, NEW FRIEND OF US, BRUTAL RULE SUPPRESSES MUSLIMS. The piece depicts the ruling regime as " a brutal dictatorship that uses tactics — political repression, show trials, and torture — inherited from the Soviet Union to crack down on any political or religious group it cannot control. " Filipov gives numerous examples to back up this assertion. They add up to this: our troops are preparing for action from the shelter of a country that houses nearly 8000 political prisoners, all Muslim — a country that borders Afghanistan, and whose population of 23 million people, mainly Muslims, includes many who apparently identify with the Taliban.

It is certainly not new for the United States to forge marriages of convenience with scurrilous regimes. But in the end, we always awaken to find ourselves loathed. Don’t forget that people throughout the world (predominantly, but not exclusively, Muslims radicals as well as many moderates) cheered the events of September 11.

And yet, what are we to do? How are we to prosecute this war without sacrificing our friends and our precious freedoms? We can later rail against human-rights abuses in the countries with which we are now allied. We can take up the causes of those who suffer under these regimes, and put economic sanctions in place. We can try to isolate these countries and their leaders. We can even try to bomb them out of existence, until ... we are confronted by acts of terrorism that kill citizens on our soil. And then, none of these humanitarian concerns matter and it all seems so simple: we must do whatever it takes, including aligning ourselves with anyone, for whatever Machiavellian purpose that ally might have in mind, in an effort to protect ourselves, our democracy — indeed, our very lives. And so we are presented with the ultimate conundrum: close our eyes and support those whose regimes we abhor, or refuse to make deals with the devil and compromise our ability to fight the " evildoers " ? It is Hobson’s hopeless choice.

Given our fluid fealty, who in the Middle East or elsewhere might we choose to abandon in our desperate need to protect our shores from the madness of terrorism?

Might it be Israel? Why not? It’s just a little nation of six million people. A nation — arbitrarily sited in the desert just 53 years ago — in a place where none of its immediate neighbors want it to be (and maybe half of the rest of the world agrees). Indeed, many don’t want it to exist at all. We now find ourselves in need of the very people who want to see Israel gone. Maybe we’ll decide we need these Arab (and non-Arab) Muslim states even more than we need to continue our alliance with Israel.

Is this scenario far-fetched? Maybe. We can hope so. But maybe not. After all, look at whom we’re lying down with. At what point will our own citizens say, It’s Israel or us? Or, It’s X or us? What would it take to drive us over the top? How many more cases of anthrax? How many more terrorist strikes? How many more comments by Saudi princes and others among our newfound friends (like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad) to the effect that this is all about our " unequivocal " support of Israel?

Or maybe we’ll give up on Israel when, as the British have done, we begin to install millions of surveillance cameras and allow our civil liberties to be restricted in the name of " protection. " Maybe the last straw will come when a suicide bomber blows himself up at Thanksgiving in one of America’s shopping malls, and going about " our normal daily living, " as our president exhorts us to do, finally becomes impossible. Or maybe the proverbial straw will be the true collapse of our economy under the weight of war, when millions more of us are put out of work. Or will it simply be, as is inevitable, the arrival home of large numbers of body bags from foreign lands?

These are dark and depressing things to contemplate — visions of our nation going completely awry. But if hopelessness, desperation, jealousy, and religious zealotry may have driven our enemies to take heretofore incomprehensible actions against us, how much pain, suffering, death, and fear can we withstand before we take actions abroad and at home from which we, as a once free nation, may never recover?

Unlike our enemy, we are not prepared to commit suicide on the promise that a bevy of virgins and a better life await us in the hereafter. Nor can we unleash nuclear weapons — which, among other things, would be just as suicidal as crashing planes into buildings. We cannot and should not respond in kind. But as the months go by, it is possible that, without stern vigilance over our values and careful debate over every decision made in the name of self-protection, we will move along a self-destructive path of another kind: a fracturing of identity that would have us considering our friends our enemies and our enemies our friends, losing faith in the freedom-based system that makes this country great. As we proceed with this war, let us not forget who we are, and how and why we became that way.

Issue Date: October 18 - 25, 2001