“We are at war.”
Orwell was never more right. I heard the above comment on NPR yesterday (11/9/07) during a discussion of the presidential candidates. The analyst was wrong. We are not at war, but we have entered 1984, the world of perpetual war. It might be Oceana against Eurasia today, but we could be fighting Eastasia tomorrow.
While we are not at war, we are warring. To actually be at war we have to be fighting some other nation-state. What we are doing is messing around in someone else’s civil war, which we started. Incidentally, democracy is not a panacea that delivers peace. It can actually have the counterintuitive effect of causing war. What real democracy does is empower the majority of the people. Now if only a few people have most of the wealth, and all of a sudden the poor have power, it is only rational that they try to redistribute the wealth to themselves. This is potentially socialism. The people who own the wealth hate it, and call it communism.
Democracy also has a problem if there are factions, like Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites. The federalists warned about that as we wrote our own constitution, which is why there are so many dikes in it to thwart democracy, since the most dangerous faction is the majority of the people. We laud the checks and balances in our constitution, but those checks and balances are there to keep democracy from getting out of hand, more than to check a powerful executive. Just think, most people want universal health care, but we don’t have it. Most people want to protect the environment, yet we’re the ones causing more global warming per capita. Most people want to get out of Iraq, but we’re still there. In this country, it is democracy that is being checked. Why don't citizens of the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have voting representation in Congress?
But enough about democracy, back to war. How did we get into this civil war in Iraq? We got involved because someone committed a crime in the US. Who did it? Somebody. Not a nation-state. Just a bunch of somebodies. Most of these somebodies actually came from the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia, but they sell us a lot of oil so we can’t do anything to them. But we’ve got to look strong! We can’t just let some somebodies push us around, and kill 3,000 people. We have to attack! So we start a civil war in another country.
If someone commits a crime, you don’t call it war. What’s the difference if a foreign national commits a crime, or a citizen? Do we call it war if an Englishman steals a purse from an American? What if a Saudi shoots someone? What if an American citizen, Ronni Moffitt, is killed by Chilean operatives in Washington D.C. in Operation Condor in 1976? If Bush had been president then, that would have given us an excuse to attack Bolivia, since the president/dictator of Chile at that time was Pinochet, our guy. The Saudis are our guys.
Hence we are not at war, we are warring. How else can you tell the difference? Just leave. If a nation-state follows you home, then you’re at war. Bush and Cheney would say that we fight over there so we don’t have to fight here. It’s the same logic as the Cold War and the domino theory. And like the Cold War, we designate the enemies and make the war, even if it has nothing to do with communism, or terrorism. We also waste money and lives in Iraq (and cause the death of more than 600,000 Iraqis) that could actually make life safer over here. Instead of actually investing in security in “the homeland,” we put the names of political writers like Naomi Wolf on the No-Fly List to harass them and keep them from making democracy a reality, from enforcing the will of the people, and getting us out of Iraq.
