AS FOR THE WAR ON TERROR
Raymond J. Lawrence Jr.
As for the War on Terror, I'm sitting this one out. I will be a non-combatant and conscientious objector. And since flag-waving has become the meta-symbol of that war, I will not display the flag, least of all on my lapel.
Candor requires me to add that I cannot think of any war in which I would have been proud to serve or willing to die for the cause, even as a hero. I am not privy to all the wars fought in human history, but of the ones about which I have some knowledge, I would choose to sit them out.
My ancestors fought the Indian wars for 300 years, their many victories providing the basis for European settlement of the continent. I suppose that the final destruction of Indian culture and of most of its people is now considered an"historical necessity." But the entire story fills me with melancholy. All my prosperity is founded on pushing the Indians into oblivion, which makes me an Indian killer by inheritance. But I recoil at the characterization. Count me out of the Indian wars.
The Revolutionary War may just be the exception to my thesis. Certainly I would have found the suasion of Jefferson, Franklin, and even Adams irresistible, those 18th century terrorists who would have been hanged, drawn and quartered had they been caught. Their cause was the closest thing imaginable to a cause worth dying for. But two centuries later I see that Canadians and the Brits have every bit as much liberty and freedom in the pursuit of happiness as we do, and apparently a tad more sanity to boot. To pack off to Canada in 1776 would be tempting. In any case, I never thought I would hang well.
1861 would certainly have been a good year to go to Mexico. The Civil War was fought to restore the Union, not to rescue slaves. Restoring the Union did have some beneficial secondary results, such as freeing the slaves. However, the South had the last laugh in implementing a century of a brutal segregation that was hardly an improvement over slavery. The restoration of the Union provided the basis for the expansion of Federal power in Washington. A century later that power center is looking more and more like our worst enemy. Was the Confederacy such a bad idea after all? I am not willing to die for either side. A popular Civil War historian says "none died in vain." I say, they all died in vain, and an awful lot of them at that. Count me out of that war.
In World War I France, Germany, and England were all much too eager to fight. They could hardly wait to get into the trenches. Everyone's blood was up. Europe in the decades following was in a worse state than it would have been had the Kaiser ruled the whole continent. Woodrow Wilson was on his own unselfaware, professorial ego trip in that war, exacerbating an already bad situation. If the Germans had won, we wouldn't have had to deal later with Hitler. Count me out of that one too.
We read a lot of pap recently about "the greatest generation" that fought what the Cajuns, according to Myron Madden, call World War Twice. Certainly Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini made near-perfect enemies, and the fact that they got their just deserts is almost enough to make me want to enlist. However, in that war we joined forces with Stalin, securing his bloody throne for the rest of his natural life, giving him additional tyrannical power over all of central and eastern Europe as well. If pressed to decide who tilts the scales of depraved inhumanity with the most weight, Hitler or Stalin, a well-read person would likely pick the latter. Certainly Hitler killed more Jews than Stalin. However, Hitler built the extermination camps only after the war began, as he publicly promised he would. Prior to the onset of the war he offered Jews the option of leaving Germany. Since the putative leading nation of the free world refused to take them in, most other western nations followed our example. Thus most of the Jews stayed put in Nazi Germany. Our self-righteous shock on finding the extermination camps at the conclusion of the war was a despicable pose, a denial of our own complicity in their murder. Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe pried half of Europe free from the tyranny of Hitler while delivering the other half to another generation of Stalinist terror. I never have liked crusades. Count me out.
The Korean War would appear to have been a clear-cut case of stark aggression, worthy of countering with willing self-sacrifice. However, the South Korean government was indefensibly corrupt and undemocratic. Its only claim to virtue was its participation in the western economic zone. I had several thoughtful and good-hearted young Korean friends in the 50s who related to me at the time how ambivalent they were when the war began, and how difficult it was for them to decide which side to join. The retro-fantasy of marching to the Yalu River under the generalship of that prima donna, Douglas McArthur, to fight the Chinese, does not make it to the list of things I wish I had done. I want to sit that one out.
The Cold War was fought on the assumption that anyone anywhere in the world who was socialist or communist took direct orders from Stalin or his successors. Had that been fact rather than fantasy, the Cold War might have been one worth giving one's life for. But it was no more than a paranoid construct, inflating Stalin's power, and causing grief to countless social progressives the world over. Count me out.
In the Vietnam war 50,000 Americans, some of whom I knew personally, had to die before we figured out that the Vietnamese people actually preferred a communist government to the one we had hand picked on their behalf. Our government knew the attitude of the people before the war started, which is why we prevented free elections from taking place in the 60s. So count me out of that war too.
Bush the first's Gulf war was fought for the benefit of the Kuwaiti oil oligarchy. I never have had any desire to give my life on behalf of any Arab sheik.
The Iraqi war currently in progress, or regress, is given a different rationale every several months. Representative government and honest elections in Iraq would be a monumental achievement, but who can believe that Bush desires in Iraq what he desires not in Florida? It remains to be seen exactly what our troops are dying for in Iraq. Most likely they die on behalf of the wider reach of our multinational corporations. Soldiers, it is said, do or die and never question why. They may be willing in Iraq to die. Not I.
Worse than the dying is what all the violence is doing to the souls of our soldiers, the perpetrators. A report from Dhuluaya, 50 miles north of Bagdad, by Patrick Cockburn of The Independent, relates how American soldiers bulldozed a grove of orange, lemon, and date palm trees on the grounds that villagers were not reporting on insurgents in the area. One American soldier was reported weeping during the action. In reality, the whole world should be weeping.
II
Of all the wars about which I have any knowledge, the current War on Terror is far and away the worst. Remarkably, there is no place to aim one's gun. Since terror will never be entirely extinguished in human society wherever a critical mass of people feels, rightly or wrongly, oppressed, whether they be led by a George Washington or an Osama bin Laden. We have thus been launched into a war that by definition can never end, a war without end against an enemy with no mailing address. All wars are bad, and of questionable value, but this war has the character of an apocalyptic curse.
And since war is by definition "terror," the current national agenda is terror against terror, or terrorist against terrorist. I will not enlist as a terrorist on either side.
(War has not always been "terror," that is, waged against non-combatants. In some periods in history, soldiers attacked other combatants only. In 1066, when William the Conqueror conquered England, soldiers who had slain their foes in battle were required to do penance for murder. In Iraq we do no penance even for the murder of women and children. The increase in suicides among American soldiers, about which the military authorities have expressed concern, may be a form of expatiation on behalf of us all.)
A very worrisome dimension of the War on Terror is the innuendo that the terrorists are out there somewhere, though exactly where and exactly who is for the most part yet to be determined. Bin Laden or his followers are undoubtedly still out there working under the radar. What damage bin Laden might do to us is a matter of concern, but an even greater concern is the fact that we too have become terrorists, and arguably more adept at the business than bin Laden.
The discipline of psychology has devised a sometimes disputed concept called "projective identification." It purports to describe an unconscious process whereby we attribute unacceptable attributes of the self to others. The War on Terror is stunning example of projective identification on a national scale.
We currently dominate the world with our war machine. Our current president boasts of having assassinated within the borders of another sovereign state presumed enemies and unknown others who happened to be in their company. We have a long track record of overthrowing and assassinating duly elected officials of other governments, as in Chile, Guatemala, Iran, the Congo, and Vietnam, to name a few. In our own internal affairs we assassinate our own leaders with troubling regularity. Our own national police force, the FBI, was ruled by a terrorist for most of the 20th century, in whose name and honor we built the headquarters building in Washington. The two main terrorist NGO's within our own national borders, the Mafia and the Ku Klux Klan, have continued to operate for more than a century, in large part because the FBI has cooperated with them for its own purposes. As a nation we have never come to terms with the violence that indelibly marks our own behavior as a people. We cannot bear to face what we are. Thus when Osama bin Laden emerged on the scene after a bold strike on 9-11, "projective identification" compels us to attribute to him the full weight of our own terrorist impulses, along with his own. What we see in bin Laden is what we deny in ourselves.
Theology puts the same issue in simpler language: We attend to the crimes of others while denying one’s own similar crimes, a betrayal of truth and a mark of unfaithfulness.
We are becoming quite adept at terror. We flout the Geneva Convention's rules on treatment of prisoners of war. Hitler treated American soldiers better than Bush treats the captives held in Guantanamo, and elsewhere. American citizens are now being held incommunicado in federal custody, denied due process on arbitrary grounds that they are enemy combatants. Anyone could be seized on such grounds. Having morphed into a lawless nation of terrorists, we have no moral status to fight against alien terrorists. With the wreckage of the rule of law we now fight only to protect our wealth, a 21st century recapitulation of cowboys and Indians.
History tends to show that lawless people sooner or later are recompensed for their lawlessness. Henry Kissenger has already been charged in international courts as a war criminal. How much more likely the Bush team will be similarly charged as a war criminal.
III
A rational administration in Washington would seek to bring any war to a successful conclusion as quickly as possible. But the current leadership is moving in exactly the opposite direction. The objective seems to be an escalation of perpetual war.
The administration pays no attention to arguably legitimate complaints by Middle Eastern Muslims, namely that we have militarily occupied the land of Muslim holy sites, Saudi Arabia, and that we have not committed ourselves to ending the Israeli-Palestinian war. Persons resort to terror for ideological reasons that typically complement their economic ones.
The U.S. government seems committed to expanding the conditions that cultivate more terrorists. The national and international policy of further enriching the rich and further impoverishing the poor is the most efficient route to breeding more terrorists. It is a magical formula on the order of a perpetual motion machine. We cultivate prospective terrorists by our economic and political policy, which will in turn appear to justify our continuing War on Terror. If a 21st century George Washington were to arise amongst the vast numbers of those who live on $2 a day or less, who are the majority in the world at large, and were such a Washington to attempt to redress this inhumane imbalance of wealth, he would almost certainly be classified as a terrorist.
The current administration is also stoking the fires of American fundamentalism, promising a worsening polarization of religions. When General William Boykin in full military uniform addressed a gathering of evangelical Christians in mid-October, telling them that Islam was a false religion that worshiped idols, that we are fighting against Satan, and that we are hated because we are a Christian nation, he is stoking those fires. When Congressman John Conyers registered a complaint about the speech, the Bush administration replied that Boykin was "an officer that (sic) has an outstanding record in the United States Armed Forces." Bush is stoking a fire that might be impossible to extinguish. If the numbers of both American and Muslim fundamentalists spoiling for a fight reach a critical mass, we may find ourselves in an international religious war, the consequences of which promise apocalypse. Fundamentalists of all stripes, of course, thrive on fantasies of apocalypse.
We are more likely to be harmed by an American fundamentalists, such as those who kill physicians who perform abortions, or by politically disillusioned patriots like Timothy McVeigh, or by renegade FBI agents, than we are to be harmed by a Middle Eastern Muslim.
The stark failure of self-awareness that marks the current administration is propelling us toward a shadowy future. The actions of the current administration suggest a longing for the apocalypse.
We have more to fear from terrorists who bear a resemblance to George W. Bush than we do from those who resemble a certain Middle Eastern Muslim.
Raymond J. Lawrence Jr.
As for the War on Terror, I'm sitting this one out. I will be a non-combatant and conscientious objector. And since flag-waving has become the meta-symbol of that war, I will not display the flag, least of all on my lapel.
Candor requires me to add that I cannot think of any war in which I would have been proud to serve or willing to die for the cause, even as a hero. I am not privy to all the wars fought in human history, but of the ones about which I have some knowledge, I would choose to sit them out.
My ancestors fought the Indian wars for 300 years, their many victories providing the basis for European settlement of the continent. I suppose that the final destruction of Indian culture and of most of its people is now considered an"historical necessity." But the entire story fills me with melancholy. All my prosperity is founded on pushing the Indians into oblivion, which makes me an Indian killer by inheritance. But I recoil at the characterization. Count me out of the Indian wars.
The Revolutionary War may just be the exception to my thesis. Certainly I would have found the suasion of Jefferson, Franklin, and even Adams irresistible, those 18th century terrorists who would have been hanged, drawn and quartered had they been caught. Their cause was the closest thing imaginable to a cause worth dying for. But two centuries later I see that Canadians and the Brits have every bit as much liberty and freedom in the pursuit of happiness as we do, and apparently a tad more sanity to boot. To pack off to Canada in 1776 would be tempting. In any case, I never thought I would hang well.
1861 would certainly have been a good year to go to Mexico. The Civil War was fought to restore the Union, not to rescue slaves. Restoring the Union did have some beneficial secondary results, such as freeing the slaves. However, the South had the last laugh in implementing a century of a brutal segregation that was hardly an improvement over slavery. The restoration of the Union provided the basis for the expansion of Federal power in Washington. A century later that power center is looking more and more like our worst enemy. Was the Confederacy such a bad idea after all? I am not willing to die for either side. A popular Civil War historian says "none died in vain." I say, they all died in vain, and an awful lot of them at that. Count me out of that war.
In World War I France, Germany, and England were all much too eager to fight. They could hardly wait to get into the trenches. Everyone's blood was up. Europe in the decades following was in a worse state than it would have been had the Kaiser ruled the whole continent. Woodrow Wilson was on his own unselfaware, professorial ego trip in that war, exacerbating an already bad situation. If the Germans had won, we wouldn't have had to deal later with Hitler. Count me out of that one too.
We read a lot of pap recently about "the greatest generation" that fought what the Cajuns, according to Myron Madden, call World War Twice. Certainly Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini made near-perfect enemies, and the fact that they got their just deserts is almost enough to make me want to enlist. However, in that war we joined forces with Stalin, securing his bloody throne for the rest of his natural life, giving him additional tyrannical power over all of central and eastern Europe as well. If pressed to decide who tilts the scales of depraved inhumanity with the most weight, Hitler or Stalin, a well-read person would likely pick the latter. Certainly Hitler killed more Jews than Stalin. However, Hitler built the extermination camps only after the war began, as he publicly promised he would. Prior to the onset of the war he offered Jews the option of leaving Germany. Since the putative leading nation of the free world refused to take them in, most other western nations followed our example. Thus most of the Jews stayed put in Nazi Germany. Our self-righteous shock on finding the extermination camps at the conclusion of the war was a despicable pose, a denial of our own complicity in their murder. Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe pried half of Europe free from the tyranny of Hitler while delivering the other half to another generation of Stalinist terror. I never have liked crusades. Count me out.
The Korean War would appear to have been a clear-cut case of stark aggression, worthy of countering with willing self-sacrifice. However, the South Korean government was indefensibly corrupt and undemocratic. Its only claim to virtue was its participation in the western economic zone. I had several thoughtful and good-hearted young Korean friends in the 50s who related to me at the time how ambivalent they were when the war began, and how difficult it was for them to decide which side to join. The retro-fantasy of marching to the Yalu River under the generalship of that prima donna, Douglas McArthur, to fight the Chinese, does not make it to the list of things I wish I had done. I want to sit that one out.
The Cold War was fought on the assumption that anyone anywhere in the world who was socialist or communist took direct orders from Stalin or his successors. Had that been fact rather than fantasy, the Cold War might have been one worth giving one's life for. But it was no more than a paranoid construct, inflating Stalin's power, and causing grief to countless social progressives the world over. Count me out.
In the Vietnam war 50,000 Americans, some of whom I knew personally, had to die before we figured out that the Vietnamese people actually preferred a communist government to the one we had hand picked on their behalf. Our government knew the attitude of the people before the war started, which is why we prevented free elections from taking place in the 60s. So count me out of that war too.
Bush the first's Gulf war was fought for the benefit of the Kuwaiti oil oligarchy. I never have had any desire to give my life on behalf of any Arab sheik.
The Iraqi war currently in progress, or regress, is given a different rationale every several months. Representative government and honest elections in Iraq would be a monumental achievement, but who can believe that Bush desires in Iraq what he desires not in Florida? It remains to be seen exactly what our troops are dying for in Iraq. Most likely they die on behalf of the wider reach of our multinational corporations. Soldiers, it is said, do or die and never question why. They may be willing in Iraq to die. Not I.
Worse than the dying is what all the violence is doing to the souls of our soldiers, the perpetrators. A report from Dhuluaya, 50 miles north of Bagdad, by Patrick Cockburn of The Independent, relates how American soldiers bulldozed a grove of orange, lemon, and date palm trees on the grounds that villagers were not reporting on insurgents in the area. One American soldier was reported weeping during the action. In reality, the whole world should be weeping.
II
Of all the wars about which I have any knowledge, the current War on Terror is far and away the worst. Remarkably, there is no place to aim one's gun. Since terror will never be entirely extinguished in human society wherever a critical mass of people feels, rightly or wrongly, oppressed, whether they be led by a George Washington or an Osama bin Laden. We have thus been launched into a war that by definition can never end, a war without end against an enemy with no mailing address. All wars are bad, and of questionable value, but this war has the character of an apocalyptic curse.
And since war is by definition "terror," the current national agenda is terror against terror, or terrorist against terrorist. I will not enlist as a terrorist on either side.
(War has not always been "terror," that is, waged against non-combatants. In some periods in history, soldiers attacked other combatants only. In 1066, when William the Conqueror conquered England, soldiers who had slain their foes in battle were required to do penance for murder. In Iraq we do no penance even for the murder of women and children. The increase in suicides among American soldiers, about which the military authorities have expressed concern, may be a form of expatiation on behalf of us all.)
A very worrisome dimension of the War on Terror is the innuendo that the terrorists are out there somewhere, though exactly where and exactly who is for the most part yet to be determined. Bin Laden or his followers are undoubtedly still out there working under the radar. What damage bin Laden might do to us is a matter of concern, but an even greater concern is the fact that we too have become terrorists, and arguably more adept at the business than bin Laden.
The discipline of psychology has devised a sometimes disputed concept called "projective identification." It purports to describe an unconscious process whereby we attribute unacceptable attributes of the self to others. The War on Terror is stunning example of projective identification on a national scale.
We currently dominate the world with our war machine. Our current president boasts of having assassinated within the borders of another sovereign state presumed enemies and unknown others who happened to be in their company. We have a long track record of overthrowing and assassinating duly elected officials of other governments, as in Chile, Guatemala, Iran, the Congo, and Vietnam, to name a few. In our own internal affairs we assassinate our own leaders with troubling regularity. Our own national police force, the FBI, was ruled by a terrorist for most of the 20th century, in whose name and honor we built the headquarters building in Washington. The two main terrorist NGO's within our own national borders, the Mafia and the Ku Klux Klan, have continued to operate for more than a century, in large part because the FBI has cooperated with them for its own purposes. As a nation we have never come to terms with the violence that indelibly marks our own behavior as a people. We cannot bear to face what we are. Thus when Osama bin Laden emerged on the scene after a bold strike on 9-11, "projective identification" compels us to attribute to him the full weight of our own terrorist impulses, along with his own. What we see in bin Laden is what we deny in ourselves.
Theology puts the same issue in simpler language: We attend to the crimes of others while denying one’s own similar crimes, a betrayal of truth and a mark of unfaithfulness.
We are becoming quite adept at terror. We flout the Geneva Convention's rules on treatment of prisoners of war. Hitler treated American soldiers better than Bush treats the captives held in Guantanamo, and elsewhere. American citizens are now being held incommunicado in federal custody, denied due process on arbitrary grounds that they are enemy combatants. Anyone could be seized on such grounds. Having morphed into a lawless nation of terrorists, we have no moral status to fight against alien terrorists. With the wreckage of the rule of law we now fight only to protect our wealth, a 21st century recapitulation of cowboys and Indians.
History tends to show that lawless people sooner or later are recompensed for their lawlessness. Henry Kissenger has already been charged in international courts as a war criminal. How much more likely the Bush team will be similarly charged as a war criminal.
III
A rational administration in Washington would seek to bring any war to a successful conclusion as quickly as possible. But the current leadership is moving in exactly the opposite direction. The objective seems to be an escalation of perpetual war.
The administration pays no attention to arguably legitimate complaints by Middle Eastern Muslims, namely that we have militarily occupied the land of Muslim holy sites, Saudi Arabia, and that we have not committed ourselves to ending the Israeli-Palestinian war. Persons resort to terror for ideological reasons that typically complement their economic ones.
The U.S. government seems committed to expanding the conditions that cultivate more terrorists. The national and international policy of further enriching the rich and further impoverishing the poor is the most efficient route to breeding more terrorists. It is a magical formula on the order of a perpetual motion machine. We cultivate prospective terrorists by our economic and political policy, which will in turn appear to justify our continuing War on Terror. If a 21st century George Washington were to arise amongst the vast numbers of those who live on $2 a day or less, who are the majority in the world at large, and were such a Washington to attempt to redress this inhumane imbalance of wealth, he would almost certainly be classified as a terrorist.
The current administration is also stoking the fires of American fundamentalism, promising a worsening polarization of religions. When General William Boykin in full military uniform addressed a gathering of evangelical Christians in mid-October, telling them that Islam was a false religion that worshiped idols, that we are fighting against Satan, and that we are hated because we are a Christian nation, he is stoking those fires. When Congressman John Conyers registered a complaint about the speech, the Bush administration replied that Boykin was "an officer that (sic) has an outstanding record in the United States Armed Forces." Bush is stoking a fire that might be impossible to extinguish. If the numbers of both American and Muslim fundamentalists spoiling for a fight reach a critical mass, we may find ourselves in an international religious war, the consequences of which promise apocalypse. Fundamentalists of all stripes, of course, thrive on fantasies of apocalypse.
We are more likely to be harmed by an American fundamentalists, such as those who kill physicians who perform abortions, or by politically disillusioned patriots like Timothy McVeigh, or by renegade FBI agents, than we are to be harmed by a Middle Eastern Muslim.
The stark failure of self-awareness that marks the current administration is propelling us toward a shadowy future. The actions of the current administration suggest a longing for the apocalypse.
We have more to fear from terrorists who bear a resemblance to George W. Bush than we do from those who resemble a certain Middle Eastern Muslim.
posted by Raymond @ 11:25 AM
