Bali High Noon
by Clay Risen
Saturday's bombing of the Sari Club along Bali's Kuta Beach, a haven for vacationing
Australian college students, killed 187 people and wounded at least 100 more. In response,
President Bush has promised to help find those responsible. But he has demurred from
taking a hard-line stance against Indonesian fundamentalists (at the moment the group
believed responsible, Jemaah Islamiyah, is absent from the US list of terrorist
organizations) for fear of upsetting the balance of power between the military,
religious and secular leaders of the world's most populous Muslim state. For now, Bush
is playing the smart move. But before long, he may find that the bombing has claimed
another victim: the War on Terrorism.
At first glance, the bombing of the Sari Club, half-way around the world on an island
rarely visited by Americans, would seem to have little to do with the administration's
current efforts against Islamic fundamentalism. But while there aren't many Americans
along Kuta Beach, there is a lot of America. North American visitors invariably
describe the beach as an East Asian version of Cancun, and it is overrun with all the
trappings of lowest-common-denominator entertainment
culture. At its south end sits
the massive Hard Rock Cafe, which occupies a colonial-era edifice; heading north from
there are dozens of bars that overflow throughout the night with Europeans,
Australians and imported dance
music. During the day, the main strip is clogged with push-cart
vendors, and the streets that extend away from the beach are lined with knock-off
clothing stores.
Bali has long been a diamond in the Indonesian economy; it's the center of the
country's tourism industry and the poster island for religious harmony — the
population is 90 percent Hindu, and primarily rural. Outside of the Third-World bustle
of Denpasar, Bali's largest city, the rest of the island comprises farmland and
small villages. But because of the huge number of tourists who visit every year, it is
also an obvious target for Muslim extremists bent on striking at secular, western
capitalism.
What the Kuta Beach bombing shows is that Sept. 11 was really two separate events: one, a strike
against America the nation; the other, a strike against America the concept. Bush has
done much to take revenge for the former, but despite his rhetoric of building an
anti-terror coalition, he has left open the question of what to do about the latter.
And until Kuta Beach, events have more or less played out along his terms — the
majority of fundamentalist activity since Sept. 11 has been directed at America and
its interests, either directly or indirectly. But Kuta Beach, was a strike against
America the concept, and Bush is caught unprepared to defend that front.
In the wake of this weekend's attack, Bush's primary concern should understandably be
to ensure that the bombing is not
the first in a snowball of religious strife. The strategic implications of an Islamic
militant flare-up in Indonesia are striking: It would most assuredly complicate the
already boiling ethnic tensions in Aceh and other parts of the country. It would
severely damage the fragile coalition of secular and religious political parties that
President Megawati Sukarnoputri has built over the last year. And instability in
Indonesia could threaten the southeast Asian straits through which a large percentage
of the world's shipping passes.
All of this bodes darkly for an administration bent on proving it can manage the
world's conflicts unilaterally. More importantly, it drives a semi through Bush's
one-sided conception of terror; the bombing proves is that just as Bush
has declared war on a concept, so too have Al Qaeda and their ilk. For them, it is not
simply a war on American soldiers, or American businesses, or American civilians — it
is a war on "America," on American-ness wherever it can be found. The scores of
Australians killed in the bombing were not American citizens, but to the bombers the
distinction doesn't matter. They were participants in American culture, and as such
were no different from those killed aboard the USS Cole or in the World Trade Center.
(Not to put too fine a point on it, the terrorists detonated a bomb outside the US consulate as
well.)
Last fall Bush bombastically promised to weed out the proponents of terror, and
Islamic-centered terror in particular, but the world has been less than willing to
cooperate. The failure to capture Osama bin Laden, or to prove that he is dead, is a
giant pin in the administration's hopes for early successes in the campaign. The
second Intifadah has complicated the very definition of terrorist, and made it
difficult for the president to condone an Israeli stance that mirrors his own but also
angers his would-be Arab allies. Bush's plans against Iraq are, more than anything, an
attempt to resimplify the concept of terror, to rewrite it in nation-state terms and
to go after a supposed root cause (despite the CIA's inconvenient failure to prove a
link between Iraq and Al Qaeda).
With the Kuta Beach bombing, though, Muslim fundamentalism has proven two things:
that it is multifaceted, composed of many groups capable of sophisticated attacks;
and that it has its sights set on a larger target than simply the military and
civilian interests of the United States. It is a new front, one that the Bush will be
hard-pressed to defend alone. It will require the administration to soften its
unilateralism and make substantive strides toward a broad coalition against terror.
It will have
to make compromises to accommodate the interests of other countries. More than any
other crisis in the last year, what to do in the wake of Kuta Beach will be the
test of the administration's willingness to take on terror wherever it appears. But if
Bush decides the defeating Jemaah Islamiyah is outside of American interests, he will
find it very hard to convince others that the United States is concerned about more
than its own well-being, that the nation is willing to defend the global way of life it has spent so
many years defending.
E-mail Clay Risen at risenc@yahoo.com.
