Would You Like To Play a Game?

To The Editor:

Mark Ford's comments in response to David Blanchard's recent "fasting for peace" column were exactly right.

War is and always has been terrible. Having been a combat infantryman, I've see war up close and it's not pretty. My infantry company was the first ashore on D-Day in France. There were 9,000 Allied casualties in the first 24 hours on the Normandy beaches.

Blanchard is "stunned" when he equates military deaths with people on his block vanishing. He mourns our soldiers and dead Iraqis - although he apparently neglects to mourn the innocents around the world killed and maimed by radical Islamists.

I do not agree with Blanchard and the Peace Council on how peace and justice can be attained. They feel by laying down our arms we can accomplish peace. They must realize there are bad people in the world who would destroy this country.

Blanchard refuses to acknowledge that no amount of yearning or withdrawal of troops will accomplish the peace he seeks. Our current enemy is as ruthless as the Japanese suicide bombers or the German storm troopers in World War II.

I want peace as much as Blanchard; but as Mark Ford articulates, symbols and fasting and yearning and talking to madmen will not accomplish peace. It is the height of naivete to think if we left Iraq, the terrorists would back off. If we don't confront them in the Middle East, we will continue to pay a terrible price here and around the world.

We live by standards of good and evil, and our war on terror will determine which we choose. With people like Blanchard espousing anti-war paranoia, I fear we will lose the war at home, not on the battlefield.

Joseph

I'm not going to lash out too hard at Joe here. I don't necessarily disagree with him at a very core level. We haven't reached a point, as a species, where we can realistically expect everyone to simply put down their AK-47s and sing Kum Bi Yah. I certainly don't think it's wrong to hope and to work towards such a goal, but there will be times when use of force is imposed on us. That's the key concept here, however. There is a world of difference between having war forced upon us and going out looking for trouble. One cannot wage war to promote peace any more than, to borrow an example from Action is Eloquence, one can fuck for virginity. Promoting peace is the only way to achieve peace, and while we might not be there yet, I applaud David Blanchard and the Peace Council for their efforts, if not for their choice of method.

It's no secret that our economy revolves tightly around the Pentagon, and that there is far more money to be made from that system if resources are being expended in a military effort. When we elect oilmen and defense contractors to positions of power, we cut out the middle-man, letting corporate interest directly decide our foreign policy. Should we be surprised that we end up in a state of constant conflict? These same corporations have spent the decades following the advent of television perfecting the art of consumer marketing, and just like a pair or jeans, the newest flavor of Coke, and a low-carb diet, they are marketing to us the need for preemptive war and sustained occupation. Joseph exemplifies the results of this marketing campaign in his letter.

Are there "bad people in the world who would destroy this country?" There are, though frankly, I would argue that more of them live within her borders than do outside them. Regardless, this is an example of a broad, blanket statement meant to divide the world into very black and white camps of 'good' and 'bad'. The purpose of spreading this type of sentiment is simple; it is an attempt to keep us from feeling empathy for those designated as 'enemies.' If we are sure that all Iraqi insurgents are 'bad,' we're not likely to raise a fuss over their abuse in army prisons. Of course, many Iraqi insurgents are simply staunch nationalists, not so unlike the Americans who advocate this kind of stark black and white division. Even more insidious is the quietly spread but ultimately more successful concept that Muslims are 'bad.' Radical Muslims certainly have killed and maimed, just as radical Christians have. However, when we let that fact guide our opinion of all Muslims, there is no outcry when an American missile kills 18 villagers, including 5 children, in a failed attempt to kill one al Quaida leader. Would we fail to react if police opened fire with automatic weapons in an American suburb, killing 18 Americans in an attempt to kill a serial killer? Of course not. Those white, Christian Americans were 'good,' but olive-skinned, Muslim Pakistanis were probably 'bad' anyway. We may not consciously make this statement, but our silence is deafening and damning.

Similarly, the concept that we have to confront the terrorists in the 'Middle East' is flawed on many levels. First and foremost, we will face the terrorists wherever they decide to engage us. They have no capital that we can siege and we can't seem to locate their leaders. If we choose to fight them in a 'war,' then we allow for them to play on their own terms. They are determined to win, and they will not expend human resources that they don't have to spare. We are fighting them in Iraq because they have chosen to come to Iraq, not because they were already established there. Remember, al Quaida had no presence in Iraq before the American occupation, and none of the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 were from Iraq. This may seem like an easy fact to shrug off, but again, if we propose to be a bastion of justice and fairness in the world, how can we justify punishing a nation for a movement and a terrorist attack they had nothing to do with? Why don't we engage the terrorists in Israel, which would motivate even more of them to come out in the open, or in Saudi Arabia, where Osama Bin Laden and most of the 9/11 terrorists were from? These questions may seem foolishly implausible, but if our goal is simply to engage terrorists in the Middle East, these locations would make far more sense than Iraq. It is naive to think that our occupation in Iraq is simply an attempt to draw out terrorists, and it is dangerous to believe that we are justified in creating a war and occupation in a sovereign nation simply to deflect our enemies from our own borders. How many innocent people living across the ocean can we cause to suffer in the effort to keep ourselves safe? Is that a question we want to have to answer? If the answer is even one, can we claim moral superiority?

As long as we treat terrorists as an enemy nation, we are giving them exactly what they want, which is simple legitimacy. They can easily convince new recruits that America has declared war on them, as we've given them television footage and photos that appear to prove just that. We are helping people like Osama Bin Laden unite the Middle East - Sunnis and Shiites, devout Muslims and secularists - under a banner of anti-Americanism. The option is not to simply 'cut and run,' despite what the corporate-funded right-wing spin machine would have you believe. The correct response is to treat the terrorists for what they are: organized criminals. We can hunt down and prosecute those who order and fund these criminal acts, or we can wage an unwinnable war against an entire region of the world. We can not successfully do both.

No matter what we choose, however, we need to be vigilant in the fight for our minds, the battleground that has been mapped out by extremists right here in our own nation. Using the same techniques of advertising and marketing they've developed to sell products, they are now selling us ideas about what we need to be safe and what it means to be American. They want to paint the world in easily-digested black and white, good and evil. We know better than that. We know that the world is full of greys, and while it may be easier to simply see black and white, only by including the greys can we see all the detail. Conflicts don't always have a good side and a bad side, and even when they do, those labels usually apply only to leaders, not to entire populations. Who were the 'bad guys' in the American civil war? Did the entire population of Germany turn evil when Adolph Hitler took power? In a world of stark black and white, these questions would have easy answers, but history shows us that such easy answers are folly. We can employ the knowledge we've gained from history now and reject the catchy slogans of "The Terrorists Hate our Freedom" and "Support Our Troops" and "These Colors Don't Run," replacing them with meaningful discussion about what role we want to play in the world and what long-term effects our actions might have. In order to do that, however, we need to distinguish the sales pitches from the vital dialogue. If it fits on a bumper sticker, it's bullshit.

Recommended Reading: "Blinded by the Right," by David Brock. Brock was a participant in the formation of the right-wing spin machine and, among other things, was probably the person most responsible for the smearing of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court Hearings. Here he describes in vivid, first-person detail how the neoconservative movement diverged from the classic values of Republicans and Conservatives, and how they've managed to take control through shadowy plotting and the marketing of false information.