The Fog of Peace

EITHER SADDAM HUSSEIN will remain in power or he will be deposed. President Bush has suggested deposing him, but as the debate over that proposal has evolved, an interesting pattern has emerged. The people in the peace camp attack President Bush's plan, but they are unwilling to face the implications of their own. Almost nobody in the peace camp will stand up and say that Saddam Hussein is not a fundamental problem for the world. Almost nobody in that camp is willing even to describe what the world will look like if the peace camp's advice is taken and Saddam is permitted to remain in power in Baghdad, working away on his biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs, still tyrannizing his own people, fomenting radicalism, and perpetuating the current political climate in the Arab world. And because almost nobody in the peace camp is willing to face the realities that a peace policy would preserve, the peace proponents really cannot address the fundamental calculation we confront: Are the risks of killing Saddam greater or less than the risks of tolerating him? Instead of facing the real options, they fill the air with evasions, distractions, and gestures--a miasma of insults and verbiage that distract from the core issue. They are living in the fog of peace.

When you read through the vast literature of the peace camp, you get the impression that Saddam Hussein is some distant, off-stage figure not immediately germane to matters at hand.

For example, on September 19, a group of peaceniks took out a full-page ad in the New York Times opposing the campaign in Afghanistan and a possible campaign in Iraq. Signatories included all the usual suspects: Jane Fonda, Edward Said, Barbara Ehrenreich, Tom Hayden, Gore Vidal, Ed Asner, and on and on. In the text of the ad, which runs to 15 paragraphs, Saddam Hussein is not mentioned. Weapons of mass destruction are not mentioned. The risks posed by terrorists and terror organizations are not mentioned. Instead there are vague sentiments, ethereally removed from the tensions before us today: "Nations have the right to determine their own destiny, free from military coercion by great powers. . . . In our name, the government has brought down a pall of repression over society. . . . We refuse to be party to these wars and we repudiate any inference that they are being waged in our name." The entire exercise is a picture perfect example of moral exhibitionism, by a group of people decadently refusing even to acknowledge the difficulties and tradeoffs that confront those who actually have to make decisions about policy.

Frances FitzGerald recently wrote a long essay in the New York Review of Books headlined on the cover "Bush and War." In the piece FitzGerald portrays the Bush foreign policy team as a coterie of superhawks driven by a fierce ideological desire to act unilaterally. This unilateralism leads the Bush advisers, FitzGerald asserts, to see or invent enemies, such as Saddam Hussein. "If one decides to go it alone without allies or reliance on the rule of law, it is natural to see danger abroad."

If you are a writer setting out to evaluate the Bush foreign policy team and its longstanding worries about Saddam, it would seem reasonable to measure whether or not those fears are justified or exaggerated. This is Journalism, or Scholarship, 101. But this is the question FitzGerald cannot ask, because that would require her to enter the forbidden territory of Saddam himself. FitzGerald raises the possibility that war against Saddam might lead to a Palestinian revolt in Jordan, oil shortages, and terrorist attacks. She mentions the daunting cost and scope of an American occupation of Iraq. She approvingly quotes Brent Scowcroft's warning that taking action against Saddam would inflame the Arab world and destroy the coalition that we need to wage war on al Qaeda. But what of the risks of doing nothing? This issue she does not touch. This is the issue that must remain shrouded in the fog of peace.

Reviewing Noam Chomsky, legal scholar Richard Falk, a member of the editorial board of the Nation, observes that while he agrees with much of what Chomsky writes, he is troubled by the fact that Chomsky is "so preoccupied with the evils of U.S. imperialism that it completely occupies all the political and moral space."

That is exactly what you see in the writings of the peace camp generally--not only in Chomsky's work but also in the writings of people who are actually tethered to reality. Their supposed demons--Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Donald Rumsfeld, and company--occupy their entire field of vision, so that there is no room for analysis of anything beyond, such as what is happening in the world. For the peace camp, all foreign affairs is local; contempt for and opposition to Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, et al. is the driving passion. When they write about these figures it is with a burning zeal. But on the rare occasions when they write about Saddam, suddenly all passion drains away. Saddam is boring, but Wolfowitz tears at their soul.

You begin to realize that they are not arguing about Iraq. They are not arguing at all. They are just repeating the hatreds they cultivated in the 1960s, and during the Reagan years, and during the Florida imbroglio after the last presidential election. They are playing culture war, and they are disguising their eruptions as position-taking on Iraq, a country about which they haven't even taken the trouble to inform themselves.

THE NOTED HISTORIAN and Columbia University professor Simon Schama wrote a long essay for the Guardian that was published September 11. He begins by defending President Bush's use of the term "evil." But as he starts to talk about the war on terror and the possible war in Iraq, suddenly all logic is overtaken by his disgust for the Bush crowd:

"The United States Inc. is currently being run by an oligarchy, conducting its affairs with a plutocratic effrontery which in comparison makes the age of the robber barons in the late 19th century seem a model of capitalist rectitude. The dominant managerial style of the oligarchy is golf club chumminess; its messages exchanged along with hot stock tips by the mutual scratching and slapping of backs."

Schama goes on to attack Dick Cheney for Halliburton, Bush for Harken Energy, Secretary of the Army Thomas White for Enron, the proposal to eliminate the death tax, the banality of the architectural proposals for ground zero, Bush's faith-based initiatives, and so on and so on. It all adds up to one long rolling gas cloud of antipathy, which smothers Schama's ability to think about what the United States ought to do next.

This is the dictionary definition of parochialism--the inability to consider the larger global threats because one is consumed by one's immediate domestic hatreds. This parochialism takes many forms, but all the branches of the opposition to the war in Iraq have one thing in common: Iraq is never the issue. Something else is always the issue.

For Schama and many others, the Bush crowd is the issue. They stole the election. They serve corporate America. They have bad manners. This is the prism through which Maureen Dowd, Molly Ivins, and many others view the war. Writing in the Boston Globe, Northwestern University's Karen J. Alter psychoanalyzes the groupthink mentality that she says explains the Bush crowd's strange obsession with Iraq. The real problem, you see, is in their psyches.

Among some Democrats in Washington, a second form of parochialism has emerged. They see the Iraq conflict as a subplot within the midterm election campaigns. "It's hard not to notice that the sudden urgency of war with Iraq has coincided precisely with the emergence of the corporate scandal story, with the flip in congressional [poll] numbers and with the decline in the Republicans' prospects for retaking the Senate majority," Jim Jordan, the director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, told the Washington Post. "It's absolutely clear that the administration has timed the Iraq public relations campaign to influence the midterm elections."

What's fascinating about this wag-the-dog theory is what it reveals about the mentality of the people who float it. These are politicians (far from all of them Democrats) who have never cared about foreign affairs, have no history with the Cold War, have no interest in America's superpower role. One sometimes gets the sense that these people can't imagine how anybody could genuinely be more interested in matters of war and peace than in such issues as prescription drugs, Social Security, and Enron. If the president does pretend to care more about nuclear weapons and such, surely it must be a political tactic. For them, the important task is to get the discussion back to the subjects they care about, and which they think are politically advantageous.

This explains the strange passivity that has marked much of the Democratic response to Iraq. The president must "make the case," many Democrats say, as if they are incapable of informing themselves about what is potentially one of the greatest threats to the United States. Tom Daschle's entire approach to the Iraq issue has been governed by midterm considerations.

On September 18, as the U.N. was consumed by debate over Iraq, as the White House was drafting a war resolution on Iraq, Daschle delivered a major policy address. The subject? The tax cut Congress passed over a year ago. The speech, the New York Times reported, was "the beginning of a party-wide effort to turn attention away from Iraq and back to the domestic agenda." The United States is possibly on the verge of war, and Tom Daschle is trying to turn attention away from it. He's running around Capitol Hill looking for some sand to bury his head in. This is parochialism on stilts.

For a third branch of the parochialists, Iraq is not the issue, America is the issue. The historian Gabriel Kolko recently declared, "Everyone--Americans and those people who are the objects of their efforts--would be far better off if the United States did nothing, closed its bases overseas, withdrew its fleets everywhere and allowed the rest of the world to find its own way without American weapons and troops." For peaceniks in this school, the conditions of the world don't matter. Whether it is Korea, Germany, the Balkans, or the Middle East, America shouldn't be there because America is the problem. This is reverse isolationism: Whereas the earlier isolationists thought America should withdraw because the rest of the world was too corrupt, these isolationists believe that America should withdraw because the United States is too corrupt.

"I Hear America Sinking" is the title of James Ridgeway's recent piece in the Village Voice: America is too corrupt and troubled to attempt any action in Iraq. "American foreign policy is like their television," writes John O'Farrell in the Guardian. "It has to keep jumping from one thing to another because the president has the remote control in his hand and his attention span is very limited." Writers in this school derive an almost sensuous pleasure from recounting how much people in the rest of the world dislike America; whether those anti-Americans also, by the way, kill homosexuals, oppress women, and crush pluralism is relegated to the background. For these parochials, the immediate priority is hating America.

A fourth form of parochialism is what might be called modern multilateral gentility. For people in this school Iraq is not the issue--the U.N. is the issue. Now, it should be said that there are substantive reasons to care about whether or not the United States has allies. We need friends to help transform the Middle East. But for many of its supporters, multilateralism is purely a procedural matter. They seem to care less whether an action is undertaken than whether it is undertaken according to all the correct and genteel multilateral forms.

Like all forms of American gentility, this multilateralism is greatly concerned with refined manners. There can be no raw bullying around the earth, no passionate declarations of war, no ungentlemanly crusades. Instead, the conflict must be resolved through the framework of the United Nations (which for some reason is seen as a high-toned and civilized center of conflict resolution). Like all forms of American gentility, multilateralism carries a strong aroma of cultural inferiority. We Americans are sadly crude and uncultured. The Europeans are really much more sophisticated and subtle than we are about the affairs of the world. Their ways and manners are more mature.

Multilateral obsessives tend to be more centrist than other people in the peace camp. They are more respectable and more establishmentarian. But like many other members of the peace camp, they simply do not tackle the question of what Saddam might do or what the future might look like. Preferring process over substance, they hold to a multilateralism descended from previous genteel causes, such as civil service reform and campaign finance reform. In their quiet and sober way, they too contribute to the fog of peace.

NOW it should be said that within the peace camp, there are honorable exceptions to this pattern. Adam Shatz recently wrote a long piece in the Nation surveying left-wing thought on the war. The left is wrapped around its own axle, Shatz noted, because it can't come to terms with American power.

Richard Falk, the left-wing legal scholar, himself has argued that in deciding whether to go into places like Afghanistan and Iraq, "we should look with as much care as possible at the case where the interventionary claim is being made, and consider the effects of intervening and not intervening." This hardly seems like a radical notion, but of course it is precisely this approach that the peace camp, by and large, refuses to take. As Shatz observed in his piece, "Falk has been widely chastised for his vacillations."

Moreover, there are some in the peace camp who are willing to grapple head-on with the risks of preserving the status quo. Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's secretary of state, has argued that there is no need to take on Saddam right now because the efforts to thwart him have worked. "Since the administration of former President George H.W. Bush, each time Mr. Hussein has pushed, we have pushed back," she wrote in a recent Times op-ed. Furthermore, she argued, "Saddam Hussein's military is far weaker than it was a decade ago. And he must surely be aware that if he ever again tries to attack another country he will be obliterated. All that is grounds for calm, but not complacency."

When you come across the Groundhog Day predictions of what will happen if the United States invades Iraq--the Arab Street will explode, we will create a thousand new bin Ladens, we will become stuck in a quagmire--you're actually relieved. Here are writers who are at least willing to compare the risks of action with those of inaction. Stephen Zunes argues in the Nation that Iraq is not a center of anti-American terrorism, international inspectors can insure that Saddam will not obtain weapons of mass destruction, and the Iraqi people would not welcome a U.S. effort to topple the current regime. Writing in the New York Times, author Milton Viorst predicts that if the United States goes into Iraq, Islamists in Pakistan will overthrow the government there and launch a nuclear attack on India. These assertions and predictions may be wrong and far-fetched, but at least Zunes and Viorst are willing to think about the world and about the future.

They are still the exceptions. For most in the peace camp, there is only the fog. The debate is dominated by people who don't seem to know about Iraq and don't care. Their positions are not influenced by the facts of world affairs.

When you get deep enough into the peace camp you find fog about the fog. You find a generation of academic and literary intellectuals who have so devoted themselves to questioning meanings, deconstructing texts, decoding signifiers, and unmasking perspectives, they can't even make an argument anymore. Susan Sontag wrote a New York Times op-ed about metaphors and interpretations and about the meaning and categories of war. It filled up space on the page, but it didn't go anywhere.

Tony Kushner, the fashionably engage playwright and most recently the author of "Homebody/Kabul," contributed to a symposium, also in the Times. Here is the complete text of his essay:

"Change is not the substitution of one static state for another. The meanings of Sept. 11 continue to be fought over, and the prevailing interpretations will direct future action. Colossal tragedy has made available to America the possibility of a new understanding of our place in the world.

"Tragedy's paradox is that it has a creative aspect: new meaning flows to fill the emptiness hollowed out by devastation. Are we dedicated to democratic, egalitarian principles applicable to our own people as well as to the people of the world? And do we understand that "our own people" and "the people of the world" are interdependent? Will we respond with imagination, compassion and courageous intelligence, refusing imperial projects and infinite war?

"The path we will take is not available for prediction. We ought not to believe columnists, think-tank determinists or the cowboy bromides of our president and his dangerous handlers and advisers. We, the citizenry, are still interpreting.

"Our conclusions will then force our reinterpretation. Urgency is appropriate but not an excuse for stupidity or brutality. Our despair over our own powerlessness is simply a lie we are telling ourselves. We are all engaged in shaping the interpretation, and in the ensuing actions, we are all implicated."

Tony! We can hear you but we can't see you! You are lost somewhere in the fog of peace.

You are, though, guilty of being what Mr. Brooks was talking about: parochial. For you, it's all about what happens here.

Sir, you are spot on accurate! You have me pegged perfectly. That is my position and it's set in concrete.

As for your nuclear bomb aniexty, I suggest you move out to the country. Dick Cheney has warned we will/might be nuked. I believe him. I do not believe the govt can protect us from this threat no matter what they do.

"...so libertarian would be closer to the truth. (OK I voted for Bush and I am a Republican - but that doesn't obligate me to support their policies when they do something stupid.)"

No, you're not obligated to support stupid policies.

But, as a libertarian, you are obligated to think through your characterization of them as stupid. How would a libertarian deal with the current threat, as you yourself described it?

"But I thought they [the terrorists] were already here, their sleeper cells are already here, their weapons of mass destruction are already here.
"If those facts are true (and I believe they are, specficially since every govt spokemans who talks about this issue says, "It's not if but when...) then regardless of what we do over there...we will reap the whirlwind."

Let us start afresh. Please, sir, what is the libertarian solution to this dilemma? By all means, let us hear it.

"I suggest you move out into the country" A statement absolutely breathtaking in its inherent self-centeredness, Sir!

I live nowhere near New York City OR the Pentagon (although two men in my Rate were killed there), but that did not stop me from becoming, and staying, enraged at the perpetrators of those heinous acts, and their client states. The attacks were aimed at ALL of us, not just those unfortunates.

Nice job of sweeping 3,000 dead under a rug! What a wonderful way to represent your cause!

"Mr Brooks, it's easy to argue for war when you can't see yourself doing the dying."

Actually, we will likely be doing the dying. Most of Saddam's or the Islamist's countermeasures , be they anthrax dispersals or Scud missiles or suicide bombs, will be directed against civilian targets. In the war to date, there have been more than 3,000 civilian deaths as against a handful of uniformed military casualties. This ratio is likely to continue in any forseeable scenario.

We are noncombatants in the same sense that the people of Dresden, London and Hiroshima were noncombatants.

Mr. Brooks' question remains relevant, because it amounts to this: 'will the danger to my son increase or decrease if the Peace Lobby has it's way?' You seem to argue that it will decrease if nothing is done. John Pilger says, "don't fan the flames". Noam Chomsky warns, 'they will retaliate if we fight back'. Still others have suggested that we overwhelm terrorists with love. Seriously.

I guess that nonresistance or surrender is an intellectual position which should be debated on its merits in a fair and honest way. However, it is not accurate to say that Mr. Brooks is exhorting others to risks he would not run. Anyone could have been on Flight 93. Anyone could have been in the World Trade Center towers. And anyone could be the next suicide bomb or anthrax victim. We have a right to participate in the debate over whether we should live or die. The Peace Lobby has no real right to tell everyone to shut up.

(I really hate to get into it with you, but here goes....)

"I suggest you move out into the country" A statement absolutely breathtaking in its inherent self-centeredness, Sir!

If you hold the position that no matter how good the intentions are, the govt cannot protect our cities from attack (and again I repeat myself The VP and the SecDef have as much said so) than aren't we all really on our own?

If you hold that as true, is not my recommendation to move to the country a logical and rational idea (not to mention the best shot at survival)? Isn't that smarter than staying in the battlezone waiting to get hit?

(And if it makes you feel better, I am sorry those people died, all they were trying to do was earn a living. I am also sorry that our President didn't fire the FBI and CIA directors for their intelligence failure and the fact that there were no intercept jets on duty at Andrews AFB on the day of the attack.)

The Peace Lobby has no real right to tell everyone to shut up.

I agree. If you look at the responses on this thread, you'll see that the only ones who seem to want people to shutup (ck out longcut's remark (lead follow or step aside) are the pro war crowd.

And yes I do think we'd be much safer if we don't go to war because of the escalation potential to WWIII.

I'm glad you're "sorry" those people died. Now how about ENRAGED? Enraged against their killers and their clients?

The ONLY way to ensure that no such outrages, or worse, occur again is to systematically destroy any individual, group, or nation that was complicit in them. This includes Iraq, whose dictator publicly praised the terrorists responsible for 9-11. Those who don't think he was involved are in serious need of some streetsmarts and a reality check.

"I do think we'd be much safer IF WE DIDN'T GO TO WAR because of the escalation potential to WWIII"

See one of my previous posts. We ARE ALREADY AT WAR! It's been "game on" now for over a year, or didn't you notice? And please, don't bust me up with the "WWIII" rhetoric. The Soviet Union no longer exists, and THAT boogyman's been dead for 12 years.

And I did not tell you to "shut up". I said that there are three options: help out, stay out of the way, or help the Bad Guys. Sorry, but no middle ground exists. The fact is that the naysaying, the pacifism, the continual demands for evidence (already provided, more than enough) have the effect, intended or not of helping the enemy. Do you think they do not?

I guess it's okay, though. They didn't attack YOUR town, so why worry? Man, do you REALLY not see this?

"I am not a libertarian because I do not agree with their policies..."

Sorry. Could've sworn you wrote...

"...so libertarian would be closer to the truth."

So, we'll try it one more time:
***********************************
But, as a ~~libertarian~~ Populist, you are (still) obligated to think through your characterization of them as stupid. How would a ~~libertarian~~ Populist deal with the current threat, as you yourself described it?

"But I thought they [the terrorists] were already here, their sleeper cells are already here, their weapons of mass destruction are already here.
"If those facts are true (and I believe they are, specficially since every govt spokemans who talks about this issue says, "It's not if but when...) then regardless of what we do over there...we will reap the whirlwind."

So, let us start afresh, anew. Please, sir, what is the ~~libertarian~~ Populist solution to this dilemma? By all means, let us hear it.

I think you're right. I often tell myself that same thing, but silly me, my New Yawk Dago temper gets the better of me. I really should try to cool off, but this whole thing - the willful, self - centered denial of the brutal reality staring us all in the face, just gets to me.

Have you seen that there's even one nut running around the board claiming that we shouldn't attempt to take away Saddam's weapons because - get THIS - "he's got a right to keep and bear arms, the same as anybody".

Notice how, the closer the attack gets, the more absolutely ridiculous the arguments get (when they're not being repeated ad nauseum, that is)?

"We now have our own Fifth Column to contend with. And I'm NOT talking about Leftists here.

"Before any more damage is done, I say we take note of them, but refuse to respond to them."

It would appear the Birchers and the Brigadiers have allied with the anti-war left. Philosophically, many have -- joining with the anarchists in their anti-globalist fixation (while mistaking Bush and the Republican right for globalists, who actually inhabit the Democrat left).

I am reminded, though, of Spring, 2000. Vicious flame wars were fought on Free Republic between vile tempered self-styled Brigadiers and pompous self-styled Bushies. But a little digging revealed that the people behind some of the screen names on both sides were actually DNC-types trying to drive a wedge between conservatives.

This may be the case once again -- the anti-war left hiding behind a "conservative" coloration. And, in any event, your advice is well taken.

It is amazing, though, how the nay-sayers on this thread (and others like it) have conformed precisely to Brooks' specifications. They are universally unwilling to address the consequences of inaction.

You HAVE to be kidding, Long Cut. I thought I'd seen it all. I'm speechless.

But a little digging revealed that the people behind some of the screen names on both sides were actually DNC-types trying to drive a wedge between conservatives.

Wink! ;-|

Now you're getting it.

All, step back for a second. Remove yourselves temporarily from the debate and observe both openly and honestly. Of all of our small but vocal "anti-war" element, ask yourselves this one simple question:

What do they all have in common?

The answer to this question, above all others, makes the picture become crystal clear.

We are about to embark upon a war-effort through just cause, and we have an extremely important election coming up in a few short weeks. If America's interests are to be served, as many piously preach here, then we (conservatives) realize that the time for unity is right now. I mean right now! But what is with this tearing at our fabric?

Think. Then act accordingly, for both now and in November. The stakes are far too high not to do so.

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The evasions, distractions, and miasma of the anti-war left.