Then one day it’s over. The adrenaline’s gone and there’s a weird sense of disappointment. The French talk about nostalgie de la guerre. What it amounts to is postbellum depression. Right now I’m back in the States and, talking to friends, I find them weary, a little stunned, as if they’d just waked from a binge, and wondering in the Iraqi aftermath, “What was that all about?”
My colleague Chris Hedges, a veteran of the Central American, Balkan and Middle Eastern killing fields, wrote a wonderful meditation that touches on these feelings. He called his book, which came out last year, “War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning,” and he warned that this “enticing elixir” could be addictive. At the very least, it is distracting, and some lines Hedges cites from George Orwell’s “1984” are especially disturbing to read just now. Big Brother, as you’ll recall, waged constant wars against the Other to forge a false unity among the proles: “War had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war … The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil.”
So now President Bush, from the deck of an aircraft carrier, helmet in hand and cameras rolling, has told us the big battle in Iraq is over, but the war against terror goes on, and so does the messy work of occupation. We are asked to celebrate a victory, but not “the victory”; a milestone in the process of war, not the end of the war itself, which could be literally continuous.
This is not an experience that Americans have ever had before. The rush is over, but the war’s still on? How’s that? When do we know if we’ve actually, definitively, finally won?
Nobody’s saying, perhaps because nobody can. To know when a war is over, you have to have a pretty clear idea why it was begun. But with the Iraq adventure, war was launched against a sovereign country not because of what it had done, but because of what it might do. Saddam Hussein was singled out, defeated and deposed not because of his actions but because of his intentions, or, more accurately, his perceived intentions: to acquire weapons of mass destruction which he might share with terrorists who might use them against the United States.
The failure to find such weapons so far (I’m sure all of us are hoping that the just-discovered “mobile lab” is the real thing) and the certainty that WMD was not used by Saddam in any form, even after the fighting began, have tended to undermine the argument about his evil intentions.
So now the war is about our good intentions: to make Iraqis free and build a better more peaceful Middle East–even though those goals will take a generation, at least, to achieve.
Jeff Simon, author of “The Terrorist Trap” and president of Political Risk Assessment in California, warns against the danger of this “intentions gap” between perceptions and realities. “During the cold war, U.S. and Soviet foreign and military policies were based upon a correct reading of each other’s intentions,” he wrote in a recent e-mail. “The battlefield was clear, the doctrines were understood, and the stakes were made known to everyone. There was also an assumption of rationality on the part of each side’s decision makers.”
“Today, however, there is no well-defined battlefield, there are no clear-cut enemies, and the stakes are murky at best,” says Simon. A war is begun for one reason, ended for another. “The intentions gap,” says Simon, “allows the U.S. to use the threat of terrorism, i.e., the intentions of a particular state, group or individual, to pursue policies that sometimes have little to do with actually countering terrorism.”
“It takes patience and thoughtful analysis to obtain a ‘correct’ reading of another state, group, or individual’s intentions,” he adds. “And those qualities are not the ones that are encouraged in today’s instant access and live-coverage world that we live in. People expect quick answers to difficult problems. Our attention span is short.”
In fact, we’re no longer told when the war is over, we’re just told it’s OK to change the channel. Wars don’t end, they’re just moved out of prime time. So it’s not surprising if there’s a certain nostalgia for the events of a few weeks ago. Americans fight to win. And when the fighting raged, victory seemed at hand. Now that it’s waned, the war isn’t declared over, it’s revealed as endless. Certainly that’s not what we thought was intended.
