Victims Turning Perpetrators

By George Soros

Editor’s Note: This commencement address was delivered
to the Columbia School of International & Public
Affairs on Monday, May 17, 2004 at Cathedral of St.
John the Divine, New York City.

Today, you are graduating from the School of
International & Public Affairs. This ought to be an
occasion for celebration. You have successfully
completed your studies and you are about to enter the
real world. But the real world is a very troubled place
and international relations are at the core of our
troubles. So it may be appropriate to pause for a
moment and reflect on the world you are about to face.

Why are we in trouble? Let me focus on the feature that
looms so large in the current landscape — the war on
terror. September 11 was a traumatic event that shook
the nation to its core. But it could not have changed
the course of history for the worse if President Bush
had not responded the way he did. Declaring war on
terrorism was understandable, perhaps even appropriate,
as a figure of speech. But the President meant it
literally and that is when things started going
seriously wrong.

Recently the nation has been shaken by another event:
pictures of our soldiers abusing prisoners in Saddam’s
notorious prison. I believe there is a direct
connection between the two events. It is the war on
terror that has led to the torture scenes in Iraq. What
happened in Abu Ghraib was not a case of a few bad
apples but a pattern tolerated and even encouraged by
the authorities. Just to give one example, the Judge
Advocate General Corps routinely observes military
interrogations from behind a two-way mirror; that
practice was discontinued in Afghanistan and Iraq. The
International Red Cross and others started complaining
about abuses as early as December 2002.

It is easy to see how terrorism can lead to torture.
Last summer I took an informal poll at a meeting of
eminent Wall Street investors to find out whether they
would condone the use of torture to prevent a terrorist
attack. The consensus was that they hoped somebody
would do it without their knowing about it.

It is not a popular thing to say, but the fact is that
we are victims who have turned into perpetrators. The
terrorist attacks on September 11 claimed nearly 3,000
innocent lives and the whole world felt sympathy for us
as the victims of an atrocity. Then the President
declared war on terrorism, and pursued it first in
Afghanistan and then in Iraq. Since then, the war on
terror has claimed more innocent victims than the
terrorist attacks on September 11. This fact is not
recognized at home because the victims of the war on
terror are not Americans. But the rest of the world
does not draw the same distinction and world opinion
has turned against us. So, a tremendous gap in
perceptions has opened up between us and the rest of
the world. The majority of the American public does not
realize that we have turned from victims into
perpetrators. That is why those gruesome pictures were
so shocking. Even today, most people don’t recognize
their full import.

By contrast, the Bush administration knew what it was
doing when it declared war on terror and used that
pretext for invading Iraq. That may not hold true for
President Bush personally but it is certainly true for
Vice President Cheney and a group of extremists within
the Bush administration concentrated in and around the
Pentagon. These people are guided by an ideology. They
believe that international relations are relations of
power not law and since America is the most powerful
nation on earth, it ought to use that power more
assertively than under previous presidents. They
advocated the overthrow of Saddam Hussein even before
President Bush was elected and they managed to win him
over to their cause after September 11.

The invasion of Afghanistan could be justified on the
grounds that the Taliban provided Bin Laden and Al
Qaeda with a home and a training ground. The invasion
of Iraq could not be similarly justified. Nevertheless,
the ideologues in the administration were determined to
pursue it because, in the words of Paul Wolfowitz, "it
was doable." President Bush managed to convince the
nation that Saddam Hussein had some connection with the
suicide bombers of September 11 and that he was in
possession of weapons of mass-destruction. When both
claims turned out to be false, he argued that we
invaded Iraq in order to liberate the Iraqi people.

That claim was even more far-fetched than the other
two. If we had really cared for the Iraqi people we
would have sent in more troops and we would have
provided protection not only for the Ministry of Oil
but also for the other Ministries and the museums and
hospitals. As it is, the country was devastated by
looting.

I find the excuse that we went into Iraq in order to
liberate it particularly galling. It is true that
Saddam Hussein was a tyrant and it is good to be rid of
him. But the way we went about it will make it more
difficult to get rid of the likes of Saddam in the
future. The world is full of tyrants and we cannot
topple them all by military action. How to deal with
Kim Jong-il in North Korea or Mugabe in Zimbabwe or the
Turkmenbashi of Turkmenistan is the great, unsolved
problem of the prevailing world order. By taking
unilateral and arbitrary action, the United States has
made it more difficult to solve that problem.

I am actively engaged in promoting democracy and open
society in many parts of the world and I can testify
from personal experience that it cannot be done by
military means. In any case, the argument has become
unsustainable after the revelations about the torture
of prisoners. The symbolism of Saddam’s notorious
prison is just too strong. We claimed to be liberators
but we turned into oppressors.

Now that our position has become unsustainable, we are
handing over to local militias in Fallujah and
elsewhere. This prepares the ground for religious and
ethnic divisions and possible civil war à la Bosnia,
rather than Western style democracy after we transfer
sovereignty.

The big difference between Saddam and us is that we are
an open society with free speech and free elections. If
we don’t like the Bush administration’s policies, we
can reject him at the next elections. Since President
Bush had originally been elected on the platform of a
"humble" foreign policy, we could then claim that the
war on terror and the invasion of Iraq constitute a
temporary aberration induced by the trauma of September
11.

I would dearly love to pin all the blame on President
Bush and his team. But that would be too easy. It would
ignore the fact that he was playing to a receptive
audience and even today, after all that has happened, a
majority of the electorate continues to have confidence
in President Bush on national security matters. If this
continues and President Bush gets reelected, we must
ask ourselves the question: "What is wrong with us?"
The question needs to be asked even if he is defeated
because we cannot simply ignore what we have done since
September 11.

We need to engage in some serious soul-searching. The
terrorists seem to have hit upon a weak point in our
collective psyche. They have made us fearful. And they
have found a willing partner in the Bush
administration. For reasons of its own, the Bush
administration has found it advantageous to foster the
fear that September 11 engendered. By declaring war on
terror, the President could unite the country behind
him. But fear is a bad counselor. A fearful giant that
lashes out against unseen enemies is the very
definition of a bully, and that is what we are in
danger of becoming. Lashing out indiscriminately, we
are creating innocent victims and innocent victims
generate the resentment and rage on which terrorism
feeds. If there is a Single lesson to be learned from
our experience since September 11, it is that you
mustn’t fight terror by creating new victims.

By succumbing to fear, we are doing the terrorists’
bidding: We are unleashing a vicious circle of
violence. If we go on like this, we may find ourselves
in a permanent state of war. The war on terror need
never end because the terrorists are invisible,
therefore they will never disappear. And if we are in a
permanent state of war, we cannot remain an open
society.

The war on terror polarizes the world between us and
them. If it becomes a matter of survival, nobody has
any choice but to stick with his own tribe or nation
whether its policies are right or wrong. That is what
happened to the Serbs and Croats and Bosnians in
Yugoslavia, that is what happened to Israel, and that
is the state of mind that President Bush sought to
foster when he said that those who are not with us are
with the terrorists.

That attitude cannot be reconciled with the basic
principles of an open society. The concept of open
society is based on the recognition that nobody is in
possession of the ultimate truth. Might is not
necessarily right. However powerful we are, we may be
wrong. We need checks and balances and other safeguards
to prevent us from going off the rails. After September
11, President Bush succeeded in convincing us that any
criticism of the war on terror would be unpatriotic and
the spell was broken only 18 months later when the
Iraqi invasion did get us off the rails.

Now it is not enough to reject the Bush
administration’s policies; we must reaffirm the values
and principles of an open society. The war on terror is
indeed an aberration. We must defend ourselves against
terrorist attacks but we cannot make that the
overarching objective of our existence.

We are undoubtedly the most powerful nation on earth
today. No single country or combination of countries
could stand up to our military might. The main threat
to our dominant position comes not from the outside but
from ourselves. If we fail to recognize that we may be
wrong, we may undermine our dominant position through
our own mistakes. We seem to have made considerable
progress along those lines since September 11.

Being the most powerful nation gives us certain
privileges but it also imposes on us certain
obligations. We are the beneficiaries of a lopsided,
not to say unjust, world order. The agenda for the
world is set in Washington but only the citizens of the
United States have a vote in Congress. A similar
situation, when we were on the disadvantaged side, gave
rise to the Boston Tea Party and the birth of the
United States.

If we want to preserve our privileged position, we must
use it not to lord it over the rest of the world but to
concern ourselves with the well-being of others.
Globalization has rendered the world increasingly
interdependent and there are many problems that require
collective action. Maintaining peace, law and order,
protecting the environment, reducing poverty and
fighting terrorism are among them. We cannot do
anything we want, but very little can be done without
our leadership or at least active participation.
Instead of undermining and demeaning our international
institutions because they do not necessarily follow our
will, we ought to strengthen them and improve them.
Instead of engaging in preemptive actions of a military
nature, we ought to pursue preventive actions of a
constructive nature, creating a better balance between
carrots and sticks in the prevailing world order.

As graduates of a school of international affairs, I
hope you will have an opportunity to implement this
constructive vision of America’s role in the world.

Thank you.

George Soros is founder and chairman of the Open
Society Institute and the Soros foundations network. He
is also currently the president and chairman of Soros
Fund Management LLC.

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