Posted by
The Sound of One Man Laughing on Saturday, February 09, 2008 2:14:26 PM
I. Why we're at war: because they're at war with us.
A friend at work discusses politics and other interesting things with
me, and she asked me why I thought we should have gone into Iraq.
I believe that there has long been a war against us. Not a war like
any other war, inside a country or between other countries. This war
is between one outlook and, as a practical matter, everyone else. This
war is fought, by the enemy, for many reasons: for a world-wide Islamic
caliphate, for the elimination of Israel, for the elimination of
Western powers, for actual grievances against the Western powers. But
what the enemy hates is just part of the equation. What is it the
enemy loves?
He loves submission. He submits himself to his
family, his culture, his religious leaders, his duties, and above all
and all the time, to God. He crawls and bargains with everyone above
him, and controls and rules everyone under him, these being his wife
and his children. Not to his own whim, but to the strict guidelines
and rules in his holy texts. He does not love a free society with a majority Islamic culture; he does not like freedom, tolerance, secularism. Not at all.
So,
what does he hate? ("Why do they hate us?") He hates women's
sexuality because he hates his own. He hates America because he
thinks, knows, it to be a godless, feminized, Jew-controlled,
immoral, amoral, money-worshiping, huge power, riddled with crime,
injustice, materialism without redemption, learning without religion,
and with very little submission, and what submission there is, is
always to false idols. Weak, cowardly, and without determination.
Christopher Hitchens has put it better, in this way (time readings from 4:45 to 5:30):
...the
great struggle is between secular society. We base ourselves on doubt,
skepticism, free inquiry, separation of church and state, emancipation
of women, believing there's no such thing as any concept of race: we're
all humans. Civilization begins where that starts. What you have to
leave behind is blind faith, tribalism, clan and desert culture, and
every society's had to go through that evolution in one way or another.
The
enemy is not at war with those particular bits or some particular
actions of the United States which we temperate intellectuals also
dislike -- they're at war with the core of it which we like, which is
necessary, and which we much defend and keep in existence at any
imaginable cost.
II. The purpose of the war: to scare them silly.
I
am not at all interested in a law-and-order attitude toward Islamic
terrorism. A war in Afghanistan and Iraq should be not for the purpose
of punishing those particularly responsible for attacks against us. It
should be to scare into impotence anyone who would attack us, and to
scare into squealing anyone who knows anything about an attack on us.
We cannot make our enemy love us; we must make them paralyzed with fear
of the consequences of attacking us.
To go to war means, to me,
to mean that being nice in any way is not going to work. The enemy
must die, and the process of killing them means that many people who
are not the enemy must also die. Nice if it weren't so, certainly, but
it is so. Kill them, kill their women and children, level their
cities, until they know that we're not to be slaughtered, not
three-thousand of us at a time or one of us at a time.
III. What we fight for.
The
friend at work, who I mentioned right at the start, who is she? She is
a black woman, born in the early 1950s, university graduate, served in
the Army, married, very intelligent, very wise, observant,
intellectually curious, patient, not hasty in her judgments,
even-tempered.
We talk every day, as much as our work and
workplace etiquette will allow. I am really not a social person, not
good at talking to people, and have few friends when I have them, so
the value of these conversations should be greater to me than they are
to her -- but we both enjoy them, because we speak to each
other knowing that we both have respect for the other, that we share
important attitudes, and we both want to learn from each other.
To
the negatives: we ignore between us those things that should be
ignored: that we are not the same age, race, sex. We talk freely and
honestly, without sexist or sexual tension, racial tension, or
political tension.
Some of this is to our credit, hers and
mine. I am not concerned with that here. I am concerned about the
water which we swim in. I love, pledge allegiance to, perhaps worship,
Western Civilization as it is today. My friend and I are who we are
because we are products of this civilization and, living in that
civilization, we can behave toward each other as we do.
But this is a very recent, and very fragile, development. For the longest time, my friend would not have been
"just a woman" or of an inferior race, but treating her as such would
have been mandatory. Since the founding of America, it would have been
impossible to treat a black woman with the respect she would be
entitled to. I think it's fair to say that, regarding race and sex
equality, it's only happened within my lifetime. (Apologies to those
who don't think it's happened yet.)
What it took to get America,
to get Western Civilization, to that point was the inevitability of it
and a long run of happy accidents and remarkable people. This is what
must be defended, supported, and spread like the beautiful virus that
it is.
I don't wish to sound too idealistic and
romantic. Where my friend and I work, there is cronyism, racism,
religious chauvinism, sexism, and some isms I've missed. George Orwell
wrote in his essay of 1941, "England Your England":
Everyone
believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the
whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that
there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken
root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.
An
illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a
face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is 'just the
same as' or 'just as bad as' totalitarianism never take account of this
fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the
same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and
objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they
are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct,
national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look
about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the castor oil?
The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays there corruption
cannot go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for
instance, is an all but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is
gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some
deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become
completely corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men
with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes
miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is a
powerful safeguard.
I believe in evolution, in natural
selection; I believe that mankind is an animal with some intelligence,
an ability for abstract thought, and opposable thumbs. I believe that
the system one lives in, works in, is very important. When improvement
is needed, the most efficient means of improvement is a better system.
If you don't want people to die in massive numbers in automobiles,
which option would you choose?: (a) to implore and teach every driver
how to drive with appropriate caution, or (b) to use safe glass for car
windows, mandate seat-belts to exist and to be used, and invent the
traffic light? The rise of Japan as an economic force in the eighties
was due to the use of better systems. Western Civilization is the best
system on earth, and it must be able to and willing to defeat any
threats to it.
IV. Yes, but, why go into Iraq?
Because Afghanistan was not enough.
Never
mind that American intelligence thought that Iraq had WMD. Never mind,
indeed, that British, German, and French intelligence thought that Iraq
had WMD. Never mind that we can now certify Iraq as not having WMD,
having finally made a believable inspection of it. The aforementioned
Christopher Hitchens has given a great case for going to war from these
standpoints, and you can read them yourself.
They are very important, but I read them and listened to him debate
with leading opponents of the war, and I've satisfied myself.
The
goal of scaring the enemy, I think, would not have been achieved by an
easy victory like overthrowing the Taliban and failing to get bin Laden
(oops). We needed to do much more. It's pretty goddamned unfortunate
that we've tried to do it with every variation on incompetence
imaginable, but you go to war with the administration you have.
I
love Western Civilization, and if it could only be preserved by erasing
billions of people from the planet -- I'd be pretty pissed, but I'd
sign on to it, whether or not I had to be erased myself.