A war about America
Weigel, George
THE GULF WAR A WAR ABOUT AMEIUCA WANTED: A GENUINE PEACE MOVEMENT ~ orgive what may seem an impertinence: but this proponent of the just war tradition, who supports the use of armed force...
...This time leading doves are reiterating the careful distinction between the soldiers, airmen, sailors, and marines, whom they respect and, as the word has it "support," and the policy, which they do not support...
...Oh, that's easy," she said...
...It would have unambiguously condemned Iraqi aggression, telling Saddam Hussein that he could not play the Vietnam card in American domestic politics...
...And the opponents of the war, for their part, have not yet shown much of an inclination to demonize George Bush--at least not with the passionate intensity directed toward Johnson and Nixon...
...George Bush, for all of his rhetorical ineptitude and pseudo-Texan swagger, has not applied any of his epithets to the protesters...
...What would a peace movement worthy of the name say about winning the peace, after we have won the war...
...War Is Peace'----George Orwell, 1984...
...Finally, it would straighten itself out on the subject of America...
...Has there ever been so reluctant a superpower as the United States...
...We compared signs that caught our imagination: "Peace is Patriotic...
...Approximately two hundred thousand people congregated in the cold dry air...
...Government at Maine-Endwell Senior High School in EndweU, New York, for the last thirty years...
...It asked: 'Why do we always have money for war?' My only response was: "Call 202-456-1111 and ask for George...
...In the unedited televising of whole sessions, without the terrible constraints of hype and time and commerce, one can discern a way that the new visual communication system can help, rather than harm, republican government...
...War Is Peace'---George Bush, 1991...
...For years I've been asking the same question that I saw painted on a plain cardboard poster...
...But to argue, as one demonstrator in Washington did in January, that the United States is "a much greater danger to the Middle 22 February 1991:121 East" than Saddam Hussein is a position so desperately wrongheaded that it can only derive, not from a thoughtful calculus of policy failures (and successes), but from the deep-set alienation that has been both the distinguishing hallmark of the "new movement," and its temporal and ideological linkage with "Vietnam...
...establishment of a fictional moral equivalence between the Iraqi invasion, occupation, and plunder of Kuwait and Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories...
...The kinder, gentler treatment of protesters by Seattle's mayor and police may not be the national norm, but it is a hopeful sign...
...The war is also about America...
...policy toward Iraq are well known...
...he has not dealt with the opposition to the war with the neurotic hostility displayed by Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson...
...It would develop the concept of "peace for peace" as an alternative to the stale formula of "land for peace...
...THE GULF WAR A WAR ABOUT AMEIUCA WANTED: A GENUINE PEACE MOVEMENT ~ orgive what may seem an impertinence: but this proponent of the just war tradition, who supports the use of armed force against Iraq, also believes that America needs a genuine peace movement --which is precisely not what has been in the streets (and in many ecclesiastical venues) these past months...
...For Congress to be linked to the public in that way--by total exposure--instead of by soundbites, interviews in the hall, and third-person reports, meant that the public could genuinely be caught up in the debate itself, agreeing with some congresspersons, and disagreeing with others, joining in the argument, instead of being placed at an outsider's distance from the whole institution...
...Not Testosterone...
...GEORGE WEIGEL George Weigel is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, and the author ofTranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace (Oxford...
...there are Jewish and other college-educated intellectual and liberal supporters of the war, and there are hard hats who oppose it...
...It would say, again with Lewis, that the development of a more humane political culture in the Arab Middle East is "not beyond the creative powers of a great and gifted people whose forebears wrote one of the most brilliant chapters in the history of civilization...
...Has there ever been a great power, at the pinnacle of world politics and economics, that put itself through such rigors of self-examination before committing its citizens to battle...
...It was televised in all its unedited, uncut, unproduced, uninterpreted, uninterrupted garrulity, to all of those "households" with cable TV and CSpan, some 60 percent of the nation...
...When more are killed, maybe that will change...
...That meant not only that Congress was at its best, but that it was seen in the best way to see it...
...It would have avoided Saddam Hussein's strategic trap: the l When President George Bush and Congress decided to commit American blood and dollars to another far-off venture, Maureen called to say that she was going to Washington January 26 to demonstrate against the war...
...foreign policy is, of course, neither omniscient, omnicompetent, nor fully satisfactory from a moral perspective...
...No one can doubt that mental touchstones from Vietnam are with us still...
...Thus sociology may give moral restraint a boost...
...It would have avoided excuse-making for the embrace of Saddam Hussein by the PLO...
...It proved to be a poor plan...
...And Congress on this occasion set the pitch for our shared national debate at a high level of seriousness and mutual respect...
...It helps that, except for the worrisome difference of opinion between blacks and whites, this time opinions about the war do not fit neatly into pre-existing fault lines in the society...
...Why do we need it...
...In times of strong contending passions--when the mass on each side has a tendency to turn into a cultural lynch mob, often lynching the wrong persons--sound conduct in high politics includes explicitly and repeatedly and publicly insisting on scrupulous distinctions, including very elementary ones...
...The congressional purse strings seem to be in the Oval Office...
...Gulf policy as one between the morally concerned and the morally obtuse, but rather as a complex democratic deliberation in which the central virtue is prudence...
...Support the Troops...
...It would bring its concern for nonviolence to bear on the central historic tragedy of the post-World War II Arab world: that it has too often been characterized by political violence, within Arab countries and between Arab countries...
...We were still exhilarated by the massive protest against the ugliness of our nation's commitment to death and destruction...
...It would understand with Bernard Lewis that "the only true solution [for the Arabs]...is to free themselves from the variegated tyrannies that oppress and degrade them, and to create new regimes, more respectful of human and political rights, their own and other people's...
...We planned to meet on the Mall between the Capitol and the Washington Monument...
...THE GULF WAR WATCHING OUR WOIRDS SO FAR, A MORE CIVIL TONE e shape the future after a war not only by the way we fight it on the battlefield, and end it at the peace table, but also by the way we interpret it in the public forum...
...It would have linked legitimate concerns about America's dependence on foreign oil to an acknowledgment that the countries that would be hit hardest by Saddam's control over this basic commodity would be the poor countries of the third world and the emerging democracies of Central and Eastern Europe...
...JACK GILROY Jack Gilroy has taught Asian Studies and U.S...
...It would have focused its disarmament concerns on the Iraqi dictator's relentless build-up of weapons of mass destruction, and demanded their dismantling under international inspection...
...It would not have posed the moral argument on U.S...
...It would call on the Arab countries threatened by Saddam Hussein to make a genuine breakthrough to a more stable future by ending their state of war with Israel and by acknowledging, publicly, Israel's permanence in the region...
...Intelligence...
...Leaders of the opposition to the war have been careful, moreover, to avoid one of the terrible moral confusions of the Vietnam era: the spilling over of the disapproval of the war, with grotesque unfairness, somehow onto the members of the armed services who fought in it...
...Having done this, it would also challenge the government of Israel to a more imaginative approach to its security problems and a more supple diplomacy...
...What would a peace movement worthy of the name have been teaching since the war began on August 2, 1990...
...In the second place, one does not yet discern much of a public inclination to turn the collective enemy (as distinguished from the individual leader) into a stereotyped object of hatred...
...It turns out to have been fortunate, moreover, .if this war had to come, that it was preceded by a threeday debate in Congress that was not only sober and civil and mutually respectful (as everyone, including, significantly, President Bush, remarked) but also televised...
...Bring Them Home, Alive...
...It would, in other words, refuse to engage in that racism that treats the Arabs as fractious children who really don't know any better, and thus have to be appeased...
...a genuine peace movement would urge that, in thinking through the postwar politics of the Middle East, we learn from some profound errors of analysis and judgment...
...Because the alternative is an antiAmerican-power movement that will, like its Vietnam-era antecedent, debase the coinage of political discourse for years to come...
...We never met, but the following day we talked on the phone and shared observations and feelings...
...In the first place the debate in this country over the war has been conducted, so far, without poisoning the wells from which future generations must drink...
...some see the whole war-ravaged century shaped by the cultural as well as the political and military debris from World War I. It may be very early yet to say it, and the atmosphere could change in a moment, but several weeks into this war one may note, with hope, a limited and fragile improvement over those that have preceded it...
...The failures of U.S...
...Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today...
...Despite the FBI interviews, and the uneasiness and bad experiences of some Arab-Americans, there does not yet seem to be much public steam in any collective prejudice, either against our fellow citizensIraqi-Americans, or more generally Arab-Americans, or American Muslims-----or against the citizens of the nation a long way from us in geography and culture against whom we 122: Commonweal...
...What," 1 asked, "did you see that was an important message to fit your work activities...
...It would have refused to indulge in ritualized corporationbashing, and it would have disciplined itself to reject slogans like, "We won't fight for Texaco...
...CNN may have won the first days of the war, but CSpan won the peace that preceded it...
...Wars leave not only rows of graves and monuments and shells of buildings and cratered fields, but also scars in the culture and pictures in our heads...
Vol. 118 • February 1991 • No. 4
