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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The Iraq blunder has endangered America not just because we have exponentially multiplied the number of Muslims and Arabs willing to take up the sword of jihad against us -- and given them a convenient failed state to work with -- but also because we have weakened our standing in the world. By declaring ourselves exempt from irritating encumbrances like the United Nations and the Geneva Convention, Bush has essentially embraced the law of the jungle. Might makes right: If the U.S. government says someone is an "enemy combatant," whether or not there is any evidence to support that claim, then he is one, and he has no rights. If the secretary of defense and the administration's top legal advisors decide it's acceptable to use torture to break "terrorists," we will. (If they turn out not to be terrorists, but common criminals or innocent civilians, too bad for them.) The widespread torture of Iraqi prisoners and the suspension of due process at Guantánamo are dual blots on our national honor that may take generations to remove.
Of all the shameful episodes that have marked the "war on terror," one of the worst -- and least protested -- has been the administration's tacit admission that they had no case, and never had a case, against most of the Guantánamo detainees. Once the Supreme Court ruled against the administration's claim that it had the right to do whatever it wanted with the detainees, it quietly folded its hand and began preparing to release them. Thus ended the Salem witch trials, not with a bang but a whimper.
From its insistence on cutting taxes for the rich in the middle of a war to its ugly environmental record to its hostility to science to its corruption of the intelligence community to its stealth assault on abortion rights, the Bush presidency has been an unmitigated disaster. But the inescapable subject is Iraq. Bush's decision to invade Iraq was not only the defining event of his presidency, but a hinge in time -- an event so momentous that history arranges itself around it.
The administration justified the war as a necessary strike against Islamic terrorism. Its mantra is "9/11 changed everything": The horrific image of the twin towers falling is the Bush administration's visceral trump card. If Bush regains the White House, it will be because he has succeeded in convincing enough Americans that, as he argued in the debates, the best way to defeat terrorism is to take the fight to "the terrorists," and that he alone, not the vacillating Kerry, has the guts to do that.
In the eyes of Bush and his supporters, the "war on terror" requires simplicity, not complexity; courage, not brains; patriotism, not alliance-building. For them, 9/11/01 was really 9/1/39; the planes hitting the towers were the Nazis invading Poland. You don't think about the meaning of the Panzers, you react to them, hard and ruthlessly, across the board. Anyone who dreams that there is any alternative to a fight to the finish is a woolly-headed idealist. The hatred of the terrorists for us is implacable, metaphysical, as unchangeable as that felt by the Muslims for the Crusaders. Any sign of weakness on our part encourages them in their single-minded pursuit of our destruction. The terrorists hope for a Kerry victory because he's weak. They fear Bush because he will smash them in the mouth and keep smashing until they're all dead.
In the aftermath of 9/11, this view of "the terrorists" (a group never clearly defined) dominated the public discourse. It was aggressively promulgated by the White House and assented to by Congress and the media, both liberal and conservative. To question it was to risk being denounced as an appeaser, even a fifth columnist. The belief that it represented mainstream American thinking was why wavering Democrats signed off on the resolution giving Bush the power to invade. And even now, after Iraq has become a bloody quagmire, this view is held by most Americans who support Bush.
There are powerful reasons for its popularity. It appeals to primordial instincts -- self-preservation, anger, revenge, patriotism. It derives its power from a hypnotic and inescapable image, like a hideous Tarot card that turns up again and again: the apocalyptic vision of the towers collapsing. And there are elements of truth in its assessment of the enemy. There are indeed fanatical Islamists whose hatred of America, although it may have had political origins, has become essentially religious, i.e. absolute. They cannot be reasoned with; they must be fought.
But this analysis is profoundly and dangerously mistaken. It is based on a misreading of the Arab-Muslim world. In its high-minded guise it posits a reified Islam, monolithic in its theocratic piety, reflexively opposed to modernity and democracy. In its vulgar form it is historically ignorant and racist. And it is frequently, though not necessarily, associated with either a deep-seated pro-Israeli bias or a triumphalist belief in America's mission civilisatrice, or both. In the case of the Bush administration, emphatically both.
Above all, it is a view that is driven by emotion, not thought -- in fact, it's positively hostile to thought. It reached its reductio ad absurdum in conservative columnist David Brooks' Saturday column in the New York Times, in which he argued that Bush was a better choice to lead the "War on Terror" than Kerry because Bush really, really hated bin Laden -- hated him so much, Brooks notes approvingly, that he was "consumed" by hatred. Brooks and his ilk would do well to go to more fights. Fighters consumed by hatred, who throw wild haymakers, are inevitably cut down by fighters who know how to box. Brooks and his hate-filled hero could take some lessons from Muhammad Ali.
The very phrase "war on terror" betrays the extremist ideology that has driven the Bush administration. This is not a war against al-Qaida, or against a specific group of terrorists: This is a war against terror. But "terror" is not an enemy; it is a tactic. What Bush is waging war on is not the tactic of terrorism, which as all students of military history know cannot be defeated, but evil itself -- and not just any evil, but Arab-Muslim evil. The "war on terror" is really the "war on Arab-Muslim evil." Bush is too discreet to call it that, but the more fervent of his supporters have no such problem: Neoconservative godfather Richard Perle and former Bush speechwriter David Frum titled their frightening book (in which, among other modest proposals, they advocate that Israel annex the West Bank and the United States invade Iran and Syria) "An End to Evil."
