"...Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?"
—Epitaphs of War (1914-18),
"Dead Statesman", Rudyard Kipling
Leading up to the mid-term elections, the Bush administration's portrayal of the Iraq project had gone stupendously momentous. In his 9/11 Five Year Anniversary Speech, George Bush described the conflict in startling terms: "the early hours of [the] struggle between tyranny and freedom." No longer merely an inter-civilizational battle, the conflict had morphed into a struggle for civilization itself. With the war faltering, the war of words bellows at compensatory volume. The enterprise is widely acknowledged as a failure. Strange then how its scope hurtles ever outward and the hour of the day –like a stopped clock— is still early. We're being plied with cheap wine to wash down a steady diet of mission creep as our leaders struggle to forestall a recognition of their own failings. This procrastination is abetted by fresh levels of grandiose imagery and language.
Witness the latest conniptions in Washington DC over whether Iraq has indeed slipped into a civil war. A recent Washington Post article1 wryly acknowledges the fierce war of words underpinning the war itself: "Facing a linguistic insurrection, the administration rallied its semantic defenses. 'They have sectarian differences, and some of those are violent,' Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said. 'It's not civil war.'" Clearly words still matter to the powers-that-be.
Beginning his own redemptive, albeit rhetorical, process toward extracting the ideal of war from the ensuing carnage this ideal habitually spawns (i.e. atrocities, torture, unintended geopolitical consequences, social collapse, etc.), conservative soul-searcher Andrew Sullivan recently posed this question on his blog:
"Was the [Iraq] project always doomed or did the execution doom it?"
It's unlikely civilization as we know it will give up the ghost on the strength of this administration's misadventures. However ask a Carthaginian or a Trojan, if you can find one, and he may tell you that civilizations can turn on a few ill-judged battles. More often than not though, when leaders resort to mighty-civilization-talk, it's a smokescreen aimed at concealing more parochial foibles: ignorance, surprise, miscalculation, incompetence, confusion. No doubt America's notion of civilization will survive the Iraq debacle, even as nearly three thousand of its sons and daughters will not.
As for Sullivan, an early proponent of the war, he is beginning to carve the ledge upon which many of his fellow squawks (armchair hawks) will, in due course, be arranging their seat cushions. You can almost hear the gathering symposium of sedentary voices as they warm up in the punditocracy's many Green Rooms: "we supported the war, not its abysmal prosecution." Ah, the finer points of valorous debate! Can't we please ship all impossibly eloquent war-mongers to Fallujah?
Conservative face-saving aside, Sullivan's question —while attracting perhaps a surface interest— never entertains more than a surface reality. That's because it's a rhetorical tempest wrapped in a right-wing tizzy fit.
So what did come first, the dead chicken or the rotten eggs? The proof is offered in the scale of the early planning. Not even former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would have seriously proposed a 130,000-troop force-level for the purpose of prevailing in a veritable battle for the universe. As for the evolution of war-time propaganda, one need only follow the rhetorical swell.
In the Iraq War especially, a cogent narrative must now contend with a time span of previously unimagined duration —at least by the standards of pre-war rhetoric. That is why, with most benchmarks already historical fait accompli (an Iraqi constitution, a free election, the capture of principal villains) the time-line-as-hopeful-predictor-of-events has reached its terminus. With the storyline all used up, the present moment becomes infinitely more perilous. There is nothing to which imminent arrival can lay claim, much less claim victory. We are now in an interminable phase of War Time where the vagaries of time itself spool out into the uncharted void.
Once upon a time, there was virtual unanimity among the powerful that time was on their side. By commencing the war on a date-certain, the implicit presumption was that all subsequent events would submit themselves to an executive day planner. As Bush assured in his September 14, 2001 National Cathedral speech, "this conflict...will end in a way, and at an hour of our choosing." Such was the unabashed certitude of the last remaining superpower. Indeed the hubris was palpable as the main players offered predictions in the run-up to hostilities:
- February. 7, 2003, Secretary Rumsfeld, to U.S. troops in Aviano, Italy: "It is unknowable how long that conflict will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."
- March 4, 2003, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a breakfast with reporters: "What you'd like to do is have it be a short, short conflict. . . . Iraq is much weaker than they were back in the '90s," when its forces were routed from Kuwait."
- March 16, 2003, Vice President Cheney, on NBC's Meet the Press: "I think it will go relatively quickly. . . (in) weeks rather than months."
What a difference a war makes. One of the salutary effects of the media age is that wars, particularly incoherent ones, must contend with a rear-guard action from a voracious twenty-four-hour news cycle. Given a sprawling gap of time, all manner of earnest truth-tellers are drawn to the microphone: retired generals with axes to grind, arm-chair media quarterbacks, inevitable second-guessers, officious micro-managers, conflicted soul-searchers, disgruntled former officials, grieving survivors, emboldened journalists and on-the-ground bloggers.
Time inflicts its own grave wounds upon a stalled war effort. Had the war been prosecuted expeditiously —as per plan— a multitude of sins would have been buried forever beneath mounds of confetti and ticker tape. To the victor go the spoils of composing history. As it is, there's been three years of chimerical WMD caches, Abu Ghraib atrocities, the Woodward trilogy, John Murtha and Cindy Sheehan, a seeming drip-drip of the inevitable bad news that any war will produce –when afforded ample time.
A war's duration molds its final complexion. The rhetorical equivalent of cosmetic enhancement, this war has enjoyed its share of thematic nips and tucks. Words carry their own peculiar power. You want to recruit an endless stream of Islamo-fascists? Play into their grandiosity by invoking them as a movement worthy of the attention of the United States. With tragic irony, it may be the sheer rhetorical effrontery of this particular war that drags the world into a war between civilizations. Think of it, a war that sparked a successor war. Not so absurd, perhaps; the seeds of WWII were firmly planted in the aftermath of WWI.
Reaching back in the annals of interminable conflict, we find the words of Abraham Lincoln from his Second Inaugural Address strangely prophetic, if not a bit chilling:
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease.
In a voice thick with fatalism and drained of hubris, Lincoln by 1865 could nonetheless continue to say, quite plausibly, that slavery was the root cause of the Civil War. But what if the Union Army had found no slaves upon crossing the Mason-Dixon Line in 1861? Would the conflict have raged on for another four years? Rhetoric has its tactical limitations. Today we face the unsettling task of fighting a war whose cause seems to have vanished in the midst of battle. A war with no discernible causi belli is an illegitimate war, prima facie. So why didn't we leave yesterday? We remain to ameliorate the effects of going there in the first place. We remain because leaving might further aggravate the wound caused by our arrival. We remain because we are there.
There are political fortunes and careers to think about. The frantic dissembling of our leaders as they struggle to save face and power is, regrettably, the nature of that particular beast. Self-preservation is a first-order political instinct. At this advanced stage of the conflict, honest men and women have a duty to demand of their politicians: what are we fighting for? This message was articulated in the results of the mid-term election.
Not surprisingly, the recent amplification of the war's stated aims was timed to coincide with the mid-term election cycle. Tasked with attempting to preserve a majority, Karl Rove was almost certainly the architect. For one thing, it smacks of the 'clash of culture' clarion call so often used to incite what Sullivan calls the Christianist wing of the Republican Party. Incumbent legislators —frankly of both parties—needed a rhetorical barricade, a phrase to hang their hats. No doubt civilization would be better served by throwing all the bums out. At least fresh bums have the leeway to break with bad prior policy. It remains to be seen just how spirited an opposition the new Democratic majorities in Congress will provide. Both parties are equally beholden to Zionist interests, at least as much as they are to the will of the American people.
This is not to say that the original Iraq plan lacked for ambition, even as it was peddled to the general public as a little ole WMD scavenger-hunt. The Neo-conservatives, students of elitist-extraordinaire Leo Strauss who famously endorsed deceiving the masses for the purpose of accomplishing the Greater Good, set out to accomplish in Iraq the first leg of a Middle-East Marshall Plan —by itself, no small task, though substantially less ambitious than, say, a battle for the soul of world-civilization. However judging from the recent Vanity Fair article2, even the neo-cons' appetite for hegemony appears to be waning.
The neo-conservative blueprint can be found in the eerily prescient Statement of Principle written in 1997 under the auspices of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Practically wistful in its tone for "some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor" with which to cement American resolve for Middle East interventionism, the Statement has become the Rosetta Stone for conspiracy theorists everywhere. If PNAC didn't explicitly coordinate the 9/11 attack (a thought this writer simply cannot entertain), then surely they provided the karmic framework for such a fortuitous tragedy to ensue. One has only to look at the military adventurism commenced over the last five years under the ostensible banner of 911 to realize that full advantage was taken. Does it matter frankly whether the conspiracy was overt or implicit given the subsequent chain of events?
Iraq was to be the oil-rich, self-financing and democratized beachhead for this enterprise. Horrible execution in Iraq has surely shelved any large-scale transformative Mid-East plan for at least another generation, if not another century. Given the demographic realities pressing down on Israel, this delay may indeed prove fatal to that outflanked entity.
As the tactical miscues mounted —driven largely by Rumsfeld's 21st century (read: woefully inadequate) military force— the rhetoric had no choice but to grow to match the ever-widening scope of the fiasco. Thus it's in Rummie's tactical quagmire that the etymological roots of our current hyperbolic struggle for the soul of the universe can be traced.
The bad Greek play that is Iraq has a flawed character for every palette. In the flash of a U.N. Powerpoint presentation, Colin Powell became our era's Neville Chamberlain, an apologist for epic, if not outright willful, geo-strategic miscalculation. Senator Carl Levin characterized Powell's lapse in good counsel to the President as a complete "abdication."
For Powell anyway, the rehabilitative gears are in full swing. We learned recently that he was merely a loyal soldier serving at the pleasure of his President. But what was a tin soldier doing in the role of our nation's Diplomat-in-Chief, a position more suited to the wiles of a Metternich? It pays to recall that Powell, the most popular Republican figure in 2000, was selected to the Bush cabinet on the strength of his electoral appeal. Whether he was offered the right seat is a matter of debate. This is not to impugn Powell's competence; merely to say his selection was preeminently a political one.
Cheney wears many hats: corporatist, ideologue, Beltway bandit, war profiteer, Shylock. No doubt a potent enabler of the war effort with his proximity to the President, he seems more a synthesizer of various pro-war interests, than a Prime Mover. Though I readily confess this is pure conjecture on my part.
Relative influence notwithstanding, Cheney's formidable arrogance is handily eclipsed by that of his former boss, Don Rumsfeld. An unbowed technocrat of no great ideological persuasion, Rumsfeld was clearly cut from the Robert McNamara-MBA-wunderkind cloth. Awash in hubris and repeating Hitler's mistake, he endeavored to prosecute two fronts simultaneously. The easy one, he thought, would be subduing the Baathists; the harder one would be disabusing the Pentagon's old-school Army brass of their penchant for large scale 'boots-on-the-ground' warfare. As it turned out, neither adversary proved a particularly easy opponent, or is it that both enjoyed an accidental alliance, deriving advantage from combined numbers?
Rumsfeld had to fight the Baathists (boss' orders). But he could easily have postponed an internecine turf battle for a more propitious time. In his outsized ambitions, Rumsfeld betrayed the fatal flaw of so many would-be heroes: he thought himself too clever —by about half-a-war. The real tragedy is that, to pay for Rummie's overreach, America may well have to lose. Twice.
History may well tap Rumsfeld as the Kaiser Wilhelm —or is it the mad Captain Ahab?— of the Iraq debacle, with copious assistance from a bevy of second-mates. The White Whale never changes: it's always existential dread, and of course inexhaustible terror.
Indeed the nation finds itself on a bloody, strategically unmoored, treadmill fueled by arrogance and denial. Or, as former diplomat Richard Armitage characterized the current vacuous circle: "We've got to have more men fall to honor the memories of those who have already fallen."
Armitage's loopy logic echoes the grinding banality and capriciousness of WWI so grimly captured in Erich Remarque's seminal war novel, All Quiet on the Western Front: "A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends." Who today possesses the courage to end a war that lacks the internal logic to end itself?
In WWI, fear for the consequences of cessation without victory created its own rationale, prolonging the carnage beyond any reasonable 'military objectives'. A refusal to 'cut and run' can be a facet of character, provided it doesn't descend into stultifying inertia. It must never substitute for a strategy. Yet isn't it being touted today as precisely that, a strategy?
Of course when wartime enters an interminable phase, the optimal time for ending the madness is always sooner rather than later. Capping the innate absurdity of WWI, an armistice was arranged for the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. Poetic logic suggests a perfectly logical cessation date for the current war: the 11th day of the 11th month of 2008, 11:00 pm sharp. That would be ninety years to the hour after the Great War's end, and seven days before the election of a new President. For those with a more meaningful end-date, the world is all ears.
Notes:
1 "The Wagging of the 'Civil' Tongues", Dana Milbank, 'Washington Sketch' Column, August 22, 2006
2 "Neo Culpa", by David Rose, November 2006
Norman Ball is a Virginia-based writer, musician and poet. Some of his recent on-line efforts can be seen at Bright Lights Film Journal, Identity Theory, Potomac, Big Ugly Review and Folly.