Necessary Anger: The War and the Republic
Bromwich, David
THE MOST FATEFUL and clever decision made by George W. Bush's administration in the days just after September 11, 2001, was the decision to call the American response to terrorism a war. So...
...The Demo crats, or whatever opposition does constitute itself in the next few months, will have to think hard about this nation and about the world...
...A disaster...
...The legitimation of torture was a lively topic whose finer points some lawyers were drawn to debate last year with suitable realism and expertise...
...A degree of skepticism, it is true, still greets the more outlandish proposals from the attorney general...
...The first grid of antisedition laws, the Patriot Act abridging civil liberties for the sake of security, was passed by Congress with only a semblance of debate, just six weeks after the bombings, at the time of the anthrax scare...
...This was responsible reporting compared to CNN, which ran a brief montage of the worldwide protests under the caption, "Anti-war protests delight Saddam...
...And then the clampdown—because it is a war...
...Police action would not answer for the shootingonsight of looters in a conquered city where the invading army has found itself overstretched...
...The president lands on an aircraft carrier in his airman's suit—a hefty display of military swagger disdained by Eisenhower and Kennedy, presidents who actually fought in wars—and the applause was predictable...
...Whether or not the United States is attacked, the potency of this mood will not abate much in the year and a half before the next election...
...A party of opposition cannot simply resolve to wait for public opinion to come to its senses...
...They have shown immense ability in deploying the fear that has been the strongest current of feeling in this country for the past twenty months...
...Most of the rest of the world believed the war was wrong...
...A second Patriot Act, drafted by the office of the attorney general though not yet enacted into law, contains some totalitarian elements...
...A A ND WHAT of the Democrats...
...But the skepticism seldom warms into controversy...
...International selfdefense would not immediately suggest public discussion of the torture of prisoners...
...Such a moment does not come unprompted, and while we are waiting, the national mood continues to be debauched, and the spirit of liberty weakened, every day, by an essentially revolutionary policy that looks to exchange the virtue of a free people for the domination of an empire...
...and not, this time, be stunned into silence by the watchwords of demagogues: critical period, national mood, real emergency, unified spirit, comfort level...
...but a reader of American papers might be pardoned for not knowing this...
...We're about to go to war...
...So much becomes possible in a war that would hardly bear to be thought of under any other name...
...The string of bombings in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Pakistan, which the conquest of Iraq did nothing to deter, may forebode a domestic incident about which the administration can say, "This is what we warned you about...
...His first choice of a man beyond reproach to head the commission was Henry Kissinger—Kissinger, whose political career 8 n DISSENT / S u mmer 2003 has made his name a byword for secrecy, connivance, flattery of the powerful, and indifference to the standards of democratic probity...
...And that is a terrible sign...
...But the time is rich in prodigies...
...Not that all of these policies have been put into practice yet...
...Beside it, every other thought shrinks to a parenthesis...
...National security would not justify a design for civilian spying on civilian neighbors...
...If the opposition party allows this to pass, future wars, reclassified as the battles of one war, will be fought for the sake of victories that justify every deception retroactively...
...In shunning those pictures, the American mass media, acting as one, opted for a policy of "restraint...
...They will have to look hard at the world, and at this counDISSENT / Summer 2003 n 9 COMMENTS & OPINIONS try, and tell us what they think...
...This was too much even for a tractable public...
...Many things that would have shocked us a year ago no longer shock us today...
...As I write these words, the American search teams are getting ready to leave Iraq without having found the weapons of mass destruction that were the final justifications for fighting the war...
...Other exertions of restraint have affected the reporting of domestic news...
...Reluctantly, the president agreed to cooperate with a commission of inquiry to discover how the warnings came to be ignored...
...and if they want a hearing, they will have to think out loud...
...Those letters remain an unsolved crime about which Americans have not been encouraged to feel much urgency...
...From half a year of proselytizing on the necessity of preemptive war, most Americans came to favor the war in Iraq, provided the fighting could be short and the losses low...
...That's pretty strong language, isn't it...
...Each new measure requires for its acceptance a new debasement of public morale, and rarely in recent months have the public or our lawmakers mounted a sustained challenge...
...DAVID BROMWICH is an editor of Dissent and professor of English at Yale University...
...The exemplary killing of Iraqi looters by American soldiers was the fastest to be ditched of all these ideas, but its advocate, Paul Bremer, is still in office as I write at the end of May, and its time may come again...
...DISSENT / Summer 2003 n 7 COMMENTS & OPINIONS That we were already at war, that we had been so before we recognized the fact, that we still would be in the future, even when events did not show the face of war—this presumption gave an immense advantage to the administration in the lead-up to the congressional debate that authorized the president's design for preemptive war in Iraq...
...But oddly, an even greater distance separates American from European papers...
...Nor is it likely to fade entirely in six years, or in sixteen...
...Meanwhile, the Patriot Act gave legal countenance to the roundup for questioning of thousands of Arab nationals and the detention or deportation of many others...
...Now a rapid victory in the war, with the defeat of a tyrant internally strong but externally weak, is being offered to the American people as the end that justifies the means...
...Consider the sequence of events we have witnessed in the past twenty months...
...Jeff Greenfield, the CNN commentator, ventured once on the terrain of mild dissidence, saying that America's diplomacy had been a disaster...
...You will not find much in the newspapers about the second Patriot Act, and a follower of the networks and cable television is almost totally in the dark...
...And as we wait and watch, we are being hardened for the extreme measures that another calamity may conjure up...
...replied CNN's anchor Paula Zahn...
...War gives the meaning and justification to every sentence uttered by this administration...
...The budget, foreign policy, the environment, our links to future generations and to the portion of humanity who are neither terrorists nor Americans—these considerations can be made to vanish when our minds are engorged by the thought of war...
...THE MOST FATEFUL and clever decision made by George W. Bush's administration in the days just after September 11, 2001, was the decision to call the American response to terrorism a war...
...And yet, the clearance of all other issues was determined by a choice of the administration, a choice that seems irresistible only because it has not been resisted...
...This means that the Democrats, including John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, who voted to authorize the war, were hoodwinked by their president...
...On the news interview programs, through the months of preparation and again in the weeks of the war itself, we were treated to a redundant parade of Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Rice...
...Considered as a party of opposition, they have been nerveless, listless, dead...
...The idea lies like a weight on the mind: a burden not to be displaced by a quip, a cunning aside, a closely argued logical proof...
...it is held back by a mixture of fear and self-distrust...
...I only meant in the context of this moment...
...Soon after September 11, the public learned that the president and his advisers in the summer of 2001 had heard and done little to respond to warnings of a coming attack...
...We had been told, after all, by the vice president only days after the World Trade Center bombings, that this was a war some of whose battles would be hidden, some conducted in open view, the whole always progressing of course, but the mass of available knowledge always overshadowed by the necessarily larger mass of secrets...
...The speech writers for Bush and the strategists and publicists of the Cheney circle have realized, what the Democratic Party does not yet see, that fear is an emotion that changes every political reckoning...
...IC) n DISSENT / Summer 2003...
...Sometimes the assigned reason will be true, sometimes not, but the force to act on the reasons is in the hands of skillful jugglers, and in the face of that staring fact nothing can save the Democrats but the triumph of principle...
...Two of the recipients of anthrax letters—how often is this remembered, and by how many?— were Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, early and articulate critics of the administration's response to the bombings...
...but since the withdrawal of Kissinger, almost nothing has been heard from the commission...
...The charge would stand whether or not the citizen knew of or had in any way abetted a terrorist act...
...Yet they show no outrage— nothing like the dignified acceptance of the task of criti cism that one could see in senators William Fulbright and Frank Church when evidence emerged that the documentary basis for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution had been forged...
...A great distance now separates the respectable American papers from the broadcast media...
...But let us say what must be said for a politically gifted administration...
...T T HE ACLU keeps watch on such matters, and so do Nat Hentoff and a few others...
...This amounted to a regime of self-censorship of a kind unknown in the coverage of the Vietnam War...
...The spying program was actively promoted by the Bush administration, but, under a strenuous barrage of criticism and ridicule, it went tactically dormant and is now pursued in the secrecy that befits it...
...Oh," said Greenfield, relieved to be reined in...
...The fact is that this president, and his secretaries of state and defense, and the media-friendly Cheney circle all concurred in presenting their cooked intelligence estimates as a sure thing...
...It was a conscious editorial choice by the New York Times, for example, to print no aerial photograph suggesting the size of the February 15 anti-war protest in New York City...
...The tranquilizing words will continue to spin, but none of those words is worth the freedom of a single American stripped of his rights and reclassified as a hostile alien...
...The Times chose instead to show a couple of hundred marchers at an intersection...
...One provision would allow the government to delete from American citizenship and reclassify as a "hostile alien" any contributor to any group designated in secret by the government as a terrorist organization...
...A libertarian critic in an offprime hour was heard to ask the awkward question, "If it were state television, what would be different...
...The war, Paula, is going to be a great tidal wave that will make our memory of the diplomatic part seem like tiny footprints in the sand...
...The names and reasons assigned for war will change—projection of American power in the Middle East, the cause of democracy throughout the world, control of nuclear weapons, the demolition of one more training camp—we have heard them all in varying order, and we will hear them again...
...This was the context in which many Americans and perhaps the majority in Congress understood Iraq as a sequel to Afghanistan...
...Readers of the European and Asian press also saw photographs, widely distributed in every COMMENTS & OPINIONS country except the United States, of children horribly maimed or horribly killed by American surgical-strike missiles that went astray or were wrongly targeted...
...Where was the laughter...
Vol. 50 • July 2003 • No. 3
