By Lewis H. Lapham.
Harper's Magazine , March 2002.
Perpetual peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream, and War is an integral part of God's ordering of the universe. In War, man's noblest virtues come into play: courage and renunciation, fidelity to duty and a readiness for sacrifice that does not stop short of offering up Life itself. Without War the world would become swamped in materialism.
--Gen. Helmuth von Moltke
It's been nearly six months since the destruction of the World Trade Center, and we still haven't come to the end of listening to people say that the world is forever changed. On and off the record, whether privately at dinner or blowing through the trumpets of the media, our leading voices of alarmed opinion (politicians, syndicated columnists, retired generals) agree that America can't go home again and that nothing will ever be the same. Before September 11 the world was one thing; after September 11, the world is something else. Impossible to depict or describe, of course, but the transformation so unprecedented and complete as to require new maps and geopolitical surveys, new sets of emotion and states of mind.
The grave announcements invite an equally grave response, but although I usually can manage a solemn nod or worried frown, I'm never sure that I know what it is that I'm being asked to notice or why I can't find in myself the symptoms of an altered sensibility. Apparently the changes don't apply to the kingdom of day-to-day event. The Enron Corporation dissolves in a bankruptcy almost as spectacular as the collapse of the World Trade Center (a market capitalization of $63 billion reduced in nine months to worthless paper), but nobody pokes around in the rubble for a world-changing paradigm; nor does anybody mention radical theories of aesthetics or startling discoveries in the sciences. No miracles being reported elsewhere in the society, I assume that the important talk about "asymmetric reality" and "multilateral chaos" pertains to "the new kind of war" that President George W. Bush has loosed upon all the world's evil. doers. It is Osama bin Laden who has rearranged the universe, Osama and his network of elusive assassins holding for ransom not only the Eiffel Tower, Mount Rushmore, and Buckingham Palace but also the beating heart of Western civilization. Madness stalks the earth, and except for Vice President Dick Cheney, none of us is safe.
But if that is the awful truth that divides the world of September 10 from the world of September 12, I'm at a loss to know why it deserves the name of news. Unless I'm badly mistaken or cruelly misinformed, madness has been stalking the earth ever since an American B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on the day in August 1945 that Buckminster Fuller marked on his calendar as "the day that humanity started taking its final exam." I was ten years old in 1945, too young to understand the remark even if I'd known that Fuller had said it; by the time I was twenty I'd read enough of the literature to know that a radioactive Armageddon doesn't extend the option of any good places to hide, and ever since the Cuban missile crisis in October of 1962 I've understood that I belong to an endangered species, never more than thirty minutes away from an appointment with extinction.
To be held hostage to the fear of a nuclear weapon brought into Manhattan on a truck doesn't seem to me much different than being held hostage to the fear of a nuclear weapon delivered to the same address by a Soviet submarine seventy miles east of Nantucket. The late Robert Benchley put the proposition about as plainly as it can be put on an examination paper that he failed to pass at Harvard in 1912. Asked to frame the legal dispute over fishing rights on the Grand Banks from both the American and British point of view, Benchley began his answer by saying that he never understood the American argument, never cared to know where England stood, but that he would like to consider the problem from the points of view of the fish. The statement of purpose introduced a dialogue in which a flounder and a cod take up the question as to whether it is better to be roasted in Liverpool, boiled in Boston, or sauteed in Paris.
In several speeches since September 11, President Bush has insisted that "terrorism is terrorism," its character always and everywhere the same, absolute and indivisible, not subject to extenuating circumstance or further explanation. Presumably he refers to terrorist acts staged by independent theater companies, not to the ones sponsored by nation-states. When wrapped up in the ribbons of patriotic slogan, terrorism becomes a show of diplomatic resolve or a lesson in democracy, the prerogative of governments apportioning its distribution to Cambodian peasants, dissident Soviet intellectuals, Israeli disco dancers, Chechen rebels, Palestinian refugees, Iraqi schoolchildren, Guatemalan coffee trees. Except as a form of terrorism, how else do we describe the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction that for the last fifty years has trapped the civilian populations of the earth in nets similar to the one in which Benchley's fish found themselves discussing the finer points of British and French cuisine? The doctrine evolved during the prolonged Cold War with the Soviet Union, the diplomatists on both sides of the Iron Curtain entrusting the peace and prosperity of mankind (also the light of reason and the rule of law) to what was bluntly recognized at summit conferences as "the balance of terror"--you kill everybody here, and we kill everybody there; together we preserve humanity by threatening to obliterate it. Citizens inclined to think the arrangement somehow disquieting or oppressive remained free to discuss the finer points of difference between the Russian and the American flag.
If I can understand why the managers of the state monopoly regard the privatization of terror as unwarranted poaching of their market, as a prospective consumer presented with variant packagings of the product I find the same instruction on the labels. Fear the unknown, reflect upon the transience of flounders, pay the ransom or the tax bill, pray for deliverance. The message is by no means new. The miraculous births of Fat Man and Little Boy in Los Alamos in 1945 pressed the fire of Heaven into the service of a religion (jury-rigged and hastily revealed) founded on the gospels of extortion. Powers once assigned to God passed into the hands of physicists and the manufacturers of intercontinental ballistic missiles; what had been human became divine, the idols of man's own nuclear invention raised up to stand as both agent and symbol of the Day of Judgment.
Historians still argue about whether the arms race was inevitable; some say that it was not, that if President Harry Truman in 1949 had heeded the advice of some of the wisest and most well-informed men in the country (among them Robert Oppenheimer and James Conant) he wouldn't have ordered the development of the hydrogen bomb, and if that program hadn't gone forward, the Russians might not have felt compelled to build their own towers of hideous strength. The Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War possessed few or none of the assets attributed to it by American intelligence operatives, and Stalin conceivably might have welcomed an excuse to forgo the making of weapons (at a cost that the Communist workers' paradise could ill afford) meant to be seen and not heard.
But if I don't know what was being said in Moscow in 1949, I do know that in Washington the managers of American foreign policy cherished the dream of omnipotence cued to a memorandum that George Kennan in the winter of the preceding year circulated within the State Department:
We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population.
... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and
resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of
relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity
without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have
to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming....
The preferred patterns of relationship presupposed an American realpolitik strong-mindedly turned away from what Kennan regarded as "unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization"; back home in Washington the interested parties (political, military, and economic) bent willingly to the task of replacing the antiquated American republic, modest in ambition and democratic in spirit, with the glory of a nation-state increasingly grand in scale and luxurious in its taste for hegemony. The imperial project flourished under both Democratic and Republican administrations, and over time it achieved the preferred pattern of relationships that Winston Churchill ascribed to the English government in office in 1904, at the moment when Britain reached its zenith as an empire on which the sun never set:
a party of great vested interests, banded together in a formidable
confederation, corruption at home, aggression to cover it up abroad ...
sentiment by the bucketful, patriotism by the imperial pint, the open hand
at the public exchequer, the open door at the public-house, dear food for
the millions, cheap labour for the millionaire.
Fattened on the seed of open-handed military spending (17 trillion since 1950) and grazing in the pastures of easy credit and certain profit, the confederation of vested interests that President Eisenhower once identified as "the military-industrial complex" brought forth an armed colossus the likes of which the world had never seen--weapons of every conceivable caliber and size, 2 million men under arms on five continents and eight seas and oceans, a vast armada of naval vessels, light and heavy aircraft, command vehicles and communications satellites, guidance systems as infallible as the Pope, tracking devices blessed with the judgment of a recording angel.
The rich displays of armament bear comparison to religious statuary. No matter what the specific function of the weapons, as attack submarines or high-altitude gun platforms, they stand as symbols representative of the divinity (absolute, unfathomable, unseen but always present) implicit in the cloud of nuclear unknowing. For as long as I can remember I've heard debriefing officers in Washington say that the end of the world is near at hand, and I've been told to prepare for "the year of maximum danger" in 1954, 1962, 1968, 1974, 1983, and 1991. Possibly because the sounding of the final trumpet has been so often postponed, I no longer take the gentlemen at their word. The Navy lieutenant stands in front of a lovingly illuminated map overlay, pointing with an elongated baton to fleets and regiments and force levels, and I remember that the wealth and worldly power of the medieval Catholic Church depended upon its cornering of the market in terror. The lieutenant taps his pointer lightly on a crescent of aircraft carriers or a delicately shaded square of parachute brigades, and I think of the Jesuit art historian, soft-footed and subtle, who once conducted me on a tour of the Vatican, directing my attention to jeweled boxes and silver altarpieces, to ivory crosses inlaid with gold and lapis lazuli.
Critics of the military establishment tend to divide into two camps, those who object to the cost of its maintenance and those who complain of its incompetence. Neither caucus lacks reasons for its unhappiness, one of them classifying as extravagant waste the $200 billion contract awarded as recently as last October to Lockheed Martin for 3,000 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, the second of them mentioning the loss of the war in Vietnam, the failure to rescue the Shah's Iran or conquer Saddam Hussein's Iraq. True enough and no doubt sad to say, but the critics allied with both the liberal and conservative schools of opinion usually manage to miss the point, failing to appreciate the military establishment's dual nature as successful business enterprise and reformed church. How well or how poorly the combined services perform their combat missions matters less than their capacity to generate cash and to sustain the images of omnipotence. Wars, whether won or lost, and the rumors of war, whether true or false, increase the budget allocations, stimulate the economy, clear the weapons inventory, and add to the stockpile of fear that guarantees a steady demand for security and promotes a decent respect for authority.
The country has been more or less continuously at war for sixty years, and we can't leave home without it. Otherwise we might not remember that we're the good guys or what would be playing at the movies. During the prosperous decade of the 1990s, the American public showed disturbing signs of weakness, too many people forgetting that without war they were apt to get lost in General von Moltke's "swamps of materialism." The breaking down of the Berlin Wall had brought an end to the skirmish with the Russians, the stock market was going nowhere but up, and the louche example being set by President Clinton in the White House (overweight, emotionally indulgent, morally slack) was bad for children and the weapons business. It wasn't that the American people no longer approved the uses of terrorism as a means of astute crisis-management (in romantic Baghdad or picturesque Kosovo) or as a form of light entertainment (as video game, newspaper headline, and Hollywood plot device), but they had gotten into the habit of thinking that it was a product made exclusively for export.
At Washington policy conferences two and three years before the attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, at least three of the four experts seated on the dais could be counted upon to say that nothing good would come of the American future unless and until the American people awakened to the fact that the world was a far more dangerous place than was dreamed of in the philosophy of Jerry Seinfeld and the World Wildlife Fund. I haven't spoken to any of the panelists since September 11, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear them say that although the attacks were abominable, a criminal outrage, and certainly a lot more destructive than might reasonably have been expected, sometimes people needed harsh reminders to recall them to the banners of noble virtue under which von Moltke's German army invaded Belgium in 1914 and massacred every man, woman, and child in the city of Dinant.
As for the critics who complain that President Bush has been sending ambiguous signals to the American people, once again I think they miss the point. They see a contradiction in the fact that one day he appears on television to say that we confront a future darkened by scenes of unimaginable horror and then, at the next day's press conference, tells everybody not to worry, to remain calm but stay alert, to keep up the strength of their buying in the nearest retail outlet.
Understood as a religious instead of a secular form of communication, the ritual makes liturgical sense. The President first ascends to the pulpit in the persona of the grim but righteous prophet, setting before the congregation a fiery vision of Hell, and then, in the bright sunlight on the steps of the church, he appears as the amiable vicar bidding his flock a kindly and reassuring farewell. Between the sermon and the benediction, a choir of media voices sings hymns of thanksgiving and anthems of praise, and men in uniform pass the collection plate.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Harper's Magazine Foundation
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Citation: Lewis H. Lapham, "Spoils of War," Harper's Magazine, March 2002.
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