[Mb-civic] SHOULD READ: Is America actually in a state of war? - James Carroll - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Is America actually in a state of war?

By James Carroll  |  January 30, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

STATE OF the Union, state of war: They have a nice ring. When George W. 
Bush goes before the Congress and the nation tomorrow night, he will 
present himself (again) as a war president. Personally and politically, 
the identity defines him. Instead of the callow leader he was in the 
beginning of his presidency, he will conduct himself as a man of sharp 
determination, with defiance born of the impression that his fight is to 
the death. He will justify all of his policies, including the illegal 
ones, by citing his responsibilities -- and privileges -- as wartime 
commander in chief. He will not have to remind the men and women in 
front of him that twice (just after 9/11 and just before Iraq), they 
voted to license his use of ''all necessary and appropriate force" -- 
enabling acts by which most of them still stand. The United States 
became a nation at war with congressional collusion.

But did it? Here is the embarrassing question: Is America actually at 
war? We have a war president, war hawks, war planes, war correspondents, 
war cries, even war crimes -- but do we have war? We have war dead, but 
the question remains. With young US soldiers being blown up almost 
daily, it can seem an absurd question, an offensive one. With thousands 
of Iraqis killed by American firepower, it can seem a heartless 
question, as if the dead care whether strict definitions of ''war" are 
fulfilled. There can be no question that Iraq is in a state of war, and 
that, whatever its elements of post-Saddam sectarian conflict, the 
warfare is being driven from the Pentagon.

But, regarding the Iraq conflict as it involves the United States, 
something essential is lacking that would make it a war -- and that is 
an enemy.

The so-called ''insurgents," who wreak such havoc, are not America's 
enemy. They are not our rivals for territory. They are not our 
ideological antagonists. Abstracting from the present confrontation, 
they have no reason to wish us ill.

Americans who bother to imagine the situation from the Iraqi point of 
view -- a massive foreign invasion, launched on false pretenses; a 
brutal occupation, with control of local oil reserves surely part of the 
motivation; the heartbreaking deaths of brothers, cousins, children, 
parents -- naturally understand that an ''insurgency" is the appropriate 
response. Its goal is simply to force the invaders and occupiers to 
leave. Sunnis, Shi'ites, and Kurds have intrinsic reasons to regard each 
other as enemies, from competition over land and oil, to ethnic hatreds, 
to unsettled scores. No equivalent sources of inbuilt contempt exist 
among these people toward America. Taken as a whole, or in its parts, 
Iraq is not an enemy.

President Bush would say Iraq is only one front in the so-called war on 
terrorism. Surely, in that realm, where the antagonist has a name and a 
face, the US is authentically at war. If Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda 
are not an enemy, what is? True enough. But the war on terrorism is not 
real war either, since the Pentagon has proven itself incapable of 
actually engaging Al Qaeda. That, of course, is because Al Qaeda is a 
free floating nihilism, not a nation, or even a network. Al Qaeda is a 
rejectionist idea to which deracinated miscreants are drawn, like 
filings to a magnet, but that drawing power is generated in Washington. 
Bin Laden was a self-mythologized figure of no historic standing until 
George W. Bush designated him America's equal by defining 9/11 as an act 
of war to be met with war, instead of a crime to be met with criminal 
justice. But this over-reaction, so satisfying at the time to the 
wounded American psyche, turned into the war for which the other party 
simply did not show up. Which is, of course, why we are blasting a 
substitute Iraq to smithereens.

Iraq is not a war, because, though we have savage assault, we have no 
enemy. The war on terrorism is not a war because, though we have an 
enemy, the muscle-bound Pentagon offers no authentic means of assault.

In each case, Bush is presiding over a self-serving delusion, in concert 
with a self-emasculating Congress, his partners as would-be war 
profiteers. Anticipating tomorrow night, one could say Bush will, on 
this question, be lying to the American people again. But that would 
presume he is not first lying to himself. State of war? No. State of the 
Union? Catastrophe, pure and simple.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/01/30/is_america_actually_in_a_state_of_war/
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