Why Are We at War?

  DOTSON RADER: What I think is that we are facing a war of civilizations between an Islamic cult of death—

  NORMAN MAILER: Wait a minute. Cult of death? You’re going too far. For every Muslim who believes in your cult of death, thousands don’t. People who are ready to sacrifice their lives form a very special group. They don’t need big numbers.

  DOTSON RADER: But millions cheer them in the streets.

  NORMAN MAILER: Oh, it’s easy to cheer. I can cheer athletes who score winning touchdowns when I don’t know the first thing about them. I’m cheering for an idea, my team! That’s one thing. It’s another to shed your own blood. There’s a gulf between the two. Many a Muslim who hates us is nowhere near to being a terrorist.

  Still, so many of them do hate us.

  DOTSON RADER: Okay, recognizing that, why? Why are we so hated?

  NORMAN MAILER: To some degree it’s envy. Some human emotions are obvious. But we’re also hated for more intrusive reasons. Corporate capitalism does have this tendency to take over large parts of the economies of other countries. Often we are the next thing to cultural barbarians. We don’t always pay attention to what we are trampling. What intensifies the anger is how often we are successful in these commercial invasions. You go into a McDonald’s in Moscow and there are marble floors. The Russian equivalent of young corporate executives are phoning each other across the room on their cell phones. They’re proud of that. I spoke once at Moscow State University to a class that was studying American literature. One of the students asked me, “Is there anything in our economy that compares to American economy?” I said, “Yes. Your McDonald’s are better than ours.” And they loved it. They were delighted. They had something they could do that was better than us. It was as if Brooklyn College were playing the University of Nebraska in football. The score had been one hundred to nothing, but then they kicked a field goal—it’s now one hundred to three. And the Brooklyn College stands went crazy. So, by the same token, those are the people—and these are the young people in Moscow—who are reacting positively to American corporate culture.

  Now think of all the other people in Russia who hate the very thought that not only were they bankrupted by the United States, not only were they betrayed by a communism that many of them had believed in, but now on top of it they’re being culturally invaded by these people with their money-grubbing notions of food. And, worse, the young love it. The young are leaving them. So the hatred toward America intensifies.

  Now, take the West’s cultural invasion into Islam. The Muslim reaction is that Islam is endangered by modern technology and corporate capitalism. They see everything in America as aiming to destroy the basis of Islam. The huge freedom given to women in American culture is seen as an outrage by orthodox Muslims. American TV they find licentious in the extreme. They feel all that Islam stands for is going to be eroded by American culture. So, to repeat: The core of the hatred of Muslims toward us is the fear that they’re going to lose their own people to Western values. Maybe half the people in Muslim countries may want secretly to be free of Islam. And so the ones who retain the old religion become extreme in response. Many Muslims can put Christian fundamentalists to shame by the intensity of their belief. It’s an interesting belief, after all.

  There is one fascinating element in Islam, which is the idea that all Muslims are equal before God, a tremendous egalitarian concept. Like all organized religion, Islam ends up being the perversion of itself in practice. Just as in Christianity, compassion is supposed to be the greatest good, but its present exercise in the world seems to be a study in military power and greed. In Islam, no Muslim has the right to consider himself superior to another Muslim. What happens in reality is that you have oppressive societies run for the wealthy, with the poor getting less and less—tremendous economic inequalities in many a Muslim society. And tyrannical people in the seats of power.

  Now, of course, the Koran, like the Old and New Testaments, has something in it for everyone. You can run north, run south, blow east, you can blow west. But there have been numerous revolutions within Islam over the centuries to restore its original beliefs. There is no understanding of Islam until one recognizes that Muslims who are truly devoted feel they are in a direct relationship with God. Their Islamic culture is the most meaningful experience of their lives, and their culture is being infiltrated. They feel the kind of outrage toward us that, let’s say, a good Catholic would know if a black mass were performed in his church.

  DOTSON RADER: But if that’s true, if that’s what the motivation is about, then there’s no fixing it.

  NORMAN MAILER: There’s no quick fix. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that this is a war between those who believe the advance of technology is the best solution for human ills and those who believe that we got off the track somewhere a century ago, two centuries ago, five centuries ago, and we’ve been going in the wrong direction ever since, that the purpose of human beings on earth is not to obtain more and more technological power but to refine our souls. This is the deep divide that now goes on, even with many Americans. You know, what does it profit me if I gain the entire world and lose my soul?

  Now, I don’t want to paint myself into a corner where I am defending Islam. I’m sure they have as many sons of bitches as we have, maybe more. They probably have more in that they suffer lousier living conditions and they’re under more tension. Muslims also bear a huge sense of shame, because they were a superior civilization around 1200, 1300 A.D., the most advanced culture then, and now they lag behind. There is a deep sense of failure among them. Think of those periods in your life when you felt you were a failure, and recall the bitterness, the anger, the disturbance. Multiply that by the followers of a faith, and that gives some sense of how bad it can get.

  We in the West have this habit of looking for solutions. Part of the spirit of technology is to assume that there’s always a solution to a problem, or something damn close to one. There may be no solution this time. This may be the beginning of an international cancer we cannot cure. What’s in the mind of a cancer cell? Doubtless, its basic desire is to kill as many cells and invade as many organs as it can. So, too, the greater number of people the terrorists can wipe out, the happier they’re going to be. Before you feel too righteous and outraged, however, let me ask: Did Harry Truman shiver in his bed at the thought that a hundred thousand people had been killed in Hiroshima and another hundred thousand in Nagasaki two days later, or was he proud that he had won the war?

  6

  And, one could add, won it by extraordinary means, never employed before. The explosion of the first atom bomb had an immensely greater effect upon human identity, worldwide human identity, than 9/11; yes, an order of magnitude more. We’ve never recovered from the knowledge that our earthly universe is chained to a bomb larger than human measure. So many of the roots of human history were pulled out by that bomb, and we have been paying the price ever since.

  Part II

  WHY ARE WE AT WAR?

  ADDRESS TO THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB,

  SAN FRANCISCO, FEBRUARY 20, 2003

  It is probably true that at the beginning of the present push of the administration to go to war, the connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were minimal. Each, on the face of it, had to distrust the other. From Saddam’s point of view, bin Laden was the most troublesome kind of man, a religious zealot, that is to say a loose cannon, a warrior who could not be controlled. To bin Laden, Saddam was an irreligious brute, an unbalanced fool whose boldest ventures invariably crashed.

  The two were in competition as well. Each would look to control the future of the Muslim world, bin Laden conceivably for the greater glory of Allah and Saddam for the earthly delight of vastly augmenting his power. In the old days, in the nineteenth century, when the British had their empire, the Raj would have had the skill to set those two upon each other. It was the old rule of many a Victorian crazy house: Let the madmen duke it out, then jump the one or two who are l
eft.

  Today, however, these aims are different. Security is considered insecure unless the martial results are absolute. So the first American reaction to September 11 was to plan to destroy bin Laden and al Qaeda. When the campaign in Afghanistan failed, however, to capture the leading protagonist, even proved unable, indeed, to conclude whether he was alive or dead, the game had to shift. Our White House decided the real pea was under another shell. Not al Qaeda but Iraq.

  Political leaders and statesmen are serious men even when they appear to be fools, and it is rare to find them acting without some deeper reason they can offer to themselves. It is these covert motives in the Bush administration upon which I would like to speculate here. I will attempt to understand what the President and his inner cohort see as the logic of their present venture.

  Let me begin with Colin Powell’s presentation before the U.N. on February 5, 2003. Up to a point, it was well detailed and ready to prove (to no one’s dramatic surprise) that Saddam Hussein was violating every rule of the inspectors that he could get away with. Saddam, after all, had a keen nose for the vagaries of history. He understood that the longer one could delay powerful statesmen, the more they might weary of the soul-deadening boredom of dealing with a consummate liar who was artfully free of all the bonds of obligation and cooperation. It is no small gift to be an absolute liar. If you never tell the truth, you are virtually as safe as an honest man who never utters an untruth. When informed that you just swore to the opposite today of what you avowed yesterday, you remark, “I never said that,” or should the words be on record, you declare that you are grossly misinterpreted. Rich confusion is sown, teeming with permutations.

  So, Saddam had managed to survive seven years of inspection from 1991 to 1998. He had made deals—most of them under the counter—with the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Jordanians; the list is long. He also knew how to play on the sympathies of the third world. He convinced many a good heart. The continuing cruelty of America was starving the Iraqi children. The Iraqi children were, in large part, seriously malnourished by the embargo Saddam had brought upon himself, but indeed, if they had been healthy, he would have kept a score of six-year-olds starving long enough to dispatch a proper photograph around the globe. He was no good and he could prove it. He did so well at the games he played that he succeeded in declaring the inspections at an end by 1998.

  There had been talk before, and there was certainly talk then in the White House, that we had to send troops into Iraq as our reply to such flouting of the agreement. Unfortunately, Clinton’s adventure with Monica Lewinsky had left him a paralyzed warrior. In the midst of his public scandal, he could not afford to shed one drop of American blood. The proof was in Kosovo, where no American infantry went in with NATO and our bombers never dropped their product from any height within range of Serbian anti-aircraft. We did it all from fifteen thousand feet up. So Iraq was out of the question. Al Gore was a hawk at the time, ready, doubtless, to improve his future campaign image and rise thereby from wonk to stud—a necessary qualification for the presidency—but Clinton’s vulnerability stifled all that.

  So in 1998, Saddam Hussein got away with it. There had been no inspections since. Colin Powell’s speech was full of righteous indignation at the barefaced and heinous bravado of Saddam the Evil, but Powell was, of course, too intelligent a man to be surprised by these discoveries of malfeasance. The speech was an attempt to heat up America’s readiness to go to war. By the measure of our polls, half of the citizenry were unready. And this part of his speech certainly succeeded. The proof was that a good many Democratic senators who had been on the fence declared that they were in on the venture now; yes, they too were ready for war, God bless us.

  The major weakness in Powell’s presentation of the evidence was, however, the evidential link of Iraq to al Qaeda. It was, given the powerful auspices of the occasion, more than a bit on the sparse side. With the exception of Britain, the states with veto power in the Security Council, the French, the Chinese, and the Russians, were obviously not eager to satisfy the Bush passion to go to war as soon as possible. They wanted time to intensify inspections. They looked to containment as a solution.

  Not a week later, al Jazeera offered a recorded broadcast by bin Laden which gave a few hints that he and Saddam were now ready, conceivably, to enter into direct contact, even though he called the “socialists” in Baghdad “infidels.” But this last statement was in immediate contradiction to what he had just finished saying a moment earlier: “It does no hurt under these conditions [of attack by the West] that the interests of Muslims [will ultimately] contradict the interest of the socialists in the fight against the Crusaders.”

  Bin Laden may have chosen to be ambiguous and two-sided in his remarks, but the suggestion of a common interest, despite all, between al Qaeda and Saddam was also there. Was it finally happening? Had the enemy of Saddam’s enemy now become Saddam’s friend? If so, that could prove a disaster. We might vanquish Iraq and still suffer from the catastrophe we claimed to be going to war to avert. Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction could yet belong to bin Laden.

  Without those weapons, al Qaeda would have to scrape and scratch. But if Saddam were to make transfer of even a sizable fraction of his biowarfare and chemical stores, bin Laden would be considerably more dangerous. The inner diktat of George W. Bush to go to war with Iraq as rapidly as possible now had to face the possibility that Saddam had come up with an exceptional countermove. Was he saying, in effect, “Allow me to string along the inspections, and you are still relatively safe. You may be certain I will not rush to give my very best stuff to Osama bin Laden so long as we can keep playing this inspection game back and forth, back and forth. Go to war with me, however, and Osama will smile. I may go down in flames, but he and his people will be happy. Be certain, he wants you to go to war with me.”

  Since the sequence of these kinds of moves was present from the beginning, it could be asked, as indeed more than a few Americans were now asking: How did we allow such choices in the first place—these hellish Hobson’s choices?

  Meanwhile, the world was reacting in horror to the Bush agenda for war. The European edition of Time magazine had been conducting a poll on its website: “Which country poses a greater danger to world peace in 2003?” With 318,000 votes cast, the responses were: North Korea, 7 percent; Iraq, 8 percent; the United States, 84 percent …

  As John le Carré had put it to The Times of London: “America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.”

  Harold Pinter no longer chose to be subtle in language:

  … The American administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary. Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture of their government, but seem to be helpless.

  Unless Europe finds the solidarity, intelligence, courage and will to challenge and resist American power, Europe itself will deserve Alexander Herzen’s declaration “We are not the doctors. We are the disease.”

  According to Reuters, on February 15, more than 4 million people “from Bangkok to Brussels, from Canberra to Calcutta … took to the streets to pillory Bush as a bloodthirsty warmonger.”

  A quick review of the two years since George W. Bush took office may offer some light on why we are where we are. He came into office with the possibility of a recession, plus all the unhappy odor of his investiture through an election that could best be described as legitimate/illegitimate. America had learned all over again that Republicans had fine skills for dirty legal fighting. They were able to call, after all, on a powerful gene stream. The Republicans who led the campaign to seize Florida in the year 2000 are descended from 125 years of lawyers and bankers with the cold nerve and fired-up greed to foreclose on many a widow’s home or farm. Nor did these lawyers and bankers walk about suffused with guilt. They had the moral equivalent of Teflon on their souls. Church on Sunday, foreclose on Monday. Of course their descendants won in Flori
da. The Democrats still believed there were cherished rules to the game. They did not understand that rules no longer apply when the stakes are immense.

  If Bush’s legitimacy was in question then from the start, his performance as President was arousing scorn. When he spoke extempore, he sounded simple. When more articulate subordinates wrote his speeches, he had trouble fitting himself to the words.

  Then September 11 altered everything. It was as if our TV sets had come alive. For years we had been watching maelstrom extravaganzas on the tube, and enjoying them. We were insulated. A hundredth part of ourselves could step into the box and live with the fear. Now, an invasion from the Beyond! An Appearance! Gods and demons were invading the United States, coming in right off the TV screen. This may account in part for the odd, unaccountable guilt so many felt after September 11. It was as if untold divine forces were erupting in fury.

  And, of course, we were not in shape to feel free of guilt about September 11. The manic money-grab excitement of the Nineties had never been altogether separated from our pervasive American guilt. We were happy to be prosperous, but we still felt guilty. We are a Christian nation. The Judeo in Judeo-Christian is a grace note. We are a Christian nation. The supposition of a great many good Christians in America is that you were not meant to be all that rich. God didn’t necessarily want it. For certain, Jesus did not. You weren’t supposed to pile up a mountain of moolah. You were obligated to spend your life in altruistic acts. That was still one half of the good Christian psyche. The other half, pure American, was, as always: Beat everybody. One can offer a cruel but conceivably accurate remark: To be a mainstream American is to live as an oxymoron. You are a good Christian, but you strain to remain dynamically competitive. Of course, Jesus and Evel Knievel don’t consort too well in one psyche. Human rage and guilt do take on their uniquely American forms.