The first casualty of war is said to be truth, but more precisely the casualty is complexity. In war, there are Evil and Good, Enemies and Allies, a Them and an Us, conveniently spelled U.S. George Bush declared: "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." Excoriating an enemy whose suicide bombers fly in the name of Allah, Bush also clarified that God is, in fact, on our side.
As a national spasm of righteous rage, war is a bad time for liberal intellectuals, whose very vocation is complexity. In war, domestic reform gets sidetracked; dissent gets confused with treason. Liberals themselves tend to divide into realists and idealists. The intellectual who agonizes over war's moral complexities risks getting punched out in a bar. In WWII, when Nazism was an unambiguous enemy, liberal intellectuals could reconcile patriotism with love of complex puzzles by joining the OSS.
This war, I fear, will be the most frustrating in our history. For all of the popular outrage and national unity, even our best-informed leaders literally don't know what to do. As I write this, the latest menace to Homeland Defense is said to be anthrax spores sprayed from single-engine crop dusters, which could easily depopulate a major city. How, without turning the United States into a garrison state, do we protect against this horror—not to mention insidious assaults on the water supply, computer mayhem, and car bombs made from common ingredients? What a grimly ironic twist on the splendidly decentralized Internet age. What passes for civil defense has been revealed as a patchwork of Keystone Kops—but how severe a cure is sensible? Even as a police state, how secure would we be?
The military challenge is no less baffling. There is a terrible risk that we will overreach or underreach; that we will target the wrong enemy and inflame hundreds of millions of ordinary Muslims without wiping out terrorists. For all its determination, the Bush administration doesn't entirely know whether Iraq was involved; whether to make war on Baghdad even if it was; whether to prosecute aground war in Afghanistan in winter. It doesn't know how well the terror network would operate without bin Laden, or even where he is. Compared to what we face now, Mutually Assured Destruction looks pretty good: The other side, at least, had a country and a civilian population that we could hold hostage.
If ever there were a moment to engage and debate complexities, it is this one. And in wartime, debate also risks turning poisonous. Some, to my left, think that Bush is simply to be resisted; that the roots of the present crisis are mainly in America's own imperial overreach and the injustices of the global order that America champions. Others, to my right, see this as a simple war of liberal democracy against a new totalitarianism. Each group thinks that the other is naive and dangerous. Both, I think, have pieces of the truth.
Certainly, the West's own swagger, from the Crusades through Churchill's carving up the post-Ottoman Near East, the cynical politics of oil, the propping up of client states from Iran to Egypt, and the double standard on Israeli excess have all stoked fundamentalist Islamic rage. Certainly, wretched refugee camps have been breeding grounds for two generations of militants; for some, suicide jihads are a step up. In a moment when the heart of New York has just been incinerated, dare a liberal mention words like Hiroshima? One risks getting slugged in that bar.
Can we admit that as we cherish our liberal democracy at home, we also recoil from some of what it does abroad. Isn't that what my generation was resisting in Vietnam? In this crisis, if America is heedless of historic grievance and reads the current conflict as nothing but Good versus Evil, we risk miscalculating the politics of alliance and misconstruing war aims as well as aims of ultimate peace and reconstruction.
At the same time, medieval Islam's ruthless assault on liberal democracy and its civilian population must be resisted totally, whatever the contributory causes. As good liberals, we were able to connect the misery of the industrial age to the appeal of Marxism and still battle the total menace of the Soviet communism. Indeed, the Kennan generation of liberals had enough appreciation of complexity to opt for patient containment of communism and to reject World War III. What a magnificent wartime argument that was.
So in this uncharted crisis, we must insist on the persistence of politics. Despite the national unity in grief and outrage, despite the national resolve that terror must end, there are grave questions of tactic, priority, and proportion. Presidential polls notwithstanding, Congress, miraculously, isn't giving the administration a blank check. The print press, if not television, has made plenty of room for skeptical and dissenting voices. We Americans are now arguing passionately about security and civil liberty, about what kind of economic stimulus and reconstruction we need, about Amtrak and airports and prescription drugs, about whether to repeal tax cuts in the name of equal sacrifice, and about the diplomatic imperative of multilateralism. Privatizing airport security has been revealed as a disaster, and privatizing Social Security is still a dubious idea. Everything debated before September 11 is still in contention, and more so.
As our president put it, terrorist fundamentalists hate our freedom "to disagree with each other." If this is indeed a different kind of war, it demands a different kind of wartime unity—one that celebrates strength in debate and embraces complexity, unflinchingly.
