Watching our words
Miller, William Lee
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...
...The kinder, gentler treatment of protesters by Seattle's mayor and police may not be the national norm, but it is a hopeful sign...
...No one can doubt that mental touchstones from Vietnam are with us still...
...Defense Minister Moshe Arens, considered Shamir's top ally, calls Ze'evi's ideas "beyond the pale...
...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...
...In early February, as Iraqi Scud missiles were raining on Tel Aviv, Shamir wrapped up secret negotiations to bring Ze'evi into his cabinet...
...at the time of the oil crises of the seventies the swarthy sinister figure with flowing robes and a hooked nose was rather prominent, but he does not seem to have appeared so far in this war...
...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...
...War damages the fabric of civilization not by the destruction it causes...
...WILLIAM LEE MILLER William Lee Miller is professor of ethics and institutions, and professor of rhetoric at the University of Virginia...
...The deal outraged Israelis of every political hue, but it makes some sense...
...Ze'evi is a former Israeli general with the odd nickname of "Gandhi," bestowed on him years ago for his slight, bespectacled look...
...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...
...Maybe reiterating brutal, brutal, brutal is our way of responding...
...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...
...We have now as a nation admitted our guilt on that point, and made such compensation as is possible at this late date, and perhaps we will not do anything quite as bad as that again...
...That must have a reverse-of-the-coin effect in the segments of the Arab world in which America inherits the hostility to the colonizing and arrogant West, and in which Saddam wants to be seen as Nasser, at least, if not Saladin...
...That insures him against blackmail from any of the half-dozen tiny splinter groups in his shaky alliance...
...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...
...Take the case of Rehavim Ze'evi...
...Throughout this war, and at its end, and as is probable as its consequences for years to come, this once rather innocent and isolated offshoot of European Christendom, the United States of America, will be deeply entangled in an ancient nation, and an ancient Arabic and Islamic civilization, with which we have had relatively little experience and of which we have relatively little knowledge...
...George Bush, for all of his rhetorical ineptitude and pseudo-Texan swagger, has not applied any of his epithets to the protesters...
...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...
...one does not yet hear anything of an opposite tendency...
...In a spectacular exhibit of paranoid nonreasoning at the outset of a war, General DeWitt ("A Jap is a Jap") argued that the fact that there had been no instances whatever of sabotage by Japanese-Americans was a "disturbing and confirming indication that such will occur...
...Thus sociology may give moral restraint a boost...
...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...
...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 are fighting...
...there are Jewish and other college-educated intellectual and liberal supporters of the war, and there are hard hats who oppose it...
...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...
...It helps, to be sure, with respect to potential stereotypes of Arabs, that many are fighting on"our" side...
...John Holliman of the original CNN Baghdad Three went out of his way in the "Larry King Live" interview immediately upon returning to give examples of extraordinary Iraqi generosity...
...not even by the slaughter of human beings, but by stimulating hatred and dishonesty...
...Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...CNN may have won the first days of the war, but CSpan won the peace that preceded it...
...He is no pacifist, though...
...It brings Shamir's ruling coalition up from 64 to 66 seats in the 120-seat Knesset...
...Perhaps the demonizing of Saddam has soaked up the passions that might have been spread...
...THE GULF WAR DOVES & HAWKS TOGETHER AMERICAN JEWS, ISRAEL & THE WAR ince the outbreak of the Gulf crisis, many Jews in America and Israel have found themselves isolated, lonely, out of sorts, and in bed with strange partners...
...if he is so bad for the Great Satan, then he must be so good for us...
...When more are killed, maybe that will change...
...thus, again, social reality gives morality a boost...
...We hear about numbers of newly born children among Palestinians in Jordan, and in Egypt, who have been given the name Saddam...
...he has not dealt with the opposition to the war with the neurotic hostility displayed by Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson...
...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...
...We shall all be dead in less than a hundred years...
...Some said Shamir needs Ze'evi's military expertise, since most top ex-generals belong to the Labor opposition...
...But on the other hand, President Bush has been careful to say explicitly that the Iraqi people are not our enemy...
...he wrote...
...The war is also about America...
...Insiders said it was an arcane power grab launched by 22February1991:123...
...He was first elected to Israel's parliament in 1988 as head of a tiny party that seeks the mass "transfer" of Palestinians to nearby Arab states...
...But by hating him, by inventing lies about him and bringing up your children to believe them, by clamoring for unjust peace terms that make further wars inevitable, you are striking not at one perishable generation but at humanity itself...
...It is well that at this early point at least we do not seem to have wheeled into place any very deep-going collective stereotypes...
...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...
...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...
...And Congress on this occasion set the pitch for our shared national debate at a high level of seriousness and mutual respect...
...Perhaps Orwell was a little too cavalier, for argumentative effect, about mere death and destruction, but his larger point was surely correct, and applies to us now...
...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...
...The truly evil thing is to act in such a way that peaceful life becomes impossible...
...Even that colorfully extravagant language of invective from Saddam, about the infidel invaders walking barefoot through sands flowing with rivers of their own blood in the mother of battles, and the like, which clearly comes from a radically different rhetorical culture than our own----certainly a different one from George Bush, with his extremely limited vocabulary and imaginative range--has not yet provoked much, as it were, rhetorical retaliation...
...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...
...During World War II, the embarrassing anti-German and antiGerman-American excesses of World War I were pretty much avoided, but in their place came not only the heavily racial stereotyping of the Japanese enemy but America's worst conduct ever on this point, the forcible relocation of our fellow citizens of Japanese ancestry, for no crime whatever...
...In Israel, cynics were suggesting all manner of motives for the "Gandhi" putsch...
...His platform repels even hawks in Yitzhak Shamir's right-wing Likud party...
...That meant not only that Congress was at its best, but that it was seen in the best way to see it...
...So far there have not been any Japs or Gooks or Huns, any equivalent of the widespread mistreatment of people with German names, the eliminating of German from schools, or the refusal to eat sauerkraut (or to eat it as "victory cabbage") of World War I. President Bush has certainly poured obloquy upon invective upon abuse on Saddam Hussein individually far too much, as many have said...
...There certainly are heavy Arab stereotypes in popular culture...
...When late in World War II a correspondent wrote to George Orwell that although "the Hun has got to be beaten," he objected to the barbarous methods being used--saturation bombing ---Orwell gave the striking response, that calling people, "Huns," was worse than bombing them...
...By shooting at your enemy," he wrote, "you are not in the deepest sense wronging him...
Vol. 118 • February 1991 • No. 4
