Moussaoui: The 'Honor Culture' Versus Honor

"America, you lost. I won."

Coming at a time when the world press assumes that America is losing in Iraq, Osama bin Laden is still running loose, and Afghanistan is suffering a Taliban resurgence of sorts, Zacarias Moussaoui's imprecation may strike many as telling even if maddening. Is the United States once again becoming the "pitiful helpless giant" of Vietnam days? Did the failure to sentence Moussaoui to death represent a loss of nerve on the part of the jury and American society as a whole?

Oh sure, as Judge Leonie Brinkema pointed out, Moussaoui will now be left to rot in jail, never to be heard from again. But even many conservatives profess despair, worried that the United States, hijacked by a small band of pro-Israel ideologues, has overstepped the bounds of prudence and enmeshed America in a quagmire of epic dimensions. Some are fond of citing the supposed parallel with Athens, which was laid low after "over-reaching" in its attack on Sparta.

But all this strikes a heartlander like myself as vastly overblown.

America survived Vietnam and Korea, after all, and went on to win the broader war. What was demonstrated in those "losing" fights was America's willingness to confront Communism. Likewise, the real reason for removing Saddam from power was to demonstrate America's determination to hold accountable regimes that might be tempted to harbor terrorists in their midst.

It may have been a mistake to try Moussaoi as a mere criminal instead of as an illegal enemy combatant. Execution would not have bothered me in the least. But at least Moussaoui has been deprived of the martyrdom that is a primary goal of every member of a primitive honor culture. And if anybody doubts that Americans have lost their own sense of honor and determination, let them see "United 93."

The movie is a graphic (but not terribly gory) account of how ordinary Americans, once they understood what was at stake, began the counterattack against Islamic extremism on their own initiative. Indeed, one reason the movie is so spellbinding is not the intrinsic drama. We know the outcome in advance. What is so gripping - and what has made United 93 the focus of other movies and documentaries -- is the question in every viewer's mind: "What would I have done?"

The passengers of United 93 are heroes because they did what had to be done. In other words, they did the honorable thing - not honorable in the crude "honor culture" sense of the code duello, but in the sense of personal and collective virtue. "United 93" never puts it in those terms - part of its beauty is that it never preaches - but the story of the airplane that never reached its target is a very powerful statement of the greatness that still resides in the American heart.

In an important, absorbing and very timely new book, "Honor: A History" (Encounter Books), James Bowman, a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center of Washington, D.C., worries about the decline of "honor" as a core Western value. As Bowman sees it, the Western sense of honor, tempered by Christianity and democratized by middle class values, is threatened by the victimology brought to the fore by the egalitarian, therapeutic culture of the 1960s and '70s.

"The only honor left was the honor of rebellion against honor," observes Bowman. Life's victims - and who in life is not a victim? -- could now claim equal, or even more, right to honor than people of demonstrated merit.

Thus in Britain's Trafalgar Square, once the showplace of heroes, a statue was temporarily erected several years ago to a woman who suffered through life without arms and only rudimentary legs. And the difficulty agreeing on a "memorial" at the site of the Twin Towers - a gigantic office building for which there is little need - suggests the pathetic confusions of our therapeutic age.

The victims of 9/11 surely deserve our sympathy. But to win the war that was so visibly announced that day will require far more than a memorial to victimhood. Fortunately, the the passengers aboard United 93 showed us that honor - real honor - still beats in the American breast. America may lose some battles, but that's a long way from saying America has lost the war.