A Pilgrim’s Digression

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.