What If They Gave A War and Nobody Cared?
BY RICHARD REEVES
Universal Press Syndicate
December 18, 2002
NEW YORK -- Silver Bells. Silver Bells. It’s Christmas time in the city. And what New Yorkers do is get together with friends and talk mainly about their children. At a certain age -- folks like us who have 18-year olds -- the conversations focus with enormous intensity on a single question: What colleges are yours applying to and have you heard yet on early admissions?
Iraq? Terrorism? Well, a few people we know who are writing books about those subjects bring them up when you ask, "How’s it going?" But even those parents, if they have teenagers, turn to subject back to the irrationalities of college admission.
It is not that we are not patriotic or that we do not care about the Americans and others who will die for...? As you know there is a certain confusion about why we might actually go to war against...? There’s some confusion about that, too, though I would argue that the idea, in the White House, is to make the United States the dominant political force in the Middle East and to use that power to control oil fields and strike back at terrorists.
Big power, big picture strategy, however, just does not have much impact on our lives this season. War planning is being done in secret, the process being guarded by lies. We know the reasons handed to us from on high in Washington will suit whatever the public mood is when fighting begins. Osama? Saddam? Kim? Yasser? Oil? Pride? Freedom? Whatever turns you on.
"Turns you on," come to think of it, is a ‘60s phrase. That’s when we asked, "What if they gave a war and nobody came?" We have grown since then. Now the relevant question is more like, "What if they gave a war and nobody cared?"
People care about war, if it is someplace else, only if it threatens their childrens’ lives and futures. If there were still a draft in this country, we would be talking about nothing but the war right now, reciting draft numbers rather than SAT scores.
The worst trick Richard Nixon played on this country was ending Selective Service to try to stop anti-war protests in 1970. The idea came from the great conservative economist Milton Friedman, who might have figured there would be no market for peace if consumers were not faced with sacrifice in the family. Whatever the reasoning then, it did allow President Nixon to make war in relative peace for a couple more years.
Now, with a high-tech volunteer military, there will be little public sacrifice, at least in the United States. War will be more or less a spectator sport. The one in Iraq, being planned in secret right now, may very well be launched in late January or early February, just in time to fill the boring time between the Super Bowl and the beginning of the baseball season.
The best argument so far for war in Iraq is still revenge for the terror of September 11th. The heavy thinkers around and behind President Bush seem to think that the way to make up for not destroying Al Qaeda, an enemy without a country, when we had the chance, is to find a bad country and threaten to level it. This trick, which could work, does show political contempt for the intelligence of the American people -- so what else is new? -- but also for their necessity. If the public doesn’t care, the public is not necessary. When sacrifice is removed from the equation, when the overwhelming majority of Americans are asked to do nothing but watch, the government has license to do whatever it pleases, wherever it pleases.
The success of that strategy has been demonstrated by the fact that the most effective dissent in the this military cycle has come from outside the United States, from the United Nations and from Europe. But all that anti-war activity may end up accomplishing is giving the White House and the Department of Defense the time to build up for attack.
Not our problem. So let us have ourselves a merry little Christmas. Chestnuts roasting on open fire. But they’re not our nuts, are they?
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RICHARD REEVES is the author of 12 books, including President Nixon: Alone in the White House. He has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, Esquire and dozens of other publications. E-mail him at rr@richardreeves.com.
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