Hugues de Jouvenel: Le règne de la violence

Bruce Lloyd: Terrorism, Today and Tomorrow

Walter Truett Anderson: The Future Isn't What it Used to Be

Yehezkel Dror: The Bitter Necessity: A Globial Leviathan

Laurence J. Victor: Fear and Hope

Victor Ferkiss: Globalization and Terrorism: The Long Road Ahead

Sohail Inayatullah: World System Futures: After the Terror

Hazel Henderson: Preventing War and Global Recession

Thomas Homer-Dixon: Why Root Causes are Important

John Galtung: United States, the West and the Rest of the World

Joseph F. Coates: The U.S. Response

W. Warren Wagar: What Now? Three Futuribles

Arnold Brown: Don't Call It War

Igor Bestuzhev-Lada: World War 4

What Now? Three Futuribles
By W. Warren Wagar, wwagar@binghamton.edu

Since the indiscriminate air attacks on German and Japanese civilians during the later years of the Second World War, the United States has engaged in numberless campaigns to establish and maintain its position as a world hegemon. It has killed millions of people, destroyed many cities, overthrown or helped to overthrow many regimes, and sponsored or abetted terrorist activities throughout the world.

Now, for the first time, it has been the target of effective international terrorism on its own turf. Nearly all the Americans and foreign nationals who died in the attacks on September 11, 2001, were innocent civilians. It is appropriate to grieve for them. But their deaths, in and of themselves, do not signal the Apocalypse. Rather, these dead take their place alongside all the other victims of violence on our planet in the long history of human fratricide, a history on whose pages the United States, sometimes rightly, often wrongly, has written more than its share during the past 60 years.

Futurists do not know what the future holds. They can only survey the range of what Bertrand de Jouvenel aptly called the "futurible." Three scenarios come to mind as futurible, given what we know of the players involved, their capacities, and the pressures on them to respond.

The first is a general war in the Middle East, in which the United States, with the active assistance of Great Britain and certain Muslim nations, attempts to seize control of Afghanistan and Iraq, replace their governments, and in the process capture or kill Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and their chief associates. In a war of this kind, the collaboration of countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey would be crucial, not to mention Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, on Afghanistan's northern frontier, which the Taliban still does not control. Some operations would require the dropping of large numbers of airborne troops into hostile and unfamiliar terrain. The chances of American and allied success in such a war are 50-50 at best.

A second scenario leaves Iraq out of the picture at least for the time being, but focuses exclusively on Afghanistan. Again, military force would be needed to dislodge the Taliban from power and attack Osama bin Laden and his camps. If successful, such operations might or might not lead to a later attack on Iraq. But the temptation to widen the war would be great, given Baghdad's refusal to accept U.N. inspection of its weapons facilities, repeated violations of the no-fly zones, and the catastrophic suffering of Iraqi civilians because of international sanctions.

In the third scenario, the United States and its allies would confine their operations to surgical strikes in Afghanistan and elsewhere against the bin Laden network and any other networks that threaten the safety of Americans and their allies. Much of this action would not take the form of military attacks. It would require close collaboration between American operatives and those of other countries, such as Egypt, where bin Laden enjoys powerful underground support. The objective of this more limited campaign would be to cripple terrorist networks, not to interfere in the internal political life of any Muslim nation, even if some of these nations directly or indirectly subsidize and protect these networks.

Some combination of the second and third scenarios is also eminently futurible. Whatever the United States and its allies do, however, there is little chance that they can eliminate all terrorist networks or prevent the formation of new ones. As the experience of Israel suggests, the struggle against terrorism is never-ending. It cannot be brought to a successful conclusion without removing its root causes, which lie deep within the structure of the modern world system.

In fact the long-term prospects are for widening conflict between the rich and poor nations of the world, for widening conflict among the poor nations themselves, and for increasing destabilization worldwide. A system that routinely rewards the few who are rich and powerful at the expense of the many who are poor and weak — especially given the range of weapons and terrorist strategies available to the poor and weak — is a system that cannot stand. It is programmed for self-destruction, and its eventual collapse, if my guess is right, will be the principal event of the 21st Century.

About the author
W. Warren Wagar is Distinguished Teaching Professor of history at Binghamton University and author of several books on future histories, including A Short History of the Future (University of Chicago Press, 3rd ed., 1999), which is available from the Futurist Bookstore for $19.95 ($17.50 for Society members), cat. no. B-2302. Order Now.

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