No end to war

It sounds terrifying, but consider the alternatives: what lies ahead for the world beyond any conceivable end to The War on Terror? Win or lose, we're done for. That's why most people are coming around to the White House's stated purpose: it has no end to confront.

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

One of the enduring mysteries about the continuing US war on Iraq is “What for?”

Noted commentator Bill Moyers recently spoke to a university graduating class where he summed up the point of view that Bush and his crew are primarily millenarians seeking to hasten Armageddon and the return of the rule of Christ.

Noam Chomsky has articulated in great detail the opposing point of view that holds that the White House is an oil company boardroom by another name, and the war aim is to secure access to Iraqi oil fields to keep the US domestic market lubricated.

Those are only the two most prominent theories. Many plausible theories abound. The Bush association with the Skull and Bones society at Yale lends credence to the notion that war is understood by a sector of the American elite to provide a necessary focus for an otherwise wandering and promiscuous American mores.

Robert Bork, formerly a Reagan pillar of conservatism in the judicial branch of American politics, in a speech in Toronto in 2000, spoke of the necessity for a large-scale war to cleanse the American soul of the grime built up from 30 years of the social revolution.

On a whole other level, there are now theories floating around, like one hinted at by Michael Moore, suggesting that America, having been founded in the fire of war, knows no other way to be with the rest of the world. The fact that there is hardly a single year in its 229-year history when US forces were not invading or occupying one or another foreign country is notable in this regard.

Then of course there is the White House's own stated reason: terrorists who hate freedom are intent on destroying the beacon of freedom in the world, the United States, and the defense of civilization itself requires US forces to go out and confront the terrorists where they live, in foreign countries, before they come to where Americans live. Hand in hand with these terrorists are certain countries who, for geopolitical reasons of their own, provide aid and shelter to these otherwise stateless terrorists, and therefore require “regime change.”

With almost as wide a disparity, there is a broad range of public reaction to the war around the world and in Canada, reactions that are partly dependent on what theory one believes is the reason for the US war, and partly on what ultimate effects, both immediate and long term, one believes the war will bring.

There is no question that in Canada at least, the war's importance is waning. Prime Minister Paul Martin was unmolested by any protests as he prepared to meet with George Bush during the second anniversary of the unprovoked US attack on Iraq. The war was never mentioned, not while mundane issues like softwood lumber, mad cow disease and missile defense earned higher places on the agenda.

There is a growing number of Iraqis being killed every day, both civilians and new police and army recruits, but still no one is counting, and news of deaths only get to our front pages if the number tops 30 or so in the same day. Americans killed in the war only make it to our papers if they die in groups of three or more.

Whatever one believes are the reasons for the war, and whatever one assesses the war's effects to be, there is no question of a growing numbness toward the war among the public. This is partly due to the Cockburn Effect: the trouble with normal is, it always gets worse. It has become normal for the US to be violently occupying some countries and threatening to invade several others. That all-new stance toward the world in the fall of 2001 is by now an everyday fact of life and is accepted as normal.

There's a comic strip where a man has fallen down a bottomless pit. In the first frame, he's shrieking with alarm. By the third frame, he's bored and nodding off to sleep even while he still falls at a terrifying speed. It's not quite a perfect analogy because, when it comes to the American's new militant stance toward the world, there is a bottom to the pit.

In all the theories above about why there was a war, only one doesn't necessarily have a bottom, an end to its purpose. If it's to hasten Armageddon, there is an event—the end of the world—that signals when the purpose has been served. If it's to secure access to oil, that too is an aim that can conceivably be achieved, after which the war can be stopped. If it's to steer American society away from moral relativism, it is possible to see how victory can be won; likewise if it's to cleanse the American soul of its wayward mores.

But if the aim of the war is to end hate and rid the world of enemies of the US, there will never be a time when victory can be declared and the troops brought home to their barracks. US policy makers have intimated as much, suggesting the war begun in the fall of 2001 may not end in our lifetimes, so large and noble is the undertaking.

American election campaign managers on both sides of the recent election conspired to leave the impression with the American and world public that the war in Iraq and the War on Terrorism are two different wars. They are not, but the deceit allows one to oppose the war on Iraq and at the same time, with no apparent contradiction, endorse the War on Terror—as many left-wing Democrats did. Across almost the entire spectrum of American political thought, there is unanimity on the necessity for the War on Terror, its shape (real shooting in real countries, as in Iraq), its endlessness, and (despite its endlessness) the positive prospects for victory in it by the Americans.

At first glance one might imagine that war without end is the most terrifying of all prospects. One might further imagine that the majority of the public would choose to believe in a reason for the war that precludes them having to conclude the war will never end.

But considering what lies at the end of the war if the war were for a reason that allows there to be an end, the idea of the war never coming to an end, horrible as that sounds on first blush, provides the most comfortable narrative one can live with. If the end of this war means any of Armageddon, total US economic hegemony through control of world oil, the reconstruction of American social thought, or the cleansing of the American soul of the 1960s revolution, then no end to the war - so long as its effects remain relatively remote, as they do at present - is the least offensive of future prospects.

Canadians, if not Europeans or most other peoples of the world, seem to be increasingly willing to grant benefit of the doubt to the White House and are coming around to a majority belief in the purpose for war that the White House propagates, the one - ridding America of enemies - that best promises there is no bottom to the pit to be concerned about as we fall, shoulder to shoulder, with that country down into it. But of course, there is an end, of one kind or another. All we've done is choose to belief in a purpose for the war that guarantees the longest delay before an inevitable, and horrifying, end.

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