Why Are We at War? (5 page)

In the 1930s, you could be respected if you earned a living. In the Nineties, you had to demonstrate that you were a promising figure in the ranks of greed. It may be that Empire depends on an obscenely wealthy upper upper class who, given the in-built, never-ending threat to their wealth, is bound to feel no great allegiance in the pit of its heart for democracy. If this insight is true, then it can also be said that the disproportionate wealth which collected through the Nineties may have created an all but irresistible pressure at the top to move from democracy to Empire. That would safeguard those great and quickly acquired gains. Can it be that George W. Bush knows what he’s doing for the future of Empire by awarding these huge tax credits to the rich?

Of course, terrorism and instability are the reverse face of Empire. If the Saudi rulers have been afraid of their mullahs for fear of their power to incite terrorists, what will the Muslim world be like once we,
the Great Satan, are there to dominate the Middle East in person?

Since the administration can hardly be unaware of the dangers, the answer comes down to the unhappy likelihood that Bush and Company are ready to be hit by a major terrorist attack. As well as any number of smaller ones. Either way, it will strengthen his hand. America will gather about him again. We can hear his words in advance: “Good Americans died today. Innocent victims of evil had to shed their blood. But we will prevail. We are one with God.” Given such language, every loss is a win.

Yet so long as terrorism continues, so will its subtext, and there lies the horror to its n
^th
power. What made deterrence possible in the Cold War was not only that there was everything to lose for both sides, but there was also the built-in inability on either side to be certain it could count on any particular human being to flip the apocalyptic switch over to world domination. In that sense, no final plan could be counted on. How could either of the superpowers be certain that the up-to-now wholly reliable human
selected to push the button would actually prove reliable enough to obliterate the other half of the world? A dark cloud might come over him at the last moment. He could fall to the ground before he could do the deed.

This human unreliability does not apply, however, to a terrorist. If he is ready to kill himself, he can also be ready to destroy the world. The wars we have known until this era, no matter how horrible, could offer at least the knowledge that they would come to an end. Terrorism, however, is not attracted to negotiation. Rather, it would insist on no termination short of victory. Since the terrorist cannot triumph, he cannot cease being a terrorist. They are a true enemy, far more basic, indeed, than Third World countries with nuclear capability that invariably appear on the scene prepared to live with deterrence and its in-built outcome—agreements after years or decades of passive confrontation and hard bargaining.

If much of what has been argued so far has been restricted to neocon mentality, there is a wing of
the flag conservatives’ campaign to invade Iraq that does have liberal support. Part of the liberal media, columnists at
The New Yorker
and
The Washington Post
and some at
The New York Times
, is joined with Senators Hillary Clinton and Dianne Feinstein, Joe Lieberman and John Kerry, in acceptance of the idea that perhaps we can bring democracy to Iraq by invasion. In a carefully measured appraisal of what the possibilities might be, Bill Keller speaks on
The New York Times
op-ed page on February 8 of a war that might go quickly and well:

Let’s imagine that the regime of Saddam Hussein begins to crumble under the first torrent of cruise missiles. The tank columns rumbling in from Kuwait are not beset by chemical warheads. There is no civilian carnage. [Even so] a victory in Iraq will not resolve the great questions of what we intend to be in the world. It will lay them open.

[Is] our aim to promote secular democracy, or stability? Some, probably including some
in Mr. Bush’s cabinet, will argue that it was all about disarmament. Once that is done, they will say, once Saddam’s Republican Guard is purged, we can turn the country over to a contingent of Sunni generals and bring our troops home in 18 months.

Or perhaps, argues Keller, we will fashion a real democracy in Iraq after all, and the Middle East will benefit. It is as if these liberal voices have decided that Bush cannot be stopped and so he must be joined. To commit to a stand against fighting the war would guarantee the relative absence of Democrats at the administration tables that will work on the future of Iraq. It is an argument that can be sustained up to a point, but the point depends on many eventualities, the first of which is that the war is quick and not horrendous.

The old Bill Clinton version of overseas presumption is present. The argument that we succeeded in building democracy in Japan and Germany
and therefore can build it anywhere does not necessarily hold. Japan and Germany were countries with a homogeneous population and a long existence as nations. They each were steeped in guilt at the depredations of their soldiers in other lands. They were near to totally destroyed but had the people and the skills to rebuild their cities. The Americans who worked to create their democracy were veterans of Roosevelt’s New Deal and, mark of the period, were effective idealists.

Iraq, in contrast, was never a true nation. Put together by the British, it was a post–World War I patchwork of Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, and Turkomans, who at best distrusted one another intensely. A situation analogous to Afghanistan’s divisions among its warlords could be the more likely outcome. No one will certainly declare with authority that democracy can be built there, yet the arrogance persists. There does not seem much comprehension that, except for special circumstances, democracy is never there in us to create in another country by the
force of our will. Real democracy comes out of many subtle individual human battles that are fought over decades and finally over centuries, battles that succeed in building traditions. The only defenses of democracy, finally, are the traditions of democracy. When you start ignoring those values, you are playing with a noble and delicate structure. There’s nothing more beautiful than democracy. But you can’t play with it. You can’t assume we’re going to go over to show them what a great system we have. This is monstrous arrogance.

Because democracy is noble, it is always endangered. Nobility, indeed, is always in danger. Democracy is perishable. I think the natural government for most people, given the uglier depths of human nature, is fascism. Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home
and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace attained only by those countries that have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it.

The need for powerful theory can fall into many an abyss of error. One could, for example, be wrong about the unspoken motives of the administration. Perhaps they are not interested in Empire so much as trying in good faith to save the world. We can be certain at least that Bush and his Bushites believe this. By the time they are in church each Sunday, they believe it so powerfully, tears come to their eyes. Of course, it is the actions of men and not their sentiments that make history. Our sentiments can be flooded with love within, but our actions can produce the opposite. Perversity is always looking to consort with the best motives in human nature.

David Frum, who was a speechwriter for Bush (he coined the phrase “axis of evil”), recounts in
The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush
what happened at a meeting in the Oval Office last
September. The President, when talking to a group of reverends from the major denominations, told them,

You know, I had a drinking problem. Right now, I should be in a bar in Texas, not the Oval Office. There is only one reason that I am in the Oval Office and not in a bar: I found faith. I found God. I am here because of the power of prayer.

That is a dangerous remark. As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.

“Our war with terror,” says Bush, “begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end … until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” But, asks Eric Alterman in
The Nation
, what if America ends up alienating the whole world in the process? “At some point, we may be the only ones left,” Bush told his closest advisers, according
to an administration member who leaked the story to Bob Woodward. “That’s okay with me. We are America.”

It must by now be obvious that if the combined pressures of Security Council vetoes and the growing sense of world outrage, plus a partial collaboration of Saddam with the inspectors, result in long-term containment rather than war, if Bush has to turn away from an active invasion of Iraq, he will do so with great frustration. For he will have to live again with all the old insolubles! Deep down, he may fear that he will not have any answer then for restoring America’s morale. Can it be that the prospect of bringing these troops home again will prove so unpalatable that he has to go to war? And will.

Speaking to the Senate, Robert Byrd said,

Many of the pronouncements made by this administration are outrageous. There is no other word. Yet this chamber is hauntingly silent. On
what is possibly the eve of horrific infliction of death and destruction on the population of the nation of Iraq—a population, I might add, of which over 50 percent is under age fifteen—this chamber is silent. On what is possibly only days before we send thousands of our own citizens to face unimagined horrors of chemical and biological warfare—this chamber is silent. On the eve of what could possibly be a vicious terrorist attack in retaliation for our attack on Iraq, it is business as usual in the United States Senate.

We are truly “sleepwalking through history.” In my heart of hearts I pray that this great nation and its good and trusting citizens are not in for a rudest of awakenings.

 … I truly must question the judgment of any President who can say that a massive unprovoked military attack on a nation which is over 50 percent children is “in the highest moral traditions of our country.” This war is not necessary at this time. Pressure appears to be having a good result in Iraq.… Our challenge is to now
find a graceful way out of a box of our own making. Perhaps there is still a way if we allow more time.

If I were George W. Bush’s karmic defense attorney, I would argue that his best chance to avoid conviction as a purveyor of false morality would be to pray for a hung jury in the afterworld.

For those of the rest of us who are not ready to depend on the power of prayer, we will do well to find the rampart we can defend over what may be dire years to come. Democracy, I would repeat, is the noblest form of government we have yet evolved, and we may as well begin to ask ourselves whether we are ready to suffer, even perish, for it rather than preparing ourselves to live in the lower existence of a monumental banana republic with a government always eager to cater to mega-corporations as they do their best to appropriate our thwarted dreams with their elephantiastical conceits.