causus belli

I've just read a story in The New Yorker that everyone should read. Unfortunately, the magazine doesn't put most of their content online, but it has posted a Q&A with the author, George Packer. This article is probably the most clear-eyed, perceptive piece I have read about the war in Iraq. Everyone should read it -- the acquired heft of its import moved me to tears.

The article is essentially a profile of a father whose son died in Iraq, but it's much more perceptive than, say, the Lila Lipscombe section of Farenheit 9/11. This is more than just a parade of grief. It's mostly about the disturbing ambivalence and the ideological pettiness that this war has prompted, qualities that distinguish it from other wars in our history. In a long middle section of the article, Packer tries to come to grips with the conflict's strange character:

Iraq provided a blank screen onto which Americans projected anything they wanted, in part because so few Americans had anything at stake there. The war's proponents and detractors spoke of the conflict largely in theoretical terms: imperialism, democracy, unilateralism, weapons of mass destruction, pre-emption, terrorism, totalitarianism, neoconservativism, appeasement. The exceptions were the soliders and their families, who carried almost the entire weight of the war.

Packer presents a scathing indictment of the Adminstration's conduct, arguing that "what prevented open and serious debate about the reasons for war was, above all, the character of the President." But he also scrutinizes ideologues and media voices on both sides who have seen in the war vindication of some narrow political position, as well as a Democratic opposition whose policies are bankrupt. He asks what happened to an anti-war movement that included millions of Americans in the buildup to the invasion but has essentially dissolved once the war became real.

The other night I was sitting with friends, discussing the state of the nation and asking what was the differecne between this conflict and Vietnam. Packer's article points out that Bush's behavior, his projection of a completely unmerited optimism, demonstrates that he's not "waiting up past midnight for the casualty figures to come in, like Lyndon Johnson in the Situation Room." No one in America is. For all of us, including the anti-war left, the conflict has become an empty echoing chamber into which all of our talk fades into nothingness. Public dissatisfaction with the war, the media blared last week, has reached record levels! Does that mean that the course of the war will alter significantly? Not likely.

I feel as if my own response to the war has been curiously neutered. Anesthetized. Packer and the father he profiles argue for a discourse based on truth rather than ideology, on trying to bring the reality of what's going on over there home to us. They call for leaders who can accept the "cognitive dissonance" of a war that was begun under false pretenses, which certainly did overthrow a despotic regime, which has brought about a certain form of democracy, and yet which may end up in only bringing more years of chaos to the nation it ostenbily was intended to save. That cannot be summarized into a few talking points. It's not as simple as "stay the course" or "bring the troops home now." We need leaders who are adult enough to begin that conversation, and who trust that the American people are adult enough to handle it.

I've started to think that the only way to effectively take action as a citizen in regard to the conflict is to argue for the re-instatement of the draft. An unlikely proposition, especially given recent poll figures about the war's popularity. But only with a universal draft, only if every family in America had some stake in what we were doing over there, only if every young man had to make a choice about what he was willing to risk his life for, would the war that we are all paying for be brought to the forefront of everyone's minds. Only then would we be compelled to demand the truth.