Tomgram

Societies are shaped by the means of destruction

Posted on

Below are three recent pieces from writers I admire who try to step back to catch some essence of our moment: Barbara Ehrenreich, whose book Blood Rites turned our ideas about the origins of war upside down, reminds us that in our world the means of destruction as much as the means of production shape who we are. The Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, author most recently of Upside Down, A Primer for the Looking-Glass World, considers the contradictions embedded in this war and in an imperial president, who has, as ever, declared war in the name of peace. And Jonathan Schell, author of the upcoming The Unconquerable World, suggests the depths of the constitutional crisis we find ourselves in, domestically and internationally, while reminding us that “unilateralism was born in Florida.”

You might also take a look at two pieces that appeared along with Ehrenreich’s in the packed Los Angeles Times Sunday opinion section. American historian and former John F. Kennedy aide, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has written a strong piece (Good Foreign Policy a Casualty of War) — especially who wrote it and when it was published — that compares our strike against Iraq to Pearl Harbor. The key passage is:

“But let us continue to ask why our government chose to impose this war. The choice reflects a fatal turn in U.S. foreign policy, in which the strategic doctrine of containment and deterrence that led us to peaceful victory during the Cold War has been replaced by the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. The president has adopted a policy of “anticipatory self-defense” that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy. Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy.”

Schlesinger, I’m sure, remembers well that, during the Cuban Missile crisis, Kennedy’s brother Robert, then Attorney General, rejected the military’s suggestion of a preemptive strike against missile sites in Cuba manned by Soviet advisors, saying, “My brother is not going to be the Tojo of the 1960s.”

On the same pages, James Reston Jr. considers how many Arabs frame the war in Iraq in the long view of history. In his piece To the Arabs, This Crusade Too Will Fail) the following is a crucial passage because there has been next to no coverage here of how this administration’s plans in the Middle East are now radicalizing previously moderate thought and institutions in the Arab world. This is an important and untold story:

“What about mainstream Islam? It has taken the American threat of imminent war to persuade established Islam into embracing the metaphor of an American crusade. Earlier this month, the most powerful moral voice of the world’s Sunni Muslims, representing 80% of all Muslims worldwide, the Islamic scholars of Al Azhar University in Cairo, proclaimed America’s war to be “the new crusade.” What was after Sept. 11 the province of the radical has now become the duty of the true believer everywhere.

“‘According to Islamic law, if the enemy steps on Muslims’ land, jihad becomes a duty on every male and female Muslim,’ read the statement by the Islamic Research Academy. It calls upon ‘Arabs and Muslims throughout the world to be ready to defend themselves and their faith…. Our Arab and Islamic nation, and even our faith, are a main target of all these military buildups.'”

Schlesinger, I’m sure, remembers well that, during the Cuban Missile crisis, Kennedy’s brother Robert, then Attorney General, rejected the military’s suggestion of a preemptive strike against missile sites in Cuba manned by Soviet advisors, saying, “My brother is not going to be the Tojo of the 1960s.”

On the same pages, James Reston Jr. considers how many Arabs frame the war in Iraq in the long view of history. In his piece To the Arabs, This Crusade Too Will Fail) the following is a crucial passage because there has been next to no coverage here of how this administration’s plans in the Middle East are now radicalizing previously moderate thought and institutions in the Arab world. This is an important and untold story:

“What about mainstream Islam? It has taken the American threat of imminent war to persuade established Islam into embracing the metaphor of an American crusade. Earlier this month, the most powerful moral voice of the world’s Sunni Muslims, representing 80% of all Muslims worldwide, the Islamic scholars of Al Azhar University in Cairo, proclaimed America’s war to be “the new crusade.” What was after Sept. 11 the province of the radical has now become the duty of the true believer everywhere.

“‘According to Islamic law, if the enemy steps on Muslims’ land, jihad becomes a duty on every male and female Muslim,’ read the statement by the Islamic Research Academy. It calls upon ‘Arabs and Muslims throughout the world to be ready to defend themselves and their faith…. Our Arab and Islamic nation, and even our faith, are a main target of all these military buildups.'”

Finally, from yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle Insight section I recommend a piece by the director of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Joseph Cinncione, What comes next? The shape of the postwar world. He concludes:

“The ‘bold stroke’ so long sought by administration hawks has now hammered not only Hussein’s regime but the international institutions so patiently constructed by Democrats and Republicans over the past 60 years. It will destabilize the region, increase terrorism, decrease alliance unity and make the spread of deadly weapons more likely without measurably increasing our national security.

“That will be the postwar world.”

Tom

Disease of Our Making
Wars produce warlike societies, which in turn make the world more dangerous
By Barbara Ehrenreich
The Los Angeles Times
March 23, 2003

Only three types of creatures engage in warfare: humans, chimpanzees and ants. In the case of ants, we assume war is instinctually driven. Many have concluded that the same is also true of humans. After all, the earliest archeological evidence of human war is from 12,000 years ago, dating back to the very beginning of settled, agricultural life, and well before such innovations as capitalism and cities.

Sweeping through recorded history, you can find a predilection for warfare among hunter-gatherers, herding and farming peoples, industrial and even postindustrial societies, democracies and dictatorships. The old pop-feminist explanation — testosterone — would seem, at first sight, to fit the facts.

But war is too complex and collective an activity to be accounted for by any warlike instinct lurking within the individual psyche

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” and “Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War.”

To read more Ehrenreich click here

The War
By Eduardo Galeano
La Jornada (posted on ZNET)
March 23, 2003

Just think. In the middle of last year, when this war was still only gestating, George W. Bush stated that ‘we have to be ready to attack in any obscure corner of the world’; ergo, Iraq is an obscure corner of the world. Does Bush believe that civilization began in Texas and his fellow Texans invented writing? Has he really never heard of the library of Niniveh, the tower of Babel or the hanging gardens of Babylon? Has he really never heard even one of the tales in the thousand and one nights of Baghdad?

[translated by Alistair Ross]

To read more Galeano click here

American Tragedy
by Jonathan Schell
The Nation Magazine
April 7, 2003

The decision to go to war to overthrow the government of Iraq will bring unreckonable death and suffering to that country, the surrounding region and, possibly, the United States. It also marks a culmination in the rise within the United States of an immense concentration of unaccountable power that poses the greatest threat to the American constitutional system since the Watergate crisis. This transformation, in turn, threatens to push the world into a new era of rivalry, confrontation and war. The location of the new power is of course the presidency (whose Augustan proportions make the “imperial” presidency of the cold war look like a mere practice run). Its sinews are the awesome might of the American military machine, which, since Congress’s serial surrender of the constitutional power to declare war, has passed wholly into the President’s hands. Its main political instrument is the Republican Party….

To read more Schell click here