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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Hedges is not, of course, arguing that American complicity in the terrorizing of foreign nationals on a far greater scale than that visited on us, our longtime support for repressive regimes or our misguided imperialist or anti-Communist adventures means that we deserved to be attacked, or that we have no right to defend ourselves. Rather, he is arguing that the primitive, tribal response to the attacks is grossly inadequate and in fact dangerous, both to our nation's security and to the minds and souls of Americans who abandon humility and critical thought to worship at the idol of the Good War and the Nation.
"As long as we think abstractly, as long as we find in the patriotism and the exuberance of war our fulfillment, we will never understand those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them, or finally those who do battle for us and how we should respond to it all. We will never discover who we are. We will fail to confront the capacity we all have for violence. And we will court our own extermination," Hedges writes. "By accepting the facile clichi that the battle under way against terrorism is a battle against evil, by easily branding those who fight us as the barbarians, we, like them, refuse to acknowledge our own culpability. We ignore real injustices that have led many of those arrayed against us to their rage and despair."
As previously noted, one of the flaws of "War Is a Force" is that Hedges, in his Cassandra-like haste to warn us, tends to level all distinctions -- between wars, between the causes of wars, between types of patriotism. Like Shakespeare's Thersites, the nihilistic Greek in "Troilus and Cressida" whom he quotes and who could stand as the spokesman for his book, Hedges is an absolutist; anything that praises war, points to war, invokes war, is tainted. His extreme assessment of the patriotic fervor that seized the United States after the Sept. 11 terror attacks is a case in point: Even those who agree that there were disturbing and excessive elements to it might not say that it made them feel like they had turned into Gregor Samsa. And, of course, Hedges' comparison of America's post-Sept. 11 reaction with Argentina's after the junta invaded the Falklands ignores the fact that despite its historic sins, America, unlike Argentina, was the victim -- not the aggressor.
For Hedges, however, even nations that find themselves victims must avoid draining the intoxicating cup of war. That does not mean never going to war: It means doing so with extreme misgivings, with humility, and, Hedges says, with "repentance." It is telling that Hedges uses that word, with its Christian associations: In the spiritual climax of the book, Hedges celebrates love as the only force that can provide a meaning stronger than war. Hedges is no poet, but his aim is higher than the merely political. His bleak, faith-tinged affirmation of human solidarity even in the midst of hell recalls the work of the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz.
At a personal level, Hedges' call for humility in the face of those who would unleash the dogs of war is incontrovertible: It carries the haunted moral authority of someone who has seen too much and lived too long. But it is obviously more problematic when applied to national policy. What, specifically, does it mean to pursue a campaign against al-Qaida "with repentance"?
Hedges doesn't say. But he seems to mean two things. First, an overly ambitious and open-ended response -- a "war" on terror, as opposed to a battle or campaign -- will create far more problems than it solves. Second, those who embrace war without understanding what it is risk losing their humanity. "I wrote this book not to dissuade us from war but to understand it," Hedges writes. "It is especially important that we, who wield such massive force across the globe, see within ourselves the seeds of our own obliteration. We must guard against the myth of war and the drug of war that can, together, render us as blind and callous as some of those we battle."
Translated into a policy prescription, what Hedges has in mind seems to be not quietism but a carefully calibrated response, perhaps along the lines of an international police action and/or selected U.S. military strikes, along with proactive steps to address underlying injustices that inspire Muslim terrorists and that we are party to, such as our blank-check support for Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. As for America's recently promoted public enemy No. 1, Iraq, Hedges says nothing about it, but it seems unlikely that he would sign off on the Bush administration's war plans. The self-interested realpolitik motivations behind the Bush administration's thirst for a war, and the probability that a war would hatch hundreds of new Osamas, would presumably outweigh the clear moral benefit of ridding the world of Saddam Hussein -- especially since there is no compelling evidence that Saddam poses an immediate danger.
There is nothing particularly controversial about this position: It represents the view of many Americans across the political spectrum who want to track down and destroy al-Qaida, who hold no brief for bloody Saddam but have grave doubts about the wisdom of a unilateral, unprovoked American invasion of a sovereign state, particularly one in the heart of the Arab world. Hedges' second, more personal point, however, is much trickier.
