http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/10/5141/
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16470
by Norman Mailer
Published on Saturday, November 10, 2007 by The New York Review of Books
From our archives. The following essay by Norman Mailer was
published in July 2003 issue of The New York Review of Books. We
reprint it today - the day of his passing - November 10th 2007.
Exeunt: lightning and thunder, shock and awe. Dust, ash, fog, fire,
smoke, sand, blood, and a good deal of waste now move to the wings.
The stage, however, remains occupied. The question posed at
curtain-rise has not been answered. Why did we go to war? If no real
weapons of mass destruction are found, the question will keen in
pitch.Or, if some weapons are uncovered in Iraq, it is likely that
even more have been moved to new hiding places beyond the Iraqi
border. Should horrific events take place, we can count on a
predictable response: "Good, honest, innocent Americans died today
because of evil al-Qaeda terrorists." Yes, we will hear the
President's voice before he even utters such words. (For those of us
who are not happy with George W. Bush, we may as well recognize that
living with him in the Oval Office is like being married to a mate
who always says exactly what you know in advance he or she is going
to say, which helps to account for why more than half of America now
appears to love him.)
The key question remains-why did we go to war? It is not yet
answered. The host of responses has already produced a cognitive
stew. But the most painful single ingredient at the moment is, of
course, the discovery of the graves. We have relieved the world of a
monster who killed untold numbers, mega-numbers, of victims. Nowhere
is any emphasis put upon the fact that many of the bodies were of the
Shiites of southern Iraq who have been decimated repeatedly in the
last twelve years for daring to rebel against Saddam in the immediate
aftermath of the Gulf War. Of course, we were the ones who encouraged
them to revolt in the first place, and then failed to help them. Why?
There may have been an ongoing argument in the first Bush
administration which was finally won by those who believed that a
Shiite victory over Saddam could result in a host of Iraqi imams who
might make common cause with the Iranian ayatollahs, Shiites joining
with Shiites! Today, from the point of view of the remaining Iraqi
Shiites, it would be hard for us to prove to them that they were not
the victims of a double cross. So they may look upon the graves that
we congratulate ourselves for having liberated as sepulchral voices
calling out from their tombs-asking us to take a share of the blame.
Which, of course, we will not.
Yes, our guilt for a great part of those bodies remains a large
subtext and Saddam was creating mass graves all through the 1970s and
1980s. He killed Communists en masse in the 1970s, which didn't
bother us a bit. Then he slaughtered tens of thousands of Iraqis
during the war with Iran-a time when we supported him. A horde of
those newly discovered graves go back to that period. Of course, real
killers never look back.
The administration, however, was concerned only with how best to
expedite the war. They hastened to look for many a justifiable
reason. The Iraqis were a nuclear threat; they were teeming with
weapons of mass destruction; they were working closely with al-Qaeda;
they had even been the dirty geniuses behind 9/11. The reasons
offered to the American public proved skimpy, unverifiable, and void
of the realpolitik of our need to get a choke-hold on the Middle East
for many a reason more than Israel- Palestine. We had to sell the war
on false pretenses.
The intensity of the falsification could best be seen as a reflection
of the enormous damage 9/11 has brought to America's morale,
particularly the core-the corporation. All the organization people
high and low, managers, division heads, secretaries, salesmen,
accountants, market specialists, all that congeries of corporate
office American, plus all who had relatives, friends, or classmates
who worked in the Twin Towers-the shock traveled into the fundament
of the American psyche. And the American working class identified
with the warriors who were lost fighting that blaze, the firemen and
the police, all instantly ennobled.
It was a political bonanza for Bush provided he could deliver an
appropriate sense of revenge to the millions-or is it the tens of
millions?-who identified directly with those incinerated in the Twin
Towers. When Osama bin Laden failed to be captured by the posses we
sent to Afghanistan, Bush was thrust back to ongoing domestic
problems that did not give any immediate suggestion that they could
prove solution-friendly. The economy was sinking, the market was
down, and some classic bastions of American faith (corporate
integrity, the FBI, and the Catholic Church-to cite but three) had
each suffered a separate and grievous loss of face. Increasing
joblessness was undermining national morale. Since our administration
was conceivably not ready to tackle any one of the serious problems
looming before them that did not involve enriching the top, it was
natural for the administration to feel an impulse to move into larger
ventures, thrusts into the empyrean-war! We could say we went to war
because we very much needed a successful war as a species of psychic
rejuvenation. Any major excuse would do-nuclear threat, terrorist
nests, weapons of mass destruction-we could always make the final
claim that we were liberating the Iraqis. Who could argue with that?
One could not. One could only ask: What will the cost be to our democracy?
Be it said that the administration knew something a good many of us
did not-it knew that we had a very good, perhaps even an
extraordinarily good, if essentially untested, group of armed forces,
a skilled, disciplined, well-motivated military, career-focused and
run by a field-rank and general staff who were intelligent,
articulate, and considerably less corrupt than any other power cohort
in America.
In such a pass, how could the White House fail to use them? They
would prove quintessential morale-builders to a core element of
American life-those tens of millions of Americans who had been
spiritually wounded by 9/11. They could also serve an even larger
group, which had once been near to 50 percent of the population, and
remained key to the President's political footing. This group had
taken a real beating. As a matter of collective ego, the good average
white American male had had very little to nourish his morale since
the job market had gone bad, nothing, in fact, unless he happened to
be a member of the armed forces. There, it was certainly different.
The armed forces had become the paradigmatic equal of a great young
athlete looking to test his true size. Could it be that there was a
bozo out in the boondocks who was made to order, and his name was
Iraq? Iraq had a tough rep, but not much was left to him inside. A
dream opponent. A desert war is designed for an air force whose
state-of-the-art is comparable in perfection to a top-flight fashion
model on a runway. Yes, we would liberate the Iraqis.
So we went ahead against all obstacles-of which the UN was the first.
Wantonly, shamelessly, proudly, exuberantly, at least one half of our
prodigiously divided America could hardly wait for the new war. We
understood that our television was going to be terrific. And it was.
Sanitized but terrific-which is, after all, exactly what network and
good cable television are supposed to be.
And there were other factors for using our military skills, minor but
significant: these reasons return us to the ongoing malaise of the
white American male. He had been taking a daily drubbing over the
last thirty years. For better or worse, the women's movement has had
its breakthrough successes and the old, easy white male ego has
withered in the glare. Even the consolation of rooting for his team
on TV had been skewed. For many, there was now measurably less reward
in watching sports than there used to be, a clear and declarable
loss. The great white stars of yesteryear were for the most part
gone, gone in football, in basketball, in boxing, and half gone in
baseball. Black genius now prevailed in all these sports (and the
Hispanics were coming up fast; even the Asians were beginning to make
their mark). We white men were now left with half of tennis (at least
its male half), and might also point to ice hockey, skiing, soccer,
golf (with the notable exception of the Tiger), as well as lacrosse,
track, swimming, and the World Wrestling Federation-remnants of a
once great and glorious white athletic centrality.
Of course, there were sports fans who loved the stars on their
favorite teams without regard to race. Sometimes, they even liked
black athletes the most. Such white men tended to be liberals. They
were no use to Bush. He needed to take care of his more immediate
constituency. If he had a covert strength, it was his knowledge of
the unspoken things that bothered American white men the most-just
those matters they were not always ready to admit to themselves. The
first was that people hipped on sports can get overaddicted to
victory. Sports, the corporate ethic (advertising), and the American
flag had become a go-for-the-win triumvirate that had developed many
psychic connections with the military.
After all, war was, with all else, the most dramatic and serious
extrapolation of sports. The concept of victory could be seen by some
as the noblest species of profit in union with patriotism. So Bush
knew that a big victory in an easy war would work for the good white
American male. If blacks and Hispanics were representative of their
share of the population in the enlisted ranks, still they were not a
majority, and the faces of the officer corps (as seen on the tube)
suggested that the percentage of white men increased as one rose in
rank to field and general officers. Moreover, we had knockout tank
echelons, Super-Marines, and-one magical ace in the hole-the best air
force that ever existed. If we could not find our machismo anywhere
else, we could certainly count on the interface between combat and
technology. Let me then advance the offensive suggestion that this
may have been one of the covert but real reasons we went looking for
war. We knew we were likely to be good at it.
In the course, however, of all the quick events of the last few
months, our military passed through a transmogrification. Indeed, it
was one hellion of a morph. We went, willy-nilly, from a potentially
great athlete to serving as an emergency intern required to operate
at high speed on an awfully sick patient full of frustration,
outrage, and violence. Now in the last month, even as the patient is
getting stitched up somewhat, a new and troubling question arises:
Have any fresh medicines been developed to deal with what seem to be
teeming infections? Do we really know how to treat livid
suppurations? Or would it be better to just keep trusting our great
American luck, our faith in our divinely protected can-do luck? We
are, by custom, gung-ho. If these suppurations prove to be
unmanageable, or just too time-consuming, may we not leave them
behind? We could move on to the next venue. Syria, we might declare
in our best John Wayne voice: You can run, but you can't hide. Saudi
Arabia, you overrated tank of blubber, do you need us more than ever?
And Iran, watch it, we have eyes for you. You could be a real meal.
Because when we fight, we feel good, we are ready to go, and then go
some more. We have had a taste. Why, there's a basketful of billions
to be made in the Middle East just so long as we can stay ahead of
the trillions of debts that are coming after us back home.
Be it said: the motives that lead to a nation's major historical acts
can probably rise no higher than the spiritual understanding of its
leadership. While George W. may not know as much as he believes he
knows about the dispositions of God's blessing, he is driving us at
high speed all the same-this man at the wheel whose most legitimate
boast might be that he knew how to parlay the part-ownership of a
major-league baseball team into a gubernatorial win in Texas.
And-shall we ever forget?-was catapulted, by legal finesse and
finagling, into a now-tainted but still almighty hymn: Hail to the Chief!
No, we will rise no higher than the spiritual understanding of our
leadership. And now that the ardor of victory has begun to cool, some
will see how it is flawed. For we are victim once again of all those
advertising sciences that depend on mendacity and manipulation. We
have been gulled about the real reasons for this war, tweaked and
poked by some of the best button-pushers around to believe that we
won a noble and necessary contest when, in fact, the opponent was a
hollowed-out palooka whose monstrosities were ebbing into old age.
Perhaps he was not that old. Perhaps Saddam made a decision to go
underground with as much wealth as he had spirited away, and would
fund al-Qaeda or some extension of it in a collaboration of sorts
with Osama bin Laden-a new underground team, the Incompatible
Terrorist Twins. That is a hypothesis as mad as the world we are
beginning to live in.
Democracy, more than any other political system, depends on a modicum
of honesty. Ultimately, it is much at the mercy of a leader who has
never been embarrassed by himself. What is to be said of a man who
spent two years in the Air Force of the National Guard (as a way of
not having to go to Vietnam) and proceeded-like many another spoiled
and wealthy father's son-not to bother to show up for duty in his
second year of service? Most of us have episodes in our youth that
can cause us shame on reflection. It is a mark of maturation that we
do not try to profit from our early lacks and vices but do our best
to learn from them. Bush proceeded, however, to turn his declaration
of the Iraqi campaign's end into a mighty fashion show. He chose-this
overnight clone of Honest Abe-to arrive on the deck of the aircraft
carrier Abraham Lincoln on an S-3B Viking jet that came in with a
dramatic tail-hook landing. The carrier was easily within helicopter
range of San Diego but G.W. would not have been able to show himself
in flight regalia, and so would not have been able to demonstrate how
well he wore the uniform he had not honored. Jack Kennedy, a war
hero, was always in civvies while he was commander in chief. So was
General Eisenhower. George W. Bush, who might, if he had been
entirely on his own, have made a world-class male model (since he
never takes an awkward photograph), proceeded to tote the flight
helmet and sport the flight suit. There he was for the photo-op
looking like one more great guy among the great guys. Let us hope
that our democracy will survive these nonstop foulings of the nest.
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