Why Are We at War? Read Free Page A

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 sufferlousier 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 righteousand 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 tofind 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