A Pilgrim’s Digression

I’ve been reading a good book the past two weeks, titled American Gunfight: the Plot to Kill Harry Truman. I first heard about this book on the podcast of the Power Line radio show. Although the Power Line blog is a Conservative blog, I find its essays and its radio talk show to be fair-minded and intellectually challenging to people on both sides of the war. Funny how war has come to be the central, defining intellectual issue of our time. But there you go.

Back in November 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists tried to assassinate Harry Truman and came pretty close to succeeding, closer than media reports at the time indicated to the public. Truman was staying in Blair House, across from the White House, when the two men attacked his security detail in an effort to shoot their way into the house. During the gunfight, Truman actually leaned out a window directly above his assailants, in a foolhardy attempt to see what was happening outside.

What I find fascinating about this story is that far from being grim, bloody-minded terrorists, as they would be described today, they were simple family men who believed passionately in the cause of Puerto Rican independence. Assassinating Truman was supposed to be a ploy to attract the attention of the United States people and government, which they saw as an oppressive colonial power, unfairly Americanizing and impoverishing their homeland.

However, the result of their assassination attempt was to kill another simple family man, Les Coffelt, a White House police officer, and grievously wound another. One of the Puerto Rican assassins also died in the gun battle. Truman escaped unhurt, and the incident passed quickly from the front pages to the history books as the irrational action of two crazed Hispanics. Why would Puerto Ricans want independence anyway? It doesn’t make sense. Poor, stupid bastards, people say.

I don’t see what the two assassins did as any more or less senseless than the killing that men do every day in any war. Really, what they attempted that day in 1950 was nothing less than an act of war. It would be a very personal, pointless, almost silly war, but war nonetheless. They believed in a cause. They believed themselves and their people aggrieved, and they were the avengers. They thought of themselves quite literally as soldiers, and like soldiers, they scrubbed from their conscience any hint of remorse or guilt for the act they were about to commit. How were they any different than a Marine gunning for Saddam Hussein in Iraq?

Only the older man, Oscar, could not fully rationalize the violence he intended to commit. Perhaps because he was older, and more of a family man than the younger man (one of his last acts before leaving home to do the killing was to walk the dog), he lost his nerve when the blood began to flow. At the critical moment of action, while his partner and White House police officers traded shots in front of Blair House, Oscar fainted dead on the sidewalk. He was the only one of the two to survive. He was tried for murder and served a long jail sentence.

War begins with strong rhetoric and dedication to noble ideals, or even just a sense of aggrievement. It ends with one poor individual trying to kill another who has done him no harm before that moment. Meanwhile, the real target leans out his window and watches the whole event transpire, as if on a TV screen.

Even the President cannot be viewed as a legitimate target in war. What has the President to do with the petty inducements that may have led a man to view killing him as the only solution to an injustice?

In the end, the President, too, is in thrall to forces beyond his control. Like a vicious parasite, violence perpetuates itself upon (mostly) innocent hosts. An island nation in the tropics becomes an American colony in 1898 and fifty years later as an act of revenge, two ordinary men kill another ordinary man, who certainly had nothing to do with the original injustice.

Viewed in this way, all war is pointless and silly. The only way a man can be steeled to the task of killing another who has done him no harm is either to be made to believe that the man has in fact, or will soon, do him or his country harm; or else, he must be convinced that the cause the other man is fighting for (presuming he is fighting for any cause) is evil and pernicious.

Abstractions. War is built on abstractions, because left alone, individuals generally prefer not to kill each other. Like a great, modernist symphony, war is composed by men concerned only with bringing the principal players together in an abstract, discordant fusillade of mutual gunfire, to great effect.

The conductor of our current 1812 Overture, President Bush, gave a press conference yesterday full of the abstractions we have all come to know and love by heart. It’s a grand old song, patriotic and optimistic. Increasingly, however, some of his players are hitting flat notes where they ought to be finely in tune with the President’s conducting.

First, former Prime Minister of Iraq, Ayad Allawi, claimed that Iraq is in a state of civil war.  And as if on cue, one of the most well-known Conservative columnists, George Will, agreed with him.

These days, I look forward to reading a George Will column on Iraq. It’s like an early Christmas present in my stocking, every week. This week, in Bleakness in Baghdad, Will asserts boldly that civil war in Iraq began months ago. Will writes, “…civil wars do not usually begin with an identifiable event, such as the firing on Fort Sumter, or proceed to massed, uniformed forces clashing in battles like Shiloh. Iraq’s civil war–which looks more like Spain’s in the 1930s–began months ago.”

Why has no one on the right stepped up to accuse Will of hurting the morale of the troops or giving aid and comfort to the enemy? Limbaugh and his cronies are strangely silent on George Will’s treasonous writings.

Much of the debate today, at the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq (Will points out, to my amusement, that the Iraq War has already gone on twice as long as American involvement in World War I), is over whether Iraq is in a state of civil war or not.

Yesterday on his program, Neal Boortz concluded that since the dictionary definition of a civil war is “war between factions or regions of a country for control of the government,” Iraq is therefore not in a civil war. None of the factions in Iraq want control of the government, Boortz claims; they just want to kill each other. In fact, Boortz went so far as to say that the American Civil War was not a civil war, since it was a war between two sovereign governments. He has now decided to call it the War Between the States, to be perfectly accurate.

In truth, as George Will points out, civil war does not have to involve a struggle for control of a central government. Dictionary definitions, as any editor of a dictionary will tell you, are protean according to individual usage; they are more like approximations of meaning than fact. Wherever there are two factions, sects, or armies fighting within a country, there you have civil war.

Anyway, in the end the result of civil war in Iraq will be the same: one side will end up in control of the government, or a new government will be formed, or anarchy will reign until an outside power steps in. Thus Boortz’s semantic quibble over the meaning of “civil war” is pointless.

Meanwhile, the President is as clueless as ever. What does he see when he looks out his window upon the gunfight below? He seems to think the critical danger point has passed. Listen to him answer a question about civil war in Iraq:

Says the President, “Listen, we all recognize that there is a violence, that there’s sectarian violence. But the way I look at the situation is that the Iraqis took a look and decided not to go to civil war.”

He speaks of it in the past tense, as if there is no chance of civil war now. The Iraqis have made their decision, and they will not have a civil war.

Phew. Glad that’s decided. Now I can go back to my coffee and donut.

What else does he see when he looks out his window? On the same day that the President spoke, 100 guerrillas attacked an Iraqi police station, killing a score of officers and freeing all thirty prisoners in the jail . Iraqi armed forces were delayed in their response by coordinated car bombs. Americans were late to the scene. Today, another band of sixty guerillas struck another police station, but were this time foiled. American and Iraqi forces captured fifty of the attackers, but four policemen, including the police commander, were killed.

Does the President see this, and what does he think of the fact that the evil “terrorists” can apparently group together in a large platoon and coordinate and execute a well-planned attack on a police station? These attacks do not sound like random acts of terrorism, to me, but like military operations. We could be witnessing the influence of Iran coming to fruition, here, with better trained Iraqi militias or platoons of Iraqi guerrillas actually engaging the Iraqi government and military in more or less traditional warfare. For one thing, instead of attacking civilians, the guerillas chose to attack a legitimate military target, the law enforcement branch of the civil government of Iraq.
If that is not civil war, then the meaning of the word is totally lost.

Pundits often debate the “tipping point” in Iraq. Has Iraq reached the tipping point, they ask each other? A similarly important question is whether we have reached the tipping point in the United States. More and more of what Power Line calls the “to hell with them hawks”–George Will and William Buckley chief among them–are giving up American involvement in Iraq as lost. Public opinion is reaching critical mass. A majority of Americans view the President as incompetent, or at least deeply out of touch with reality.

Sometimes it seems like the only ones who can’t read the writing on the wall are the President and his attack dogs on talk radio. The litany repeated again and again and again on talk radio is that the media is destroying the American people’s trust in the President.

No blame is placed on the President for his incompetence and near-obsessive determination to forge ahead with policies that are failing. It’s all the media’s fault. If they’d just lay off and report the good news from Iraq, if they would emulate their predecessors from the World War II era and become a propaganda mouthpiece for the administration, all would be well.

America has lost our momentum in the war in Iraq, and in the war on terrorism generally. Building a school simply cannot compete with brazen acts of terrorism for space on the front pages of newspapers. It’s not a matter of political bias in the media, it’s a matter of what stories people most want to read. People want to read about the violence. If terrorists know that, and use that as their primary weapon–one bombing can push all other news out of the headlines–that isn’t the fault of the media. The fault, if it is a fault (I don’t think so), lies with us who gobble this stuff up.

Death is a primary preoccupation of all people.

Meanwhile, perfectly oblivious to the decline and fall of his administration and maybe the Republican party itself, the President is determined to keep the gun battle blazing outside his window, even though we have all grown sick of it.

The headline of the Washington Times today is Bush Commits Until 2009. We are living through a season of profound discontent in this country. In fact, every winter has seen the American people growing more and more restive, in proportion to the corrosion of the President’s ability to accomplish his foreign policy and domestic objectives. If we are discontented now, Republicans should think of what we will be like in the winter of 2008, if things don’t change. “Bush fatigue” won’t begin to describe it.