THE OTHER DAY I reported that Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper’s magazine, was angry at America. His writings following September 11 show he is really pissed off that three airplanes should be hijacked and crashed, the Twin Towers should be reduced to rubble, a massive bite should be taken out of the Pentagon building, thousands of people should die, and still the American people will not focus on such life-or-death issues as road repair and prescription-drug benefits for the elderly. And now–thanks to reader Ken Goldstein–there is an important nuance to add to the story of Lapham’s one-sided shouting match with the United States.
In the January 2002 issue of Harper’s where Lapham calls the war on terrorism “American jihad,” he refers to a speech given by the military historian Michael Howard. Harper’s excerpted this same speech in the “Readings” section of the magazine. In it Howard harshly criticizes President Bush for declaring war not on a state, but an abstraction, terrorism. Howard goes on to argue that “many people would have preferred a police operation conducted under the auspices of the United Nations on behalf of the international community as a whole, against a criminal conspiracy, whose members should be hunted down and brought before an international court, where they would receive a fair trial and, if found guilty, awarded an appropriate sentence. In an ideal world this is no doubt what would have happened.”
