Washblog

I'm convinced that in conventional military terms we're losing the war, and I suspect we'll never win it. Like the self-feeding fire, our pursuit of military objectives only feeds the resistance, and the resistance will only disappear when almost the entire Sunni population has been crushed. That is, the fire stops when the forest is burnt to the ground.

The attempt to bring elections to Iraq by force, by ever-greater applications of violence, has thus far ensured that the electoral process will be for the benefit of Shi'as and Kurds, and to the exclusion of Sunnis. Which is to say, the war for elections is feeding the sectarian war. To those who say our speedy departure from Iraq would cause civil war, I ask: aren't we already fanning the flames of civil war?

All wars have their propaganda, and this one is no exception. The propaganda is meant to so demonize an enemy that a people are willing to sacrifice blood and treasure, and to exonerate the uncivilized acts of those carrying out the war. War not only brutalizes us as a people, making us ever more martial in our outlook and habits, it also threatens our sanity by the requirement that we either accept the constant barrage of lies, hide from it, or resist its seemingly all-powerful sway. War doesn't just finance a military-industrial complex; it also finances a government-and-media propaganda complex. This propaganda has so seeped into our common lexicon that no one I know is free of its insidious influence.

Here is what Chris Hedges has to say in the last paragraph in a recent New York Review of Books essay:

We are losing the war in Iraq. There has been a steady increase in the assaults carried out by the insurgents against coalition forces. The attacks over the past year have risen from about twenty a day to approximately 120. We are an isolated and reviled nation. We are tyrants to others weaker than ourselves. We have lost sight of our democratic ideals. Thucydides wrote of Athens' expanding empire and how this empire led it to become a tyrant abroad and then a tyrant at home. The tyranny Athens imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. If we do not confront our hubris and the lies told to justify the killing and mask the destruction carried out in our name in Iraq, if we do not grasp the moral corrosiveness of empire and occupation, if we continue to allow force and violence to be our primary form of communication, we will not so much defeat dictators like Saddam Hussein as become them.

In my gloomier moments, I find almost all politicians to be little better than con artists whose stock-in-trade is the delusion of the public for the purpose of their own power and self-glorification. But those politicians who daily seek to delude the public are themselves vulnerable to their own lies. How else to explain Senator Cantwell's idiotic vote to authorize the very untrustworthy President Bush to go to war against Iraq? Her vacuous explanations after the fact only reveal her painfully obvious failure to use her own intelligence when it was most needed.

Confucious, I think, understood precisely where that delusion begins. This is from the Analects:

A story goes that Confucious was called by the emperor and asked to take the job of Prime Minister. "On one condition," he replied. "That you call things by their right names."

Just as "Weapons of Mass Destruction" was the ever-present mantra for going to war in Iraq, so "terrorism" and "terrorists" are the mantras for staying at war in Iraq. Not long ago I asked a group of high school seniors to bring in their own definitions of the "t" words. The next day, in the ensuing discussion, they quickly concluded "terrorism" and "terrorist," as they're actually used several billion times a day, amount to propaganda. Yet, when I introduced an amendment to the party platform at the 36th District caucus, I don't think I managed to convince a single person of what eighteen seniors grasped within ten minutes. So far as I could tell, I was the only person to vote for my amendment.

Alas, I, and everyone else I know, are not immune from the linguistic trap that pre-conditions us for violence. After all, coercion is a form of violence, and a command, spoken in the right tone, is a form of coercion. Even a question uttered the right way can be a kind of linguistic shove. Where is the line? Who doesn't cross it every day? Which one of us is so gentle in speech, so warm and deferential in tone, that he or she can be said to be living a life free of any trace of violence?

In his introduction to Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin wrote:

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others. One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion. This energy is all that one finds in the rubble of vanished civilizations, and the only hope for ours.

I'm not even sure whether I'm asking myself the difficult questions I need to be asking. How often, after all, do we even manage to ask ourselves one genuinely original, but devastatingly simple, question? And what happens when we do manage it? Is our world ever the same again? Is that why we fall for, time and again, the easy questions, the habitual ones? Is it because, in the end, we prefer welcome changes in others to difficult changes in ourselves?

Fall, 2004