A Pilgrim’s Digression

In The Son of the Morning Star, I read the following, Connell’s summation of the response to the massacre of Custer’s 7th Cavalry.

Reaction throughout the country was no different in 1876 than it is today upon receipt of similar news: shock, followed by disbelief, fury, and a slavering appetite for revenge. The artist DeCost Smith commented some years afterward that … Sitting Bull’s people were right and the United States government wrong. It was the government, not the Sioux, who broke treaties. There was gold in the Black Hills and the Northern Pacific Railroad must be built. Savages could not stand in the path of civilization. “It was the old argument of expediency; the shortest way out of a bad bargain. ‘Barbarism,’ and later ‘fanaticism,’ were traditional foes of ‘civilization.’ It was the detestable war cry of the Crusaders revamped for nineteenth-century needs, “Dieu le veut. Guerre aux infidéles!’ …”

Just as armchair patriots have overreacted to the events of 9/11, placing the dead bodies of some 3000 people on a bier for consumption by the fires of revenge, indignation, and nationalism, I also think armchair historians have ovvereacted in assuming that 9/11 was so horrific, we must have done something to deserve it. Connell’s words seem almost prescient: “shock, followed by disbelief, fury, and a slavering appetite for revenge …”

He goes on to narrate how schoolboys in Iowa took an oath on their McGuffey readers to kill Sitting Bull dead should they ever see him. Years later, one of these boys had the chance to do just that when he met the famous Chief when he was travelling as part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Apparently, they only shook hands and Sitting Bull signed his autograph for the potential assassin. I think that shows that the immediate reaction to a horrific event often corrupts any attempt to truly understand the event. In the heat of the moment we might vow eternal revenge, but time cools passion considerably, no matter how many politicans, Generals, talk-show hosts, and news anchors try to shovel on the coals and keep the fires blazing. Only through the less distorted lens of time do we begin to see the event as it truly happened.

On the one hand, I can see how our interference in Middle East affairs led to September 11, 2001. Our possession of nuclear weapons while seeking to prevent any other countries from obtaining such weapons is strategic at best, and at worst, hypocritical since it allows us to dominate the world stage uninhibited by fear of retaliation. On the other hand, I support a policy that forcefully keeps nuclear weapons out of the hands of dictatorships like North Korea and Iraq. Using force in Iraq was expedient, or as Connell puts it by quoting someone else, “the shortest way out of a bad bargain.”

I should back up … seen as merely one more engagement in the war on terrorism, using force in Iraq was expedient. We rid ourselves of a gadfly who had been poking us in the eye for twelve years and we eliminated a terrorist safe haven all in one fatal blow. Was it wrong or an overreaction to 9/11? I don’t think so at this point; I can’t admit that yet. I can see the connections between our reaction to 9/11 and 19th century reaction to the Little Bighorn massacre, but I can also logically disconnect those connections. Only about 239 soldiers died at the Little Bighorn whereas 3000 civilians died on 9/11. In 1876, we attacked the Indians who were merely defending themselves against an incursion by the 7th Cavalry, but on 9/11, we were ourselves attacked by terrorists. It is hard to say that we have overreacted to 9/11.

It is a mental challenge to get my mind around the fact of 3000 civilian deaths in one day; I cannot just write off 9/11 as the fault of American middle east policy, or reduce 9/11 to insignificance by citing the supposed hundreds of thousands of casualties due to U.N. sanctions against Iraq. Obviously I am not a 100% die-hard Pentagon apologist swearing on my McGuffey reader that I will kill Osama or Saddam should I ever meet either one of them. Neither can I criticize how Bush has prosecuted the war so far. 9/11 is going to be like a really itchy burn scar that we pick at for years to come; it will never heal. I only hope I live long enough tor ead the history books that help put it all in context. I’d like to understand what happened that day and why it happened, and I’d like to know whether our President has responded correctly to the challenge set forth on that lovely, sunny day in September. I regret that I haven’t the mental acuity to discern the truth all by myself, but that’s the way it goes. Only time and historians will sort things out for us.

In a Time article titled Unfinished Business, about the three challenges facing the “new” Iraq (as CNN insists on calling it), Donald Rumsfeld had this to say about the chances of finding WMDs in Iraq:

“Things were mobile. Things were underground. Things were in tunnels. Things were hidden. Things were dispersed. Now, are we going to find that? No, it’s a big country,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week. “The inspectors didn’t find anything, and I doubt that we will—what we will do is find the people who will tell us.”

“The inspectors didn’t find anything, and I doubt that we will …” I can picture Rumsfeld before the cameras stating this in his matter-of-factly, impatient way, as if to say “Why are you bothering me with these silly questions?”

The next step is for Rummy and company to begin stating the war was never just about WMDs, just as it was never only about Saddam Hussein. I don’t know how other Americans will feel about it, but the fact that we haven’t found any biological or chemical weapons in Iraq—not even a single vial of anthrax—doesn’t sit too well with me. For me, one of the moments that convinced me we needed to undertake this war was Colin Powell’s speech before the U.N. outlining the extent to which Iraq had amassed weapons of mass destruction. Powell laid everything on the line in that speech—his credibility as well as the credibility of the administration. And I trusted him. I am beginning to wonder if my trust was misplaced. I am not yet ready to admit that much; I do think it’s too soon to make a judgement one way or the other, even though Powell made it sound as if we knew the street address where these weapons were housed and Blix and his inspectors were either blind or willfully blind. That said, if the founding premise of the war turns out to have been a lie, God help George Bush in 2004.

The New York Times has an article in today’s on-line edition titled French Threaten Expulsions After Islam Radical Victory. It seems that a preponderance of fundamentalists won election to the country’s council of Muslims, and France is threatening to expell any Muslim religious leader deemed “extremist.” The Interior Minister who is threatening the deportations does not provide any definition of “extremist.” However, I especially enjoyed his comment that:

“It is precisely because we recognize the right of Islam to sit at the table of the republic that we will not accept any deviation,” Mr. Sarkozy said. “Any prayer leader whose views run contrary to the values of the republic will be expelled.”

It’s as if France invited Muslims to the restaurant of democracy, then said, “You can sit at the table, but we’ll do the ordering around here.” Yet Americans are intolerant in the eyes of the French.

I am under no illusions about the war just finished. In comparing it with wars past, it seems far more similar to the Mexican war of 1848 and the Spanish-American War of 1898, than it does to the war everyone seems to want to compare it with, World War II. I think if you look at human history, World War II is an anomaly, in that it was a war justified almost solely on ethical grounds. Wars are not usually packaged so simply.

In the present case of Gulf War II, or whatever it will finally be called in the history books, I decided early on that the political motivations for the war—pre-empting the threat of terrorists obtaining weapons of mass destruction, deposing a despot, building the first democracy in the Middle East—were more likely justifiable pretexts for war than not. However, I have not denied the imperialist overtones of the war. Wars are never all good or all bad, and you have to weigh the good that might come from the war against the bad; I think the good outweighed the bad in a war against Iraq.

That said, I worry about what kind of peace we are forging. As usual, the politicians predict that Americans have no stomach for occupation (just as they supposedly had no stomach for large numbers of casualties), and so the politicians will start sweating the 2004 election if we find ourselves still in Iraq after eighteen months. Yet it took seven years before we left Japan and Germany; can we honestly expect to build democracy in Iraq in eighteen months? We are going to have to, it seems, given the modern political practice of premature evacuation.

The charge of imperialism bothers me, though, and I think it is because it is wholly grounded in fact. In response to questions about our intentions for Syria yesterday, Powell said that we had no plan to impose democracy on anyone else. He said “impose” with an almost sarcastic accent. I think Powell realizes the irony of what we are doing, whereas others do not: you really cannot impose democracy; democracy by its nature is a chosen form of government. The Iraqi leaders who met yesterday seem to have made that choice; whether they represent the population as a whole remains to be seen. This is a risky venture we have embarked upon, and it is an imperialist venture, but it is still a venture I believe in. I read in one news story yesterday that our threats toward Syria seem to exemplify the old Soviet motto, “Our security is your insecurity,” and there does seem to be this desire to keep other nations on edge about our motives and intentions. Therein lies the primary political motivation for the war with Iraq. No one now doubts the big stick we carry, or our willingness to use it. The “speak softly” part of Roosevelt’s maxim has largely been abandoned as inappropriate for the present situation.

I have been re-reading one of my favorite books of history, Evan Connell’s Son of the Morning Star. The subject of the book is Custer’s last stand, but Connell fills in the context of the story with details about the origins of the Plains Indians Wars of the 1870’s, as well as biographical details about the major characters in the story. Our motivations for making war against the Sioux and other tribes of the plains were, to say the least, disingenuous. On the one hand, we blamed them for not keeping treaties which we ourselves broke. This was our stated reason for war. The treaties we wanted them to keep were designed not for the benefit of the Indians, but to keep them in one place so they could be monitored, controlled, and civilized. As Chief Joseph said, much later, what man would willingly surrender his freedom to go where he pleases in order to live life in a coop? Therein lies all the unstated reasons why we made war on the Indians: their freedom was our insecurity. It broke the orderly system we were trying to establish and it challenged the values we held. If the Indians rejected our civilization, our culture, our values (all of which were clearly superior to the Indians’) then this only proved their savagery and their deserving of the destruction meted out upon them. It’s a story any student of American history knows well, but Connell casts it in the light of a kind of imperialism. It can be called nothing else. And what struck me most is how similar the motivations for that war are to the present war.

There is an element of condescension in our attitude towards the Middle East that is familiar to any student of the relationship between whites and Indians in the nineteenth century. The peoples of the Middle East are regarded as little more than savages, their governments are inferior, despotic even, their treatment of others, women especially, little short of barbaric. They strap bombs to their bodies and blow themselves up on crowded buses–incomprehensible!

The time has now fully arrived for teaching these barbarians … how to appreciate the power, the justice, the generosity, and magnanimity of the United States.

The above quote was spoken not by Donald Rumsfeld, but by an Army Inspector reporting on conditions in the Black Hills, after an Army Lieutenant and his men were killed by Sioux when he came to arrest an Indian for killing a lame ox belonging to the Army that had wandered into their camp. What we don’t understand, or that which interferes with our “system” of doing things, we usually destroy, and we form all manner of perfectly logical reasons for doing so. Connell notes that at the time we were “pacifying” the Indians,

In Canada, things were different. The Hudson’s Bay Company, part of a smoothly functioning empire, understood how to live with Indians whereas the newly arrived, impatient, disorganized, aggressive Americans did not.

“… impatient, disorganized, aggressive Americans …”; the words seem as apt today as in 1984, when Connell wrote them to describe the Americans of 1876. While the British waited two weeks outside Basra before slowly inching their way into the city, the Americans grew fidgety if they stopped one day. There was no pause at all before Marines entered Baghdad. Whether we should have waited or not, I am not going to try to guess after the fact; I am merely observing that we did not wait, and any time we did pause, whether because of sandstorm, or because the Fedayeen Saddam were harassing our flanks, this pause was deemed a setback. Meanwhile, the fighting has long since stopped in Baghdad, but the people still have no electricity and are complaining about the collapse of infrastructure and the Americans’ slowness in bringing that infrastructure back online. Our past experiences with imperialism do not bode well for the present enterprise. I hope that we have learned from our history, but I doubt it.

I read an article in the New York Times yesterday, titled A Couple Seperated By War While United in Their Fears, about another West Virginia soldier, a Corporal Thompson from Kanawha County, stationed in Iraq. Stories like this interest me because so often the people fighting the war are people whom I could well have known, and in many ways do know—they come from poor and middle class families and joined the military out of a hope for a better life, rather than strictly out of patriotism. The Times reporter wrote that “Corporal Thompson says he finds Iraq alien and is amazed that anyone would fight for it.” This lack of understanding, though I sympathize with it, seems to forebode problems ahead.

Look, here comes a man in a chariot with a team of horses. And he gives back the answer: ‘Babylon has fallen, has fallen! All the images of its gods lie shattered on the ground!’

Isaiah 21:9

Today’s news is preoccupied with the lighter side of war. A Time article titled Inside the Secret World concerns the discovery of Saddam’s eldest son’s house. Uday Hussein apparently lived like an American-style playboy. The picture in Time shows a grinning female American soldier, in full military garb including helmet and M-16, stretched on one of Uday’s beds like a mischievous version of Manet’s Olympe. Another article from CNN, titled Saddam’s ‘Love Shack’ Discovered, details how Saddam apparently still lived in the 1960’s. His walls were decorated with lurid fantasy paintings of naked women and snakes and heroic male warriors that could have come from the covers of the most pulpy of our pulp science fiction novels. There were mirrors on the ceiling and shag carpet on the floor. Meanwhile, Uday printed hundreds of pornographic images from the internet and plastered his walls with them. American soldiers also found his personal supply of heroin, as well as an HIV testing kit. Since taking up residence in Uday’s home, Marines have been feeding live sheep to his menagerie of exotic cats. Some of Uday’s personal photographs have made their way onto the news websites … Uday in shorts, tee-shirt, and sunglasses, wearing what looks like a cowboy hat; he is surrounded by friends in summer garb, such as shorts and Hawaiian shirts. They are all laughing. Uday in a leather jacket sitting on a purple motorcycle with a woman on the back; Uday in tuxedo standing in front of a microphone accompanied by another man with a tambourine (did he moonlight as a wedding singer?). These stories humanize people we have come to regard as monsters. No doubt they were monsters. However, there are a couple reasons these stories only appear after the war is over. One may be that information about the personal lives of these men was not widely known before they were killed in war. That is plausible, though one suspects the government probably knew more than they ever released before: Uday’s email address was udaysaddamhussein@yahoo.com, so he didn’t exactly try to assume an alias on-line. The main reason why such information is only coming forth now, though, is that it is more difficult to hate someone who hangs on his wall an airbrushed painting of a busty blonde, with a green demon behind her, pointing a finger at a mythic hero. Such details complicate the story and make Saddam seem more like the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons than the Butcher of Baghdad.

All these stories of the personal lives of dictators lead me to think that our soldiers are probably going to do some looting of their own, and before long we will begin to see the personal effects of these men come up for auction on eBay. Supposedly they found Saddam’s boxer shorts in his townhouse. I can see it now: “1 pair Saddam’s boxers, sz L. Pee stained! NR.”

From page 2 of a NY Times story, Continued Air Assaults on City Follow Attempt to Kill Hussein:

An Associated Press reporter, Ellen Knickmeyer, traveling with the marines, said civilians approaching their positions were given two, sometimes three or four warning shots. But in one instance, she said an old man with a cane approaching Marine gunners appeared disoriented, and when he continued forward, he was killed.

“They shouldn’t be out; they got the memo,” she quoted a Marine rifleman as saying, apparently referring to warnings to Iraqi civilians.

They got the memo? What does this soldier think this is, an inter-office volleyball competition?

The New York Times is reporting that during the fighting in the night for the Republican Guard Palace in Baghdad, suicide bombers threw themselves against tanks. That must have been absolutely gruesome and chilling. It served no practical purpose, of course, though I suppose the real goal of the bombers was simply to martyr themselves.

I find it fascinating how throughout this war the media has kept up a din of negativism about how swiftly we are moving. Just last week the media was reporting that the Army would stop once it reached the outskirts of Baghdad and wait for reinforcements that would come in mid-April. There has been no pause. The stories I am reading in the Times and Post this morning convey a sense that the city is being systematically demolished. Civilian casualties are high, as are military casualties on the Iraqi side. I felt sickened by an article in the Washington Post reporting on the conditions in the hospitals. Yet this is the way it had to be. Grant and Sherman would have approved. The bloodier and more terrible a war, the quicker it is over. I’m glad the military didn’t pause; they have to finish this now. This war will be over soon, I think.

Much of the news today is about what happens after the war is over. Bush and Blair are meeting in Northern Ireland to discuss that very prospect, and the conference is being compared to the Yalta summit after World War II. All this leads me to ask, shouldn’t they already have had a post-war plan for Iraq in the pipeline? When America entered World War II in late 1941, there were no prospects of a quick war. Therefore, there was no need to immediately begin planning for the post-war period. In December 1941, people probably weren’t even sure which side would win. In the present war, there has never been any doubt who would win, and even the direst predictions of how long the war would last gave it a timeframe of a couple months, no more. Again, before the first shot was fired, should we not have already had a solid idea about what we would do after winning the war? The idea that here we are, apparently just days away from the conclusion of formal hostilities, and we don’t know what to do next or whether or when the U.N. will take control of rebuilding Iraq … this concerns me. It concerns me far more than actually engaging in war ever concerned me. A peaceful, democratic Iraq is the only result that makes this war worth fighting. A peaceful, democratic Iraq is the only result that rebuilds our reputation in the world and, hopefully, stems the flood of hatred for America rampant in the world today. Everything depends upon a peaceful, democratic Iraq.

The New York Times is now reporting that early tests indicate the chemicals found in Iraq are nerve gas and mustard gas, though more extensive tests here in the states will have to be done to determine the truth of the matter. The story is here:

U.S. Finds Barrels That May Hold Chemical Arms

I have no doubt, whether it is true or not, no one will be convinced who is not already convinced. People will say that the U.S. military planted those WMDs themselves (probably from our very own cache of prohibited weapons!).

Still, it is important for Bush to be able to prove that this war was not undertaken under the pretense of an outright lie. And yet suppose it is discovered that these chemicals are indeed chemical weapons. Why didn’t Saddam use them? Certainly he had nothing to lose. The answer commonly given to that question is, “Well, he has his historical legacy and reputation to think of.” To which I have to laugh and say, “What reputation? What legacy? The man’s reputation is as a beast, so by using these weapons he would only be confirming what people already think of him.”

Personally, I think the ferociousness of the way the Iraqis have fought this war only proves the worst of Saddam and his minions. I understand that the media has a vested interest in making the enemy appear as bestial and evil as possible, but the worst even the Iraqi media can say about us is that sometimes our bombs go astray and hit a civilian target. The Iraqis have stopped only at using weapons of mass destruction; few other gross atrocities have been beyond them. There was a story in the press last week about a group of soldiers forcing Iraqi women at gunpoint across a bridge in order to defend themselves from American fire. The Iraqis were going to attempt to blow the bridge with the women as cover. One woman was killed, another wounded in the ensuing firefight.

The Pentagon is reporting that something like 2000 Iraqi soldiers were killed this weekend in battles in and around Baghdad. So far, I think only four deaths have been reported on the American side. The Pentagon is not saying how many Iraqi soldiers have been killed in the war thus far, for obvious reasons. Some people would find it shocking, maybe a little uncomfortable.

I saw a picture today of an American marine sitting in camp, reading his Bible; he had written the words “Kill ‘em all!” in magic marker across his helmet.