The war metaphor is the
basis of the Bush administration's reference to Iraq as the new front in
the war on terrorism. It is the image invoked in Bill O'Reilly's
assertion that we are currently in the midst of World War III. It is
the backdrop of Michael Barone's recent essay comparing the American
reconstruction of Iraq with the post-World War II
American reconstruction of Germany and Japan.
Indeed, it is even the premise behind Mark Helprin's recent
criticism of the Bush administration, expressed in his claim that
"[h]ad the United States delivered a coup de main soon after
September 11 and… had the president asked Congress on the
12th for a declaration of war…, the war on terrorism
would now be largely over."
Helprin's criticism
of the Bush administration policy makes the exact same assumption
that the administration and its defenders have also made. All
believe that we are fighting a war, with the disagreement arising
only from Helprin's seemingly brutally realistic insistence that we
should have struck sooner and
harder.
But the question
here is: Struck sooner and harder at what? Against whom would the
coup de main have been directed, and in what shape would the
fist have appeared that struck the blow? Does this mean nuking or
bombing randomly selected Arab cities across Africa and Asia? And if the administration had decided to
make a declaration of war, against what legal entity would this war
have been declared?
A failure to
descend to these questions of concrete detail is surprising in a
novelist like Mark Helprin -- a novelist's one great advantage,
after all, lies in his habit of visualizing in the vivid round what
the mere thinker is apt to see as a bloodless abstraction. In a
novel, it is not enough for the main character to declare war -- he
must declare it on someone, and this someone must be specified in
order to make the story seem like a story, instead of merely the
outline for one.
But who is the
someone upon whom we should have declared war? And what should have
been the target of our coup de main?
It is by asking
such questions that the latent wishful thinking in Helprin's
apparent Realpolitik becomes self-evident. Helprin wants to
believe in the war metaphor because this metaphor permits him to
think that if only the United States taken
suitable actions two years ago, we could have already won the war on
terrorism. The only difference between Helprin and the
administration is that Helprin's wishful thinking is expressed as
nostalgic regret for a lost opportunity, while the administration's
wishful thinking still remains their blueprint for victory.
This process of
wishful thinking began on 9/11, and it began the moment someone
first called 9/11 an act of war.
Clearly, those who
called 9/11 by this label intended it as a way of indicating their
justifiable horror and outrage at the act; but in choosing this
particular label to apply to the event, they were, without noticing
it, invoking a whole hidden array of metaphoric associations, all of
which revolved around the traditional concept of war -- associations
that unconsciously seduced our nation down a path that would
inevitably generate a whole gamut of misleading analogies, distorted
perspectives, and false hopes -- not to mention Monday morning
quarterbacking that fails to notice the radically different rules of
the game that emerged that September Tuesday over two years ago. On
that day traditional war became obsolete -- not because an epoch of
perpetual peace had arrived, but because a new form of anarchy had
been unleashed.
It is wishful
thinking to believe that what we have before us is simply another
war, of the kind that we have fought in the past. And no amount of
hit 'em hard or hang tough talk will alter this fact in the
slightest bit. Though it may serve to make us feel better, such a
response is as unrealistic in the present crisis as it would be in
fighting a renewed outbreak of the bubonic plague.
Yes, 9/11 was a
colossal act of violence, such as occurs in war. But war, as we have
come to understand it, is akin to Aristotle's idea of a work of art:
it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It begins with a political
demand that one's opponent will not, or cannot, accede to -- hence
the long and painfully drawn out diplomatic wrangling that precedes
the declaration of traditional war, as in the War of 1812 as well as
America's entry into
World War I and World War II. War is the acknowledged and official
act of a classical nation-state: it is not Hitler or Roosevelt that
declare war, but the nations, and the people, that they represent.
War, finally, is a
process that has a clear cut termination. Either the parties at war
reach a negotiated settlement, or else one of the parties surrenders
to the other -- a surrender which, like the original declaration, is
the official and acknowledged act of the nation-state that
originally declared war.
All metaphors
mislead. When a poet compares his love to a red red rose, he
probably does not mean to imply that she is capable of supplying her
energy needs through photosynthesis. But in the case of the war
metaphor, it is precisely these unintended implications that have
perversely gotten the upper hand in so much of our public debate and
reflection. We talk of fighting a new front on the war on terror,
when in fact the terrorists can open a front anywhere in the world,
at anytime they choose. Their last front was on four airliners
taking off on routine flights, and their next front may well be
equally unlikely. We worry, quite rightly, over weapons of mass
destruction in the hands of a man like Saddam Hussein, and thereby
forget that, in the different hands, a box-cutter can become a WMD
as well. We criticize the administration for not having already
ended the war on terrorism, but fail to ask the simple question that
anyone could have asked the first afternoon of 9/11, "How will we
ever know when it is
over?"
This simple
question demolishes at once any pretension to adequacy of the
current war metaphor. The day may come when there is no longer a
threat of terrorism, but this day will clearly not be a day like V-E
day or V-J after World War II. Nor will it end, as World War I did,
in an armistice capable of being reckoned down to the last second of
the last minute of the last hour of the last day.
No war has ever
been waged where the combatants had no way of deciding in advance
what would count as victory, or what it would look like when it
came, or even who it would be victory over. No war has ever been
waged where there was no one to negotiate with, and no demands that
could be met, or quid pro quo's that could be worked. No war has
ever been waged where surrender was impossible, simply because we
would not know to whom to surrender, or even what surrender would
mean.
Everything about the
present crisis is new. Historical analogy drawn from the period
prior to 9/11 more often misleads than illuminates. We are in a
brave new world, and the sooner we recognize the unreliability of
all our prior categories and metaphors to guide us, the sooner we
will free ourselves from the wishful thinking that perhaps an even
greater threat to our survival than the terrorists
themselves.