The first casualty of war is said to be truth, butmore 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 Bushdeclared: "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." Excoriating anenemy whose suicide bombers fly in the name of Allah, Bush also clarified thatGod is, in fact, on our side.
As a national spasm of righteous rage, war is a bad time for liberalintellectuals, whose very vocation is complexity. In war, domestic reform getssidetracked; dissent gets confused with treason. Liberals themselves tend todivide into realists and idealists. The intellectual who agonizes over war'smoral complexities risks getting punched out in a bar. In WWII, when Nazism wasan unambiguous enemy, liberal intellectuals could reconcile patriotism with loveof complex puzzles by joining the OSS.
This war, I fear, will be the most frustrating in our history. For all of thepopular outrage and national unity, even our best-informed leaders literallydon't know what to do. As I write this, the latest menace to Homeland Defense issaid to be anthrax spores sprayed from single-engine crop dusters, which couldeasily depopulate a major city. How, without turning the United States into agarrison state, do we protect against this horror--not to mention insidiousassaults on the water supply, computer mayhem, and car bombs made from commoningredients? What a grimly ironic twist on the splendidly decentralized Internetage. What passes for civil defense has been revealed as a patchwork of KeystoneKops--but how severe a cure is sensible? Even as a police state, how secure wouldwe be?
The military challenge is no less baffling. There is a terrible risk that wewill overreach or underreach; that we will target the wrong enemy and inflamehundreds of millions of ordinary Muslims without wiping out terrorists. For allits determination, the Bush administration doesn't entirely know whether Iraq wasinvolved; 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 networkwould operate without bin Laden, or even where he is. Compared to what we facenow, 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, itis this one. And in wartime, debate also risks turning poisonous. Some, to myleft, think that Bush is simply to be resisted; that the roots of the presentcrisis are mainly in America's own imperial overreach and the injustices of theglobal order that America champions. Others, to my right, see this as a simplewar of liberal democracy against a new totalitarianism. Each group thinks thatthe other is naive and dangerous. Both, I think, have pieces of the truth.
Certainly, the West's own swagger, from the Crusades throughChurchill'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 onIsraeli excess have all stoked fundamentalist Islamic rage. Certainly, wretchedrefugee camps have been breeding grounds for two generations of militants; forsome, suicide jihads are a step up. In a moment when the heart of New York hasjust been incinerated, dare a liberal mention words like Hiroshima? One risksgetting slugged in that bar.
Can we admit that as we cherish our liberal democracy at home, we also recoilfrom some of what it does abroad. Isn't that what my generation was resisting inVietnam? In this crisis, if America is heedless of historic grievance and readsthe current conflict as nothing but Good versus Evil, we risk miscalculating thepolitics of alliance and misconstruing war aims as well as aims of ultimate peaceand reconstruction.
At the same time, medieval Islam's ruthless assault on liberal democracy andits civilian population must be resisted totally, whatever the contributorycauses. As good liberals, we were able to connect the misery of the industrialage to the appeal of Marxism and still battle the total menace of the Sovietcommunism. Indeed, the Kennan generation of liberals had enough appreciation ofcomplexity to opt for patient containment of communism and to reject World WarIII. What a magnificent wartime argument that was.
So in this uncharted crisis, we must insist on the persistence ofpolitics. Despite the national unity in grief and outrage, despite the nationalresolve that terror must end, there are grave questions of tactic, priority, andproportion. Presidential polls notwithstanding, Congress, miraculously, isn'tgiving the administration a blank check. The print press, if not television, hasmade plenty of room for skeptical and dissenting voices. We Americans are nowarguing passionately about security and civil liberty, about what kind ofeconomic stimulus and reconstruction we need, about Amtrak and airports andprescription drugs, about whether to repeal tax cuts in the name of equalsacrifice, and about the diplomatic imperative of multilateralism. Privatizingairport security has been revealed as a disaster, and privatizing Social Securityis still a dubious idea. Everything debated before September 11 is still incontention, 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, itdemands a different kind of wartime unity--one that celebrates strength in debateand embraces complexity, unflinchingly.
