Last week's deadly terrorist attack in Boston has left many asking, "why us?" Others, however, had a different question in mind: "Why not us?"
One such commentator was Dawn columnist Rafia Zakaria. "There may be fewer victims and less blood," writes Zakaria in the online magazine Guernica, "but American tragedies somehow seem to occur in a more poignant version of reality, in a way that evokes a more sympathetic response." She goes on:
"It is this greater poignancy of attacks in America that begs the question of whether the world's allocations of sympathy are determined not by the magnitude of a tragedy -- the numbers dead and injured -- but by the contrast between a society's normal and the cruel aftermath of a terrorist event. It is in America that the difference between the two is the greatest; the American normal is one of a near-perfect security that is unimaginable in many places, especially in countries at war."
Zakaria is a sharp and gutsy analyst, and the questions she asks lack easy answers, but I fear that this line of thought reveals a big misunderstanding of how Americans form their opinions on foreign affairs.
First and foremost -- just as a child mourns the loss of a parent and neighbors grieve a fallen community member -- it's simply human nature to grieve those closest to us. Pain tends to be proximate, and it makes perfect sense that Americans would mourn their own countrymen and women more passionately than those killed overseas -- just as Iraqis, Afghans and Pakistanis no doubt mourn for their own.
But it's certainly more complicated than that, and Zakaria's questions require some indelicate answers. As the world's sole remaining superpower, tragedy and terror in the states tend to create a kind of rubberneck effect around the globe. Much in the way St. Jerome sobbed over the sacking of Rome, the world tends to slow down, rightly or wrongly, when bad things happen to the United States.
Geography, as Aaron David Miller explains, plays a role as well. Americans have a somewhat schizophrenic view of the world, formed in part by their relative geographic isolation. The U.S. controls its hemisphere and is bordered by typically friendly and -- if you'll permit me to gloss over the U.S. immigration debate -- malleable allies.
"For most of its history," writes Miller, "the United States lived with a security unparalleled among the countries of the world. And despite the shrinking nature of that world and the threats it carried ... the United States never faced a threat to its existence."
There was, notes Miller, one time in American history when the country faced the kind of existential crises we see in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan -- during the American Civil War. And much like Pakistan and Iraq of today, bloodshed was routine and body counts were high. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died in combat or from disease, and entire towns and cities were leveled to the ground.
Deep-seated regional differences over slavery, secession and states rights were allowed to fester and form into an incurable ulcer that nearly ripped the nation apart. Similar to the crises of federalism, sovereignty and sectarianism now plaguing Iraq and Pakistan, America was seemingly at an irreconcilable impasse.
Over four years of death and destruction would pass before the worst conflict on U.S. soil would finally come to and end. The war didn't fix or "heal" the U.S. so much as it preserved the union and kept the promise of full enfranchisement. But battles won and bills signed, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, one of that war's great scribes, would not alone hold the country together. All of that death had to be about something more, something lasting.
So if Americans, as Zakaria suggests, seem entitled to a kind of utopian peace -- and free from the chaos and death witnessed daily around the globe -- that's because the bomb blasts in Boston snapped Americans awake -- if only momentarily, in the grand scheme -- from a security most of them believe themselves to be entitled to. It's a "near-perfect security" most feel they paid for with blood on soil both foreign and domestic.
But nothing is perfect, and Americans appear to be waking up to the world in which they now reside. If the 9/11 attacks taught the country to fear the many organized Jihadists from far off places, last week's carnage has taught Americans to fear the few in their own backyards. Indeed, a Pew Research Center survey released this week indicates that Americans now expect occasional acts of terrorism to be a part of life in America moving forward.
This is one of the more unfortunate realities in a world of globalized terror. Numbers can have a numbing effect on people, especially those weary from a decade of war and death in faraway places. (As editor of RealClearWorld, I can attest that the daily headlines of sectarian unrest and bloodshed rarely draw much attention from readers.)
The bad news for countries like Pakistan and Iraq is that American disinterest is unlikely to change much; the good news is that, in an increasingly multipolar world with growing, stable markets, Pakistan and Iraq won't necessarily require the blessing of the American public to prosper and thrive. If countries such as Pakistan -- to borrow from Zakaria's own words -- can, as a nation, address the kind of intolerance, violence and injustice currently plaguing them, then they too might come to expect more from their leaders and public institutions. Strongmen, generals and militias won't do it for them. Nay, nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.
