Why Are We at War? (2 page)

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The fear that waved the flag in every hand was our nightmare of terrorism. Nightmares tell us that life is absurd, unreasonable, unjust, warped, crazy, and ridiculously dangerous. Terorrism suggests that your death will have no relation to your life, as if your death will also produce an identity crisis.

Implicit in our attitude toward our own end is that, for most of us, there is a logic within it. We spend much of our lives searching for that logic. We live in a certain manner. We act out some of our
virtues and vices; we restrain others. From the sum of all those actions and abstentions will come our final disease. That is our assumption, at least for most of us. It can even be seen as a logical conclusion. We pay with our bodies for the sins and excesses of our minds and hearts. It is almost as if we want it that way. Our psyches are jarred, even tortured, by absurdity, and confirmed, sometimes soothed even, by a reasonable recognition of consequence.

Terrorism, however, shatters this equation. The comprehension of our death that we have worked to obtain is lost. Our ability to find meaning in our lives is lost.

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DOTSON RADER
: So, do you hate terrorism?

NORMAN MAILER
: I hate it; I loathe it. Since I believe in reincarnation, I think the character of your death is tremendously important to you. One wants to be able to meet one’s death with a certain seriousness. To me, it is horrible to be killed without warning. Because you can’t prepare yourself in any last way for your next existence. So your death contributes to absurdity. Terrorism’s ultimate tendency is to make life absurd.
    
When I consider the nearly three thousand people who died in the Twin Towers disaster, it’s not the ones who were good fathers and good mothers and good daughters, good brothers and good husbands or sons, that I mourn most. It’s the ones who came from families that were less happy. When a good family member dies, there’s a tenderness and a sorrow that can restore life to those who are left behind. But when someone dies who’s half loved and half hated by his own family, whose children, for example, are always trying to get closer to that man or to that woman and don’t quite succeed, then the aftereffect is obsessive. Those are the ones who are hurt the most. I won’t call them dysfunctional families, but it’s into the less successful families that terrorism bites most deeply. Because there is that terrible woe that one can’t speak to the dead parent or the dead son or daughter or dead mate; one can’t set things right anymore. One was planning to, one was hoping to, and now it’s lost forever. That makes it profoundly obsessive.

DOTSON RADER
: Would you define terrorism as wickedness, as an evil?

NORMAN MAILER
: To me there’s a great difference between doing evil and being wicked. I don’t use the words interchangeably. People who are wicked are always raising the ante without knowing quite what they’re doing. Most of us are wicked to a good degree. Most of us who are game players or adventurous in any way are wicked. We raise the ante all the time without knowing what the results might be. We’re mischievous, if you will.
    Evil, however, is to have a pretty good idea of the irreparable damage you’re going to do and then proceed to do it. In that sense, yes, terrorism is evil.
    However, it’s worth trying to understand terrorism in the context by which the terrorists see it. They feel they’re gouging out an octopus that’s looking to destroy their world. They feel virtuous. The individual terrorist might be violating every single rule in Islam—he might, for example,
be a drug addict or booze a lot—but at the end, he still believes he will find redemption through immolation. He is one small shard in the spiritual wreckage of the world right now. After all, in America there are a great many people on the right who are going around saying, Let’s kill all the Muslims; let’s simplify the world. You think Islam has a special purchase on terrorism?

DOTSON RADER
: What I think is that we are facing a war of civilizations between an Islamic cult of death—

NORMAN MAILER
: Wait a minute. Cult of death? You’re going too far. For every Muslim who believes in your cult of death, thousands don’t. People who are ready to sacrifice their lives form a very special group. They don’t need big numbers.

DOTSON RADER
: But millions cheer them in the streets.

NORMAN MAILER
: Oh, it’s easy to cheer. I can cheer athletes who score winning touchdowns when I don’t know the first thing about them. I’m cheering for an idea, my team! That’s one thing. It’s another
to shed your own blood. There’s a gulf between the two. Many a Muslim who hates us is nowhere near to being a terrorist.
    Still, so many of them do hate us.

DOTSON RADER
: Okay, recognizing that, why? Why are we so hated?

NORMAN MAILER
: To some degree it’s envy. Some human emotions are obvious. But we’re also hated for more intrusive reasons. Corporate capitalism does have this tendency to take over large parts of the economies of other countries. Often we are the next thing to cultural barbarians. We don’t always pay attention to what we are trampling. What intensifies the anger is how often we are successful in these commercial invasions. You go into a McDonald’s in Moscow and there are marble floors. The Russian equivalent of young corporate executives are phoning each other across the room on their cell phones. They’re proud of that. I spoke once at Moscow State University to a class that was studying American literature. One of the students asked me, “Is
there anything in our economy that compares to American economy?” I said, “Yes. Your McDonald’s are better than ours.” And they loved it. They were delighted. They had something they could do that was better than us. It was as if Brooklyn College were playing the University of Nebraska in football. The score had been one hundred to nothing, but then they kicked a field goal—it’s now one hundred to three. And the Brooklyn College stands went crazy. So, by the same token, those are the people—and these are the young people in Moscow—who are reacting positively to American corporate culture.
    Now think of all the other people in Russia who hate the very thought that not only were they bankrupted by the United States, not only were they betrayed by a communism that many of them had believed in, but now on top of it they’re being culturally invaded by these people with their money-grubbing notions of food. And, worse, the young love it. The young are leaving them. So the hatred toward America intensifies.
    
Now, take the West’s cultural invasion into Islam. The Muslim reaction is that Islam is endangered by modern technology and corporate capitalism. They see everything in America as aiming to destroy the basis of Islam. The huge freedom given to women in American culture is seen as an outrage by orthodox Muslims. American TV they find licentious in the extreme. They feel all that Islam stands for is going to be eroded by American culture. So, to repeat: The core of the hatred of Muslims toward us is the fear that they’re going to lose their own people to Western values. Maybe half the people in Muslim countries may want secretly to be free of Islam. And so the ones who retain the old religion become extreme in response. Many Muslims can put Christian fundamentalists to shame by the intensity of their belief. It’s an interesting belief, after all.
    There is one fascinating element in Islam, which is the idea that all Muslims are equal before God, a tremendous egalitarian concept. Like all organized religion, Islam ends up being the
perversion of itself in practice. Just as in Christianity, compassion is supposed to be the greatest good, but its present exercise in the world seems to be a study in military power and greed. In Islam, no Muslim has the right to consider himself superior to another Muslim. What happens in reality is that you have oppressive societies run for the wealthy, with the poor getting less and less—tremendous economic inequalities in many a Muslim society. And tyrannical people in the seats of power.
    Now, of course, the Koran, like the Old and New Testaments, has something in it for everyone. You can run north, run south, blow east, you can blow west. But there have been numerous revolutions within Islam over the centuries to restore its original beliefs. There is no understanding of Islam until one recognizes that Muslims who are truly devoted feel they are in a direct relationship with God. Their Islamic culture is the most meaningful experience of their lives, and their culture is being infiltrated. They feel the
kind of outrage toward us that, let’s say, a good Catholic would know if a black mass were performed in his church.

DOTSON RADER
: But if that’s true, if that’s what the motivation is about, then there’s no fixing it.

NORMAN MAILER
: There’s no quick fix. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that this is a war between those who believe the advance of technology is the best solution for human ills and those who believe that we got off the track somewhere a century ago, two centuries ago, five centuries ago, and we’ve been going in the wrong direction ever since, that the purpose of human beings on earth is not to obtain more and more technological power but to refine our souls. This is the deep divide that now goes on, even with many Americans. You know, what does it profit me if I gain the entire world and lose my soul?
    Now, I don’t want to paint myself into a corner where I am defending Islam. I’m sure they have as many sons of bitches as we have, maybe more. They probably have more in that they suffer
lousier living conditions and they’re under more tension. Muslims also bear a huge sense of shame, because they were a superior civilization around 1200, 1300
A
.
D
., the most advanced culture then, and now they lag behind. There is a deep sense of failure among them. Think of those periods in your life when you felt you were a failure, and recall the bitterness, the anger, the disturbance. Multiply that by the followers of a faith, and that gives some sense of how bad it can get.
    We in the West have this habit of looking for solutions. Part of the spirit of technology is to assume that there’s always a solution to a problem, or something damn close to one. There may be no solution this time. This may be the beginning of an international cancer we cannot cure. What’s in the mind of a cancer cell? Doubtless, its basic desire is to kill as many cells and invade as many organs as it can. So, too, the greater number of people the terrorists can wipe out, the happier they’re going to be. Before you feel too righteous
and outraged, however, let me ask: Did Harry Truman shiver in his bed at the thought that a hundred thousand people had been killed in Hiroshima and another hundred thousand in Nagasaki two days later, or was he proud that he had won the war?

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And, one could add, won it by extraordinary means, never employed before. The explosion of the first atom bomb had an immensely greater effect upon human identity, worldwide human identity, than 9/11; yes, an order of magnitude more. We’ve never recovered from the knowledge that our earthly universe is chained to a bomb larger than human measure. So many of the roots of human history were pulled out by that bomb, and we have been paying the price ever since.

Part II
WHY ARE WE AT WAR?

ADDRESS TO THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB,
SAN FRANCISCO, FEBRUARY 20, 2003

It is probably true that at the beginning of the present push of the administration to go to war, the connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were minimal. Each, on the face of it, had to distrust the other. From Saddam’s point of view, bin Laden was the most troublesome kind of man, a religious zealot, that is to say a loose cannon, a warrior who could not be controlled. To bin Laden, Saddam was an irreligious brute, an unbalanced fool whose boldest ventures invariably crashed.

The two were in competition as well. Each would look to control the future of the Muslim world, bin Laden conceivably for the greater glory of Allah and Saddam for the earthly delight of vastly augmenting his power. In the old days, in the nineteenth century, when the British had their empire, the Raj would have had the skill to set those two upon each other. It was the old rule of many a Victorian crazy house: Let the madmen duke it out, then jump the one or two who are left.

Today, however, these aims are different. Security is considered insecure unless the martial results are absolute. So the first American reaction to September 11 was to plan to destroy bin Laden and al Qaeda. When the campaign in Afghanistan failed, however, to capture the leading protagonist, even proved unable, indeed, to conclude whether he was alive or dead, the game had to shift. Our White House decided the real pea was under another shell. Not al Qaeda but Iraq.

Political leaders and statesmen are serious men even when they appear to be fools, and it is rare to
find them acting without some deeper reason they can offer to themselves. It is these covert motives in the Bush administration upon which I would like to speculate here. I will attempt to understand what the President and his inner cohort see as the logic of their present venture.

Let me begin with Colin Powell’s presentation before the U.N. on February 5, 2003. Up to a point, it was well detailed and ready to prove (to no one’s dramatic surprise) that Saddam Hussein was violating every rule of the inspectors that he could get away with. Saddam, after all, had a keen nose for the vagaries of history. He understood that the longer one could delay powerful statesmen, the more they might weary of the soul-deadening boredom of dealing with a consummate liar who was artfully free of all the bonds of obligation and cooperation. It is no small gift to be an absolute liar. If you never tell the truth, you are virtually as safe as an honest man who never utters an untruth. When informed that you
just swore to the opposite today of what you avowed yesterday, you remark, “I never said that,” or should the words be on record, you declare that you are grossly misinterpreted. Rich confusion is sown, teeming with permutations.