American Way of War (6 page)

As those two enormous reflecting pools were meant to mirror the soaring “beacon” of the Freedom Tower, so the American people, under the shock of loss, experiencing a sense of violation that can only come to the victors in this world, mirrored the administration’s attitude. In a country where New York City had always been Sodom to Los Angeles’ Gomorrah, everyone suddenly donned “I
♥
New York” hats or T-shirts and became involved in a series of repetitive rites of mourning that, in arenas nationwide, on every television screen, went on not for days or weeks but months on end.

From these ceremonies, a clear and simple message emerged. In its suffering, the United States was the greatest victim, the greatest survivor, and the greatest dominator the globe had ever seen. Implicitly, the rest of the world’s dead were, in the Pentagon’s classic phrase, “collateral damage.” In those months, in our all-American version of the global drama, we swept up and repossessed all the emotional roles available—with the sole exception of Greatest Evil One. That, then, was the phantasmagoric path to invasion, war, and disaster upon which the Bush administration, with a mighty helping hand from al-Qaeda, pulled back the curtain; that is the drama still being played out at Ground Zero in New York City.

But those 2,752 dead can no longer stand in—not even in the American mind—for all the dead everywhere, not even for the American dead in Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps it’s finally time to take a breath and approach the untimely dead—our own as well as those of others around the world—with some genuine humility.

I know that for some, those reflecting pools will someday touch the heart, but unfortunately they will mainly memorialize a post-9/11 America that should not have been using the numbers 1776. Facing a building so tall, who would even have the need to approach a declaration so modest—of only 1,322 words—so tiny as to be able to fit on a single page, so iconic that just about no one bothers to pay attention to what it says anymore. But perhaps it’s worth quoting a few of the words those men wrote back in the year 1776 and remembering what the American dead of that time actually stood for. Here then are some passages about another George’s imperial hubris, less well remembered than the declaration’s classic beginning:

Given the last eight years of disaster piled on catastrophe, who in our American world would want to look backward? The urge to turn the page in this country is palpable, but just for a moment let’s not.

Admittedly, we’re a people who don’t really believe in history—so messy, so discomforting, so old. Even the recent past is regularly wiped away as the media plunge us repeatedly into various overblown crises of the moment, a 24/7 cornucopia of news, non-news, rumor, punditry,
gossip, and plain old blabbing. In turn, any sense of the larger picture surrounding each flap is, soon enough, dismantled by a media focus on a fairly limited set of questions: Was Congress adequately informed? Should the president have suppressed those photos?

The flaps, in other words, never add up to a single Imax Flap-o-rama of a spectacle. We seldom see the full scope of the legacy that we—not just the Obama administration—have inherited. Though we all know that terrible things happened in recent years, the fact is that, these days, they are seldom to be found in a single place, no less the same paragraph. Connecting the dots, or even simply putting everything in the same vicinity, just hasn’t been part of the definitional role of the media in our era. So let me give it a little shot.

As a start, remind me: What didn’t we do? Let’s review for a moment.

In the name of everything reasonable, and in the face of acts of evil by terrible people, we tortured wantonly and profligately, and some of these torture techniques—known to the previous administration and most of the media as “enhanced interrogation techniques”—were actually demonstrated to an array of top officials, including the national security adviser, the attorney general, and the secretary of state, within the White House. We imprisoned secretly at “black sites” offshore and beyond the reach of the American legal system, holding prisoners without hope of trial or, often, release; we disappeared people; we murdered prisoners; we committed strange acts of extreme abuse and humiliation; we kidnapped terror suspects off the global streets and turned some of them over to some of the worst people who ran the worst dungeons and torture chambers on the planet. Unknown but not insignificant numbers of those kidnapped, abused, tortured, imprisoned, and/or murdered were actually innocent of any crimes against us. We invaded without pretext, based on a series of lies and the manipulation of Congress and the public. We occupied two countries with no clear intent to depart and built major networks of military bases in both. Our soldiers gunned down unknown numbers of civilians at checkpoints and, in each country, arrested thousands of people, some again innocent of any acts against us, imprisoning them often without trial or sometimes hope of release. Our Air Force repeatedly wiped out wedding parties and funerals in its Global War on
Terror. It killed civilians in significant numbers. In the process of prosecuting two major invasions, wars, and occupations, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans have died. In Iraq, we touched off a sectarian struggle of epic proportions that involved the “cleansing” of whole communities and major parts of cities, while unleashing a humanitarian crisis of remarkable size, involving the uprooting of more than four million people who fled into exile or became internal refugees. In these same years, our special forces operatives and our drone aircraft carried out—and still carry out—assassinations globally, acting as judge, jury, and executioner, sometimes of innocent civilians. We spied on, and electronically eavesdropped on, our own citizenry and much of the rest of the world on a massive scale whose dimensions we may not yet faintly know. We pretzled the English language, creating an Orwellian terminology that, among other things, essentially defined “torture” out of existence (or, at the very least, left its definitional status to the torturer).

And don’t think that that’s anything like a full list. Not by a long shot. It’s only what comes to my mind on a first pass through the subject. In addition, even if I could remember everything done in these years, it would represent only what has been made public. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was regularly mocked for saying: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

Actually, he had a point seldom thought about these days. By definition, we know a good deal about the known knowns, and we have a sense of an even darker world of known unknowns. We have no idea, however, what’s missing from a list like the one above, because so much may indeed remain in the unknown-unknowns category. If, however, you think that everything done by Washington or the U.S. military or the CIA in these last years has already been leaked, think again. It’s a reasonable bet that the unknown unknowns the Obama administration inherited would curl your toes.

Nonetheless, what is already known, when thought about in one place rather than divided up into separate flaps and argued about separately,
is horrific enough. War may be hell, as people often say when trying to excuse what we did in these years, but it should be remembered that, in response to the attacks of 9/11, we, as a nation, were the ones who declared “war,” made it a near eternal struggle (the Global War on Terror), and did so much to turn parts of the world into our own private hell. Geopolitics, energy politics, vanity, greed, fear, a misreading of the nature of power, delusions of military and technological omnipotence and omniscience, and so much more drove us along the way.

Perhaps the greatest fantasy of the present moment is that there is a choice here. We can look forward or backward, turn the page on history or not. Don’t believe it. History matters.

Whatever the Obama administration may want to do, or think should be done, if we don’t face the record we created, if we only look forward, if we only round up the usual suspects, if we try to turn that page in history and put a paperweight atop it, we will be haunted by the Bush years until hell freezes over. This was, of course, the lesson—the only one no one ever bothers to call a lesson—of the Vietnam years. Because we were so unwilling to confront what we actually did in Vietnam—and Laos and Cambodia—because we turned the page on it so quickly and never dared take a real look back, we never, in the phrase of George H. W. Bush, “kicked the Vietnam syndrome.” It still haunts us.

However busy we may be, whatever tasks await us here in this country—and they remain monstrously large—we do need to make an honest, clear-headed assessment of what we did (and, in some cases, continue to do), of the horrors we committed in the name of…well, of us and our “safety.” We need to face who we’ve been and just how badly we’ve acted, if we care to become something better.

Now, read that list again, my list of just the known knowns, and ask yourself: Aren’t we the people your mother warned you about?

The wooden sailing ship mounted with cannons, the gunboat, the battleship, and finally the “airship”—historically, these proved the difference between global victory and staying at home, between empire and nothing much at all. In the first couple of centuries of Europe’s burst onto the world stage, the weaponry of European armies and their foes was not generally so disparate. It was those cannons on ships that decisively tipped the balance. And they continued to do so for a long, long time. Traditionally, in fact, the modern arms race is considered to have taken off at the beginning of the twentieth century with the rush of European powers to build ever larger, ever more powerful, “all-big-gun” battleships—the “dreadnoughts” (scared of nothings).

In
“Exterminate All the Brutes,”
a remarkable travel book that takes you into the heart of European darkness (via an actual trip through Africa), the Swedish author Sven Lindqvist offers the following comments on that sixteenth-century seaborne moment when Europe was still a barbaric outcropping of Euro-Asian civilization:

For a while, Europeans ruled the coasts where nothing could stand up to their shipborne cannons, and then, in the mid-nineteenth century in Africa, as well as on the Asian mainland, they moved inland, taking their cannons upriver with them. For those centuries, the ship was, in modern terms, a floating military base filled with the latest in high-tech equipment. And yet ships had their limits, as indicated by a well-known passage about a French warship off the African coast from Joseph Conrad’s novel about the Congo,
Heart of Darkness
:

Well, maybe it wasn’t quite so droll if you happened to be on land, but the point remains. Of course, sooner or later the Europeans did make it inland with the musket, the rifle, the repeating rifle, the machine gun, artillery, and finally, by the twentieth century, the airplane filled with bombs or even, as in Iraq, poison gas. Backing up the process was often the naval vessel—as at the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898, when somewhere between nine thousand and eleven thousand soldiers in the Mahdi’s army were killed (with a British loss of forty-eight troops), thanks to mass rifle fire, Maxim machine guns, and the batteries of gunboats floating on the Nile.

Winston Churchill was a reporter with the British expeditionary force at the time. Here’s part of his description of the slaughter (also from Lindqvist):