Why Are We at War? Read online

  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 existen
ce 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.

  Appendix

  NOTES ON A LARGE

  AND UNANCHORED UNEASINESS

  A word would be appropriate here about the interview I did with The American Conservative, December 2, 2002, a magazine published by Pat Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos and edited by Scott McConnell. The piece was titled (by them) “Why I Am a Left Conservative.” Much of what I said there was put into the address to the Commonwealth Club.

  More remains, however, from that magazine and from the interview with Dotson Rader. Since I think it can serve the purpose of this book, I include such sections in this Appendix.

  FLAG CONSERVATIVES

  Back when the Soviet Union fell, flag conservatives felt this was their opportunity to take over the world. They felt they were the only people who knew how to run the world. So their lust was fierce. They were furious when Clinton got in. That was one reason he was so hated. He was frustrating the world takeover. That seemed so open, so possible to their point of view, back in 1992. How that contributed to their hatred of Clinton! This attitude, I think, deepened and festered through the eight years of Clinton’s administration. Moreover, they loathed the ongoing increase in sexual liberties. White House principals may not talk to one another in private about this, but a key element in their present thought, I suspect, is that if America becomes an empire, then of necessity everything in America that needs to be cleansed will be affected positively. By their lights! If America grows into the modern equivalent of the Roman Empire, it will be necessary to rear whole generations who can serve the military in all parts of the world. It will put a new emphasis again upon education. Americans, who are famous for their inability to speak foreign languages, will suddenly be encouraged and over-encouraged to become linguists in order to handle the overseas tasks of empire. The seriousness of purpose will be back in American life. These are, I suspect, their arguments.

  What they don’t take into account is the exceptional perversity of human affairs. Indeed, the entire scheme could fail. The notion reeks of overweening hubris.

  DREAD: A LARGE AND UNANCHORED UNEASINESS

  This war, if it proliferates over the next decade, could prove worse in one respect than any conflict we have yet experienced. It is that we will never know just what we are fighting for. It is not enough to say we are against terrorism. Of course we are. In America, who is not? But terrorism compared to more conventional kinds of war is formless, and it is hard to feel righteous when in combat with a void, for then the action smacks of rage and relative impotence, a frightful combination that deprives warrior and citizen alike of any sense of virtue. Be it said, the sense of national virtue is crucial to waging a war.

  We violate Christianity with every breath we take. Equally do the Muslims violate Islam. We are speaking of a war then between two essentially unbalanced and inauthentic theologies. It may yet prove to be an immense war. A vast conflict of powers is at the core, and the motives of both sides do not bear close examination. At bottom, the potential for ill is so great that we can wonder if we will get through this century. We could come apart—piece by piece, disaster after disaster, small and large, long before a final conflagration.

  AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE: The conflict between communism and capitalism seems so much more sensible and manageable in comparison.

  NORMAN MAILER: Looking back, it was kind of logical. Capitalism and communism had clear and opposed objectives, but neither was ready to destroy the world. Certainly, the more that conflict ebbed into its end days, the less danger was present that the big bang would come.

  AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE: You have cast the fight as Allah versus moolah, Islam versus money. If ours is indeed a post-Christian society in which materialism is the highest good and it takes a faith to fight a faith, are they not better suited to combat us?

  NORMAN MAILER: Are they better suited? No, I don’t think so. It does seem to me, on the face of it, that if we did nothing in terms of attacking them, that might delay such a war for fifty years. The next argument would be, well, can we afford to delay? We can win it now and we might lose it in fifty years. But my notion is that this war is so unbalanced in so many ways, so much power on one side, so much true hatred on the other, so much technology for us, so much potential terrorism on the other, that the damages cannot be estimated. It is bad to enter a war that offers no clear avenue to conclusion. Terrorism can proliferate. It is not that complicated to be an effective terrorist, after all. Pick up the phone, make a call, and disrupt traffic for half a day. The real question is how pervasive can terrorism get, not whether you can wipe it out. There will always be someone left to act as a terrorist. If we try to become an empire, the real question will soon be whether we are able to live with terrorism at the level that the Israelis, let us say, are living with it now.

  A NOTE ON PRESIDENTS

  Given the rigors of presidential campaigns, most men who run successfully for president have been rubbed down by then to their lowest common denominator. They are not all that impressive any longer as humans. So it is worth taking a quick look at their resources and their foibles. Compulsive adoration of our leaders is poison, after all.

  I once sat on Reagan’s left at a lunch for eight people. This was in 1972, at the convention that nominated Nixon for the second time. I spent the entire meal trying to figure out a tough question to ask him. I always found that if you meet someone’s eyes, a good question can come to mind. But for two hours he sat there at the head of the table, perfectly calm and pleasant, and kept making jokes and talking. It was a lightweight conversation. The physical impression of him was that he had about as much human specific density as, let’s say, a sales manager for a medium-size corporation in the Midwest. That kind of modest, mild, well-knit heft was in his bearing. During those two hours, he chatted with all six Time reporters at the table, but his eyes never met mine, and I found myself unable to come up with that tough question. It became a matter of decorum. The mood was too genial. It occurred to me that all through his political life, he probably, if he could help it, never spent time talking to anyone who was of no use to him. He was, be it said, an instinctive climber who scaled the face of success with great skill. That was his gift. Soon enough, he was surrounded by people who had many powerful (if self-serving) ideas and they knew how to illumine him to the point where they could wind him up. Then he could do his special stuff. At the time, he had an enormous impact on old-line conservatives, because they thought he was one of them. I suspect he had about as much to do with them as a screen star does with an agricultural laborer.

  I would guess George W. Bush can tell when one of his experts knows what he’s talking about and when he’s only pretending he knows. So I would assume he makes his decisions in opposite fashion to his predecessor. Bill Clinton made a point of surrounding himself with people who might be 90 percent as intelligent as himself but never his equal, never more intelligent. Clinton, therefore, was always the brightest guy in his circle. Whereas Bush is smart enough to know that he couldn’t possibly do the same or the country would be run by morons. In contrast, he looked to get bright people around him: Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Powell. And when they start arguing, Bush has an ear for who is most incisive at a given moment. He can pick up a hint of the inauthentic in even a seasoned expert’s voice. I’m speaking as a novelist now. Bush has a bullshit detector. Since different experts have days when they’re better than on other days, Bush, on a given morning, decides that Expert A’s voice sounds the best. Three days later, Expert D comes in better. The result is that he’s always tweaking his policies just a little. If that is his one intellectual strength, he still has the persona of a fraternity president, sententious, full of cant, pleased with his assertions and always indifferent to their lack of verisimilitude and/or specificity. Mottos and platitudes are steak tartare to him. He knows exac
tly what he’s doing. So, that one good half of America, composed of religious people who are not particularly political, is with him all the way. Give us more of your mottos and platitudes, they ask. Spice them, please, with your incomparably holy touch of mendacity.

  IMMIGRATION

  AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE: Our side of the immigration debate generally feels that America is getting transformed into something less like the country we understand and are used to. It seems a kind of foreign place. It is not an argument we often use, but that is in the back of it. Have you thought much about the more multicultural America? What are its possibilities? What are its limitations?

  NORMAN MAILER: Given the modern world of technology, I don’t know whether the race or culture question is paramount. The long-term tendency for the world is to have no races. Technology has become the dominant culture in existence and may soon be the only real culture. The similarities between computer users all over the world may now be far greater than their differences in ethnicity.

  AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE: Go back to the integrity of races. I know it is a politically incorrect thought, but it doesn’t have to be expressed with rancor. It might be interesting.