[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 2 (Wednesday, January 8, 2003)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E25-E26]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            OVERLAPPING ERAS

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. AMO HOUGHTON

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                        Tuesday, Janaury 7, 2003

  Mr. HOUGHTON. Mr. Speaker, our former colleague, the extraordinary 
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, notes that from the summer of 1914 the world 
was at war, with only brief interludes, until the collapse of the 
Soviet Union. ``But now we have to ask if it is once again the summer 
of 1914. Small acts of terror in the Middle East, in South Asia, could 
lead to cataclysm, as they did in Sarajevo . . . The eras are 
overlapping.''
  Senator Moynihan was speaking in the same forum from which General 
George C. Marshall summoned the American people to rebuild Europe--the 
Harvard University Commencement. He said that the end of the Cold War 
has brought not universal peace, but widespread violence. The new 
horrors occur on the fault lines between major conflicting cultures.
  Recalling that General Marshall had spoken to the graduating class 47 
years before, he said: ``History summons us once more in different 
ways, but with even greater urgency. Civilization need not die. At this 
moment, only the United States can save it. As we fight the war against 
evil, we must also wage peace, guided by the lessons of the Marshall 
Plan--vision and generosity can help make the world a safer place.''
  I would commend the address in its entirety to my colleagues and 
would like to insert the text in the Record at this point:

                   Commencement Address, June 6, 2002

                      (By Daniel Patrick Moynihan)

       A while back it came as something of a start to find in The 
     New Yorker a reference to an article I had written, and I 
     quote, ``In the middle of the last century.'' Yet persons my 
     age have been thinking back to those times and how, in the 
     end, things turned out so well and so badly. Millions of us 
     returned from the assorted services to find the economic 
     growth that had come with the Second World War had not ended 
     with the peace. The Depression had not resumed. It is not 
     perhaps remembered, but it was widely thought it would.
       It would be difficult indeed to summon up the optimism that 
     came with this great surprise. My beloved colleague Nathan 
     Glazer and the revered David Riesman wrote that America was 
     ``the land of the second chance'' and so indeed it seemed. We 
     had surmounted the depression; the war. We could 
     realistically think of a world of stability, peace--above 
     all, a world of law.
       Looking back, it is clear we were not nearly so fortunate. 
     Great leaders preserved--and in measure extended--democracy. 
     But totalitarianism had not been defeated. To the contrary, 
     by 1948 totalitarians controlled most of Eurasia. As we now 
     learn, 11 days after Nagasaki the Soviets established a 
     special committee to create an equivalent weapon. Their first 
     atomic bomb was acquired through espionage, but their 
     hydrogen bomb was their own doing. Now the Cold War was on. 
     From the summer of 1914, the world had been at war, with 
     interludes no more. It finally seemed to end with the 
     collapse of the Soviet Union and the changes in China. But 
     now . . .
       But now we have to ask if it is once again the summer of 
     1914.
       Small acts of terror in the Middle East, in South Asia, 
     could lead to cataclysm, as they did in Sarajevo. And for 
     which great powers, mindful or not, have been preparing.
       The eras are overlapping.
       As the United States reacts to the mass murder of 9/11 and 
     prepares for more, it would do well to consider how much 
     terror India endured in the second half of the last century. 
     And its response. It happens I was our man in New Delhi in 
     1974 when India detonated its first nuclear device. I was 
     sent in to see Prime Minister Indira Gandhi with a statement 
     as much as anything of regret. For there was nothing to be 
     done; it was going to happen. The second most populous nation 
     on earth was not going to leave itself disarmed and 
     disregarded, as non-nuclear powers appeared to be. But 
     leaving, I asked to speak as a friend of India and not as an 
     official. In twenty years time, I opined, there would be a 
     Moghul general in command in Islamabad, and he would have 
     nuclear weapons and would demand Kashmir back, perhaps the 
     Punjab.
       The Prime Minister said nothing; I dare to think she half 
     agreed. In time, she would be murdered in her own garden; 
     next, her son and successor was murdered by a suicide bomber. 
     This, while nuclear weapons accumulated which are now poised.
       Standing at Trinity Site at Los Alamos, J. Robert 
     Oppenheimer pondered an ancient Sanskrit text in which Lord 
     Shiva declares, ``I am become Death, the shatterer of 
     worlds.'' Was he right?
       At the very least we can come to terms with the limits of 
     our capacity to foresee events.
       It happens I had been a Senate observer to the START 
     negotiations in Geneva, and was on the Foreign Relations 
     Committee when the treaty, having been signed, was sent to us 
     for ratification. In a moment of mischief I remarked to our 
     superb negotiators that we had sent them to Geneva to 
     negotiate a treaty with the Soviet Union, but the document 
     before us was a treaty with four countries, only two of which 
     I could confidently locate on a map. I was told they had 
     exchanged letters in Lisbon [the Lisbon Protocol, May 23, 
     1992]. I said that sounded like a Humphrey Bogart movie.
       The hard fact is that American intelligence had not the 
     least anticipated the implosion of the Soviet Union. I cite 
     Stansfield Turner, former director of the CIA in Foreign 
     Affairs, 1991. ``We should not gloss over the enormity of 
     this failure to forecast the magnitude of the Soviet crisis . 
     . . The corporate view missed by a mile.''
       Russia now faces a near-permanent crisis. By mid-century 
     its population could well decline to as few as 80 million 
     persons. Immigrants will press in; one dares not think what 
     will have happened to the nuclear materials scattered across 
     11 time zones.
       Admiral Turner's 1991 article was entitled ``Intelligence 
     for a New World Order.'' Two years later Samuel Huntington 
     outlined what that new world order--or disorder--would be in 
     an article in the same journal entitled ``The Clash of 
     Civilizations.'' His subsequent book of that title is a 
     defining text of our time.
       Huntington perceives a world of seven or eight major 
     conflicting cultures, the West, Russia, China, India, and 
     Islam. Add Japan, South America, Africa. Most incorporate a 
     major nation-state which typically leads its fellows.
       The Cold War on balance suppressed conflict. But the end of 
     the Cold War has brought not universal peace but widespread 
     violence. Some of this has been merely residual proxy 
     conflicts dating back to the earlier era. Some plain ethnic 
     conflict. But the new horrors occur on the fault lines, as 
     Huntington has it, between the different cultures.
       For argument's sake one could propose that Marxism was the 
     last nearly successful effort to Westernize the rest of the 
     world. In 1975, I stood in Tiananmen Square, the center of 
     the Middle Kingdom. In an otherwise empty space, there were 
     two towering masts. At the top of one were giant portraits of 
     two hirsute 19th century German gentlemen, Messrs. Marx and 
     Engels. The other displayed a somewhat Mongol-looking Stalin 
     and Mao. That wasn't going to last, and of course, it didn't.
       Hence Huntington: ``The central problem in the relations 
     between the West and the rest is . . . the discordance 
     between the West's particularly America's--efforts to promote 
     universal Western culture and its declining ability to do 
     so.''
       Again there seems to be no end of ethnic conflict within 
     civilizations. But it is to the clash of civilizations we 
     must look with a measure of dread. The Bulletin of the Atomic 
     Scientists recently noted that ``The crisis between India and 
     Pakistan, touched off by a December 13th terrorist attack on 
     the Indian Parliament marks the closest two states have come 
     to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis.'' By 1991, the 
     minute-hand on their doomsday clock had dropped back to 17 
     minutes to midnight. It has since been moved forward three 
     times and is again seven minutes to midnight, just where it 
     started in 1947.
       The terrorist attacks on the United States of last 
     September 11 were not nuclear, but

[[Page E26]]

     they will be. Again to cite Huntington, ``At some point . . . 
     a few terrorists will be able to produce massive violence and 
     massive destruction. Separately, terrorism and nuclear 
     weapons are the weapons of the non-Western weak. If and when 
     they are combined, the non-Western weak will be strong.''
       This was written in 1996. The first mass murder by 
     terrorists came last September. Just last month the vice 
     president informed Tim Russert that ``the prospects of a 
     future attack ... are almost certain. Not a matter of if, but 
     when.'' Secretary Rumsfeld has added that the attack will be 
     nuclear.
       We are indeed at war and we must act accordingly, with 
     equal measures of audacity and precaution.
       As regards precaution, note how readily the clash of 
     civilizations could spread to our own homeland. The Bureau of 
     the Census lists some 68 separate ancestries in the American 
     population. (Military gravestones provide for emblems of 36 
     religions.) All the major civilizations. Not since 1910 have 
     we had so high a proportion of immigrants. As of 2000, one in 
     five school-age children have at least one foreign-born 
     parent.
       This, as ever, has had bounteous rewards. The problem comes 
     when immigrants and their descendants bring with them--and 
     even intensify--the clashes they left behind. Nothing new, 
     but newly ominous. Last month in Washington an enormous march 
     filled Pennsylvania Avenue on the way to the Capitol grounds. 
     The marchers, in the main, were there to support the 
     Palestinian cause. Fair enough. But every five feet or so 
     there would be a sign proclaiming ``Zionism equals Racism'' 
     or a placard with a swastika alongside a Star of David. Which 
     is anything but fair, which is poisonous and has no place in 
     our discourse.
       This hateful equation first appeared in a two-part series 
     in Pravda in Moscow in 1971. Part of Cold War ``agit prop.'' 
     It has since spread into a murderous attack on the right of 
     the State of Israel to exist--the right of Jews to exist!--a 
     world in which a hateful Soviet lie has mutated into a new 
     and vicious anti-Semitism. Again, that is the world we live 
     in, but it is all the more chilling when it fills 
     Pennsylvania Avenue.
       It is a testament to our First Amendment freedoms that we 
     permit such displays, however obnoxious to our fundamental 
     ideals. But in the wake of 9/11, we confront the fear that 
     such heinous speech can be a precursor to violence, not least 
     here at home, that threatens our existence.
       To be sure, we must do what is necessary to meet the 
     threat. We need to better understand what the dangers are. We 
     need to explore how better to organize the agencies of 
     government to detect and prevent calamitous action.
       But at the same time, we need take care that whatever we do 
     is consistent with our basic constitutional design. What we 
     do must be commensurate with the threat in ways that do not 
     needlessly undermine the very liberties we seek to protect.
       The concern is suspicion and fear within. Does the Park 
     Service really need to photograph every visitor to the 
     Lincoln Memorial? They don't, but they will. It is already 
     done at the Statue of Liberty. In Washington, agencies 
     compete in techniques of intrusion and exclusion. Identity 
     cards and X-ray machines and all the clutter, plus a new life 
     for secrecy. Some necessary; some discouraging. Mary Graham 
     warns of the stultifying effects of secrecy on inquiry. 
     Secrecy, as George Will writes, ``renders societies 
     susceptible to epidemics of suspicion.''
       We are witnessing such an outbreak in Washington just now. 
     Great clamor as to what the different agencies knew in 
     advance of the 9/11 attack; when the President was briefed; 
     what was he told. These are legitimate questions, but there 
     is a prior issue, which is the disposition of closed systems 
     not to share information. By the late 1940s the Army Signal 
     Corps had decoded enough KGB traffic to have a firm grip on 
     the Soviet espionage in the United States and their American 
     agents. No one needed to know about this more than the 
     President of the United States. But Truman was not told. By 
     order, mind, of Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of 
     Staff. Now as then there is police work to be done. But so 
     many forms of secrecy are self-defeating. In 1988, the CIA 
     formally estimated the Gross Domestic Product of East Germany 
     to be higher than West Germany. We should calculate such 
     risks.
       The ``what-ifs'' are intriguing. What if the United States 
     had recognized Soviet weakness earlier and, accordingly, kept 
     its own budget in order, so that upon the breakup of the 
     Soviet Union a momentous economic aid program could have been 
     commenced? What if we had better calculated the forces of the 
     future so that we could have avoided going directly from the 
     ``end'' of the cold War to a new Balkan war--a classic clash 
     of civilizations--leaving little attention and far fewer 
     resources for the shattered Soviet empire?
       Because we have that second chance Riesman and Glazer wrote 
     about. A chance to define our principles and stay true to 
     them. The more then, to keep our system open as much as 
     possible, with our purposes plain and accessible, so long as 
     we continue to understand what the 20th century has surely 
     taught, which is that open societies have enemies, too. 
     Indeed, they are the greatest threat to closed societies, 
     and, accordingly, the first object of their enmity.
       We are committed, as the Constitution states, to ``the Law 
     of Nations,'' but that law as properly understood. Many have 
     come to think that international law prohibits the use of 
     force. To the contrary, like domestic law, it legitimates the 
     use of force to uphold law in a manner that is itself 
     proportional and lawful.
       Democracy may not prove to be a universal norm. But decency 
     would do. Our present conflict, as the President says over 
     and again, is not with Islam, but with a malignant growth 
     within Islam defying the teaching of the Q'uran, that the 
     struggle to the path of God forbids the deliberate killing of 
     noncombatants. Just how and when Islam will rid itself of 
     current heresies is something no one can say. But not soon. 
     Christianity has been through such heresy--and more than 
     once. Other clashes will follow.
       Certainly we must not let ourselves be seen as rushing 
     about the world looking for arguments. There are now American 
     armed forces in some 40 countries overseas. Some would say 
     too many. Nor should we let ourselves be seen as ignoring 
     allies, disillusioning friends, thinking only of ourselves in 
     the most narrow terms. That is not how we survived the 20th 
     century.
       Nor will it serve in the 21st.
       Last February, some 60 academics of the widest range of 
     political persuasion and religious belief, a number from here 
     at Harvard, including Huntington, published a manifesto: 
     ``What We're Fighting For: A Letter from America.''
       It has attracted some attention here; perhaps more abroad, 
     which was our purpose. Our references are wide, Socrates, St. 
     Augustine, Franciscus de Victoria, John Paul II, Martin 
     Luther King, Jr., Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Universal 
     Declaration of Human Rights.
       We affirmed ``five fundamental truths that pertain to all 
     people without distinction,'' beginning ``all human beings 
     are born free and equal in dignity and rights.''
       We allow for our own shortcomings as a nation, sins, 
     arrogance, failings. But we assert we are no less bound by 
     moral obligation. And finally, . . .  reason and careful 
     moral reflection . . . teach us that there are times when the 
     first and most important reply to evil is to stop it.
       But there is more. Forty-seven years ago , on this 
     occasion, General George C. Marshall summoned our nation to 
     restore the countries whose mad regimes had brought the world 
     such horror. It was an act of statesmanship and vision 
     without equal in history. History summons us once more in 
     different ways, but with even greater urgency. Civilization 
     need not die. At this moment, only the United States can save 
     it. As we fight the war against evil, we must also wage 
     peace, guided by the lesson of the Marshall Plan--vision and 
     generosity can help make the world a safer place.
       Thank you.

                          ____________________