"No sane person wants to fight a war."
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No sane person wants to fight a war. But many sane people believe that there are times when they are necessary. I believe this is one of those times.
For it seems to me that if you are against any war – if you believe that peace is always the right choice -- then you must believe at least one, if not both of the following:
1. People will always be able to come to a reasonable agreement, no matter how deep or contentious the issue, and that all people are rational, reasonable, honorable, decent and sane,
or,
2. It is more noble to live under slavery and oppression, to endure torture, institutionalized rape, theft and genocide than it is to fight it.
History, not to mention personal experience, shows me that the first proposition is clearly false. I believe, to put it plainly, that some people have been raised to become pathological murderers, liars, and first-rate bastards, and that these people will kill and brutalize the good, meek people and steal from and murder them whenever it is in their personal interest to do so. You are, of course, free to disagree about this element of humanity. I, however, can put a great many names on the table. History is littered with people and regimes just like this: entire nations of murderers and thugs, savage and brutal men who could herd grandmothers and babies into gas chambers and march to battle with guns in the backs of old men and teenage girls for use as human shields. I believe these people are real, and that they cannot be reasoned with. I believe that there are entire societies where dominance and force are the norm, and where cooperation and compromise are despised and scorned. Again, history gives me quite a sizable list, and that list is evidence of the first order.
There are people – pacifists – who do not deny this, and these are the people who I really do find repulsive and deeply disturbing, for these are people who acknowledge the presence of evil men and evil regimes, and yet are unwilling to do anything about them. These are the people who cling to fantasies about containment and inspections and resolutions, people who acknowledge that barbarism and torture are rampant but who desperately cling to these niceties as long as nothing bad happens to them. When you point out to them that 9/11 showed that bad things can happen when you ignore such people, they simply point out that Hitler or Stalin or Mao is not as bad as all that, that they haven’t done anything to us yet, that action against them is unconscionable and illegitimate.
There are also people who say “better Red than dead,” people who would rather face the possibility of slavery – for ourselves or others -- than the certainty of a fight, with all it’s attendant blood and misery.
I’m sorry to say it, but to me that is nothing but sheer cowardice and refined selfishness.
We fight wars not to have peace, but to have a peace worth having. Slavery is peace. Tyranny is peace. For that matter, genocide is peace when you get right down to it. The historical consequences of a philosophy predicated on the notion of no war at any cost are families flying to the Super Bowl accompanied by three or four trusted slaves and a Europe devoid of a single living Jew.
It would be nice if there were a way around this. History, not merely my opinion, shows us that there is not. If all you are willing to do is think happy thoughts, then those are the consequences. If you want justice, and freedom, and safety, and prosperity, then sometimes you have to fight for them.
I still don’t know why so many people haven’t figured this out.
Growing up a sci-fi nerd has a few – very few – advantages. One of the greatest was getting to read the Time Guardians series of novels by the late, and deeply gifted Poul Anderson.
These stories were the cream of a hoary old sci-fi genre, that being the idea of parallel universes, histories where interference or accidents caused the chips to fall in very different ways. Poul Anderson showed me worlds in which the Chinese discovered America, where Carthage defeated Rome. Other writers have taken us to worlds where desperate Americans vie for jobs as household servants to the occupying Japanese administrators after the American loss in World War 2, and to a 1960’s Nazi Germany where all evidence of the Holocaust has been buried and destroyed. I’ve read accounts of Winston Churchill emerging from behind the barricades of 10 Downing Street, Tommy gun in hand, being cut down in a hail of bullets from the invading Nazis at the collapse of street-to-street fighting in London. There are many others.
All of these stories have a common thread: someone has gone back in time, tinkered ever so slightly, and produced a horrific world in which, for example, the Nazis and the Japanese divide their American possessions at the Mississippi. In them, something has gone horribly wrong.
But I have often wondered, what if this history, the one we know as reality, was the one gone horribly wrong? For example:
In the fall of 1999, the Clinton Administration took the hugely unpopular decision to invade Afghanistan to root out Islamic terrorists organized by a largely-unknown fanatic named Osama Bin Laden. Operation Homeland Security cost the lives of almost 300 servicemen, and did long-lasting damage to our relations with NATO, the UN, and especially Russia. President Clinton, at great political cost to himself and the Democratic Party, claimed to be acting on repeated intelligence that Bin Laden and his “phantom” organization – whose name escapes me – planned massive and sustained terrorist attacks against the United States. Peace protestors gathered between the towers of the World Trade Center in September, 2004 on the five-year anniversary of the illegal and immoral invasion, calling on President Gore to pay the UN –ordered reparations to the Taliban Government.
Or:
Today, April 20th, Germans again celebrate the birthday of Adolph Hitler with a parade down a stretch of the autobahn, one of his greatest achievements. Although forced from office in disgrace when a platoon of French soldiers contested his entry into the Rhineland in 1936, his rebuilding of Germany following the ruin of the Great War, and his subsequent lobbying for American economic support, culminating in the Lindbergh Plan and Germany’s spectacular economic growth through the forties and fifties, so rehabilitated his reputation that he remains one of the greatest and most revered figures in German history.
And we can go on like this for a very long time.
I see history as an unimaginably huge and complicated railroad switching yard, where by moving a pair of steel rails a few inches one way or another, the great train of history can be diverted from Chicago to Atlanta. These switches may seem ridiculously small at the time, but the consequences are often immeasurable.
So when I stood on Little Round Top and walked down that little hill for the last time that day, I saw more than dead and dying men littering the ground. I saw two nations where today there is one. I saw a Second Civil War, perhaps in 1909, or 1913, for these two countries would never peacefully co-exist – not with people as proud and energetic as we. I saw not seven thousand dead at Cold Harbor, but 70,000 cut down in an hour by machine guns in the Battle of Tallahassee, saw the gas attacks along the Cleveland Trenches that left half a million dead and dying. I saw, perhaps, the dimmest outlines of a Third American War, fought perhaps in ’34 or ’37 with millions of civilians killed in great air raids over Washington and Richmond. Of course, these millions never died. They lived long and full lives, most of them – and had children, namely us. They didn’t die, these millions, because the men at Cold Harbor and The Angle and Little Round Top did.
Now it seems fair to say that you can boil down the opinions of many of those opposed to the War in Iraq to a question uttered by leading anti-war activist Susan Sarandon, who asked, “I want to know what Iraq has done to us.”
There are two reasons to fight this war. One is so that History will never be able to answer that question. I don’t ever want to read about the VX attacks that left 16,000 dead at Atlanta Hartsfield airport. I don’t want to see the video of makeshift morgues inside the LA Coliseum as more anthrax victims are emptied from the hospitals. And I don’t want to look at helicopter shots of a blackened, radioactive crater where Times Square used to be, or of millions of dead bodies burning in funeral pyres, like columns of failure, dead from starvation and disease in the worldwide depression that such an attack on New York would produce.
I’m sure Miss Sarandon, and others, would criticize this response as fantasy. I’m also sure that had President Clinton taken military action against Bin Laden in the 1990’s, the idea that planes could be flown into skyscrapers, that thousands would die as the New York skyline collapsed upon them would be seen as equally as fantastic and absurd. Preposterous. Paranoid. Impossible.
But the fact remains that History will be written one way or another. Saddam’s crimes are well documented, as are his ambitions and his WMD programs. Are they worth stopping with force, before they have been used? I say yes, emphatically, and that anything less from the President is a dereliction of duty.
Many do not see it this way. I have to ask those people if they would have supported a military invasion of Afghanistan, with all the consequent upheavals, UN condemnation, and protest, in order to get Osama Bin Laden before he made 9/11 a symbol of disaster and death. The howls of protest that such people would have put up at such pre-emptive action are exceeded only by the shrieks from these same people that something wasn’t done about 9/11 before it happened.
Here is what I personally believe:
I believe that after September 11th, 2001, the Bush Administration sat down and took a very cold and hard look at what was going on in the world. I believe that they came to the conclusion that the post-WWII policy of depending on a strongman, an Attaturk or even a Nasser, to lift the Middle East into the modern world was an abject failure. I believe that they saw a region so seeped in despair and failure and repression that it would continue to generate, through asymmetrical warfare and weapons of mass destruction, an intolerable threat to the United States.
I believe that they came to realize that even if we were to pay the price of living in a police state, we cannot stop terrorists with flyswatters. Despite our best efforts, sooner of later, some of them will succeed, either with jet-fueled airplanes, or smallpox aerosols, or Sarin-filled crop dusters, or a suitcase nuke in Times Square or the steps of the capitol. As long as the failure of Arab nations generates such rage and hatred, they will keep coming. There is no end to the numbers a swamp like that can generate.
I believe that the United States government has taken a very bold decision to take the first steps to drain that swamp, and that this War in Iraq is the throwing of a railway switch to divert us from a very terrible train wreck lying ahead in the dark tunnel of history yet unwritten. Surely they know full well that this action will, in the short term, cause even more hatred and anger to be directed to us. But I see this as a chance – perhaps our last chance – to eliminate one of the states capable of and committed to the development of such weapons, and in the bargain establish a foothold of freedom and democracy in a region notable for its resistance to this historic trend.
Furthermore, I see it as a means of averting such wars in the future, for it shows in the most stark terms available that we are serious about this issue, and more than anything, when we talk about the safety and security of the United States of America we mean what we say. Entire wars have been cause by miscalculations of an enemy's resolve. As Tony Blair made clear in his ringing speech before Parliament on the eve of the war, to back down now, to show ourselves incapable of action, would have made all subsequent diplomatic efforts essentially meaningless. Showing that we will fight -- and fight all the way -- will make it far less likely that our enemies will miscalculate the way we allowed Saddam and Bin Laden to miscalculate.
As national policy, it is risky, and it is extremely dangerous. It is also an act of astonishing courage and leadership, because the alternative is horrible beyond contemplation. We are in the very early stages of a great and difficult campaign, one fraught with many setbacks and much loss. Although chaotic and uncertain to us today, it is a campaign that makes sense only through the long lens of history, for despite the blood and destruction, and the faces of those brave men and women held up to us nightly, it is the course most likely to steer us through these reefs into the open waters of security and a peace worth living under – a peace based on real security, on a free and democratic and successful Middle East, not the petty and false peace of inaction and denial in the face of the threatening storm. The world faced this choice in the late 1930's, and chose an easy 'peace' -- "Peace for our Time." History records our reward.
Those who oppose this war may not be willing to face the pages of history that will forever remain unwritten by us taking this action in Iraq. But two things we can be assured of, and both of them are worth noting in these anxious times.
First, while we cannot say that Weapons of Mass Destruction will never be used against the United States, we can -- because of this courageous action --say that they will not be Iraqi weapons. No one denies that these exist -- only that a raving lunatic, a paranoid, murdering psychopath can be trusted to not use them. A swamp littered with chemical weapons shells, with anthrax-dispersing jet aircraft, and with a robust, stubborn and dedicated nuclear weapons program is being drained nightly before our eyes. That is a great victory.
Second, while the long-term outcome is hard to see through the fog of war, we are in fact sending our own children to die to set a people free. When Saddam’s murdering henchmen are dead and gone, when he and his psychopathic regime lie burning and shattered like his posters and statues, we may – or may not – see people emerge from three decades of horror to greet us as liberators, once they truly realize that doing so will not cost them their lives.
But even if they don’t, it does not matter. The Japanese and Germans saw us as conquerors and occupiers too, not to mention the people of Alabama and Georgia and South Carolina. All of these people fought, and fought hard, for regimes that had kept them in bondage. Nazism and Japanese Imperialism fell away relatively quickly and painlessly. American racism was a deeper problem; it has taken more than a century to remake this society, and while that war is not yet over it most certainly has been won.
We may or may not have prevented more attacks on the United States. We may or may not have generated a greater short-term threat from terror. I personally think that recent history has shown that resolute action, that taking the offensive, has been a great deterrent to terror, and that the operation in Iraq will do much more in that regard. I could be wrong. History will tell us, soon enough.
But of one thing I am absolutely certain. Despite all the switches in the rail yard, there is a flow and a direction to history that cannot and will not be denied.
It is the slow, uneven, grasping climb toward freedom. There are markers on Little Round Top, on the beaches at Normandy, and in the sands of Nasiriyah that show us where men have fought and laid down their lives, and willingly left their wives without husbands and their children without fathers, all for this idea. It is an idea bigger than they are, bigger than self-centered movie stars, bigger than cynical and bitter journalists, bigger than Presidents and Dictators, bigger, in fact than all human failure and miscalculation.
It is the idea that people – all people – deserve to live their lives in freedom. Free from fear. Free from want. Free from despair and hatred.
My country has, again, taken up that banner, and the behavior of our young men and women under unimaginable stress and provocation have filled me with fierce and unremitting pride. We fight, nearly alone, alongside old and true friends, British and Australian, themselves decent and honorable people, long champions of freedom who have their own Waterloos and Gallipolis and cemeteries marked with fields of red poppies, rolls of sacrifice and honor that should fill all American hearts with pride. For friends like this are worth having, and I will always prefer the company of one or two solid, dependable friends over legions of fashionable and trendy and unreliable ones.
And someday, centuries from now, in the world we all hope for but which only a few will fight for, all of this death and destruction will be gone. All that will be left will be small markers in green fields that were once deserts, places where Iraqi families may walk someday with the same taken-for-granted sense of happiness and security I had in Pennsylvania and Virginia.
And perhaps they will read the strange-sounding names, and try to imagine a time when it was all in doubt.
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