Who's Really Winning In America's Jihad?
by Lewis H Lapham
Harper's Magazine, January, 2002
War is the health of the state. -Randolph Bourne
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since
it is the merger of state and corporate power. -Benito Mussolini
Three months ago I thought the United States had been given
a chance for a conversation about the future of the American political
idea, the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre providing
an impressive occasion for timely remarks on the topics of foreign
and domestic policy as well as an opportunity to ask what was
meant by the phrases "public service", "common
good", "civic interest". The newspapers were reporting
daily proofs of selfless citizenship, not only on the part of
the volunteers clearing the wreckage in lower Manhattan but also
on the part of people everywhere else in the US giving of their
money and effort to whatever need was nearest at hand, and I expected
something of the same public-spiritedness to find a voice in the
Congress, in the major news media, possibly on the television
talk shows. Informed argument about why and how America had come
to be perceived as a dissolute empire; instructive doubts cast
on the supposed omniscience of the global capital markets; sustained
questioning of the way in which American wealth is divided; a
distinction drawn between the ambitions of the American national
security state and the collective wellbeing of the American citizenry.
By December I knew that I'd been barking at the moon. The
conversation maybe had a chance of taking place in magazines of
small circulation, or possibly somewhere in the distant reaches
of C-SPAN (at 2am, on the stage of a college auditorium in Airbus,
Indiana), but not in the chambers of Congress, not under the circus
tents of the big-time news and entertainment media, not, except
by special permission and then only with a word of apology, on
network television.
Ted Koppel struck the preferred note of caution on November
2 when introducing his Nightline audience to Arundhati Roy, the
Indian novelist and a critic of the American bombing of Afghanistan:
"Some of you, many of you, are not going to like what you
hear tonight. You don't have to listen. But if you do, you should
know that dissent sometimes comes in strange packages ..."
It wasn't clear whether Koppel was referring to Roy's opinions
or to her sari, but at least he had the wit to know that she wasn't
coming to the program with a press release from the Boeing Company.
Most of the other security guards deciding what could and could
not be seen on camera explained the absence of talking heads critical
of the American "War on Terrorism" by saying that they
couldn't find any credible experts inclined to make an argument
both seditious and absurd. Thus Erik Sorenson, president of MSNBC,
telling a reporter from The New York Times that apart from the
raving of a few Hollywood celebrities there wasn't enough dissent
in the country "to warrant coverage". Or Peter Beinart,
editor of The New Republic, outraged by the noise of protest in
the streets: "This nation is now at war. And in such an environment,
domestic political dissent is immoral without a prior statement
of national solidarity, a choosing of sides."
In other words, as President Bush had become fond of saying
to United Nations ambassadors and foreign heads of state, "Either
you are with us, or you're with the terrorists."
As a means of quieting the distemper of the press, nothing
works as well as the anodyne of war. Caught up in the memory of
a tale told by Homer or Rudyard Kipling, the keepers of America's
conscience gladly smother the peepings of dissent and quickly
learn to stuff a sock into the mouth of an impiety. Show them
a cruise missile or a map, and they become more ferocious than
the generals. The scouts for the Sunday talk shows might have
found it difficult to recruit sceptics, but they didn't have any
trouble enlisting fuglemen to blow the trumpets of imperial advance
- Tom Brokaw, impatiently wanting to know why the Army wasn't
deploying ground troops "in division-size force" somewhere
south of Kabul; Dick Morris on Fox News, urging the Pentagon to
extend Civilisation's War Against Barbarism by occupying Libya
and invading Iraq.
The eagerness to enlarge the theatre of military operations
- a strategy endorsed not only by the regimental commanders at
Fox News but also by Newt Gingrich, Henry Kissinger and Senator
John McCain - seemed as senseless as the elevation of Osama bin
Laden to a world figure on the scale of Fidel Castro or Charles
de Gaulle, but by the end of October I'd begun to understand that
the heavily armoured media commentary fortified a broadcast studio
and went well with flags, the rhetoric made of the same red, white
and blue bunting that decorates the speeches of President Bush:
"We go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and
just in the world"; "We value the right to speak our
minds"; "Our ultimate victory is assured". The
viewing audience isn't expected to know what the words mean; it's
supposed to listen to them in the way it listens to a military
band playing Stars and Stripes Forever on the Washington Mall,
or to Ray Charles singing God Bless America in a World Series
baseball park.
Language degraded into the currency of propaganda doesn't
lend itself to conversations about the future course of the American
political idea, and if in September I thought that the destruction
of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon might teach America
something about its own history as well as furnishing us with
an English translation of the Arabic word for "student",
it was because I'd neglected to ask where the profit was to be
found in a cloud of black smoke rising from the ruin of lower
Manhattan. Where was the silver lining, and where the blessings
in disguise? Cui bono?, the oldest of the old maxims once learned
in a high school Latin class. To what end, and in whose interest,
do we astonish the world with the magnificence of "Operation
Enduring Freedom"?
The attacks on the buildings in Virginia and New York were
abominable and unprovoked, inflicting an as yet unspecified sum
of damage and an as yet incalculable measure of grief, but, as
historian Michael Howard has observed, they didn't constitute
an act of war. By choosing to define them as such, we invested
a gang of murderous criminals with the sovereignty of a nation-state
(or, better yet, with the authority of a world-encircling religion)
and declared war on both an unknown enemy and an abstract noun.
Like an Arab jihad against capitalism, the American jihad against
terrorism cannot be won or lost; nor does it ever end. We might
as well be sending the 101st Airborne Division to conquer lust,
annihilate greed, capture the sin of pride. Howard regards the
careless use of language as "a very natural but terrible
and irrevocable error".
If so, it is an error that works to the advantage of the American
political, military and industrial interests that prefer the oligarchic
and corporatist forms of government to those of a democracy.
Absent the excitements of a foreign war, in what domestic
political accident might we not have lost the wooden figurehead
of President George W Bush? Six months ago we were looking at
a man so obviously in the service of the plutocracy that he could
have been mistaken for a lawn jockey in the parking lot of a Houston
golf club or a prize fish mounted on the wall of a Jacksonville
bank. Having signed the law awarding $US1.4 trillion of tax relief
to the country's richest individuals, he'd reimbursed the people
who had paid his ticket to the White House, but the smiling pose
of "compassionate conservatism" was becoming hard to
hold amidst the gradual recognition of both its fraudulence and
rigidity. The economy was in trouble, the Senate had lost its
Republican majority, the President's approval ratings were sliding
into recession, and too many people still were wondering about
the sleights-of-hand that won the electoral vote in Florida. All
in all, not a promising outlook for a politician who had been
told, and so believed, that the running of a government was no
different than the management of a corporation.
On September 11, like Pinocchio brushed with the good fairy's
wand on old Gepetto's shelf of toys, the wooden figurehead turned
into flesh and blood. A great leader had been born, within a month
compared (by David Broder in The Washington Post) to Abraham Lincoln.
Suddenly we were looking at a man resplendent on the gilded throne
of power, his cliched speeches revealed as "Churchillian"
in the bright new morning of a war that secretary of defence Donald
Rumsfeld guessed might last as long as 40 years.
Which was, of course, good news for the defence industries
and the military establishment. The Senate wasn't slow to take
the point, voting, unanimously and without debate on October 2,
to fund a $US60 billion missile-defence system that to the best
of nearly everybody's knowledge can't hit its celestial targets
and offers no defence against the deadly weapons (smallpox virus,
dynamite stuffed into a barrel of nuclear waste, etc) likely to
be delivered in rented trucks. But why bother with cowardly and
disloyal argument? The nation is at war; civilisation trembles
in the balance, and what true American stoops to haggle over the
price of freedom?
If the US Senate cannot bring itself to question a proposition
as false as the missile-defence system, then what may we not expect
in the months to come? The navy will want bigger aircraft carriers,
the air force another 400 planes, the army a set of tanks equipped
with electronics so sophisticated that they can set up the targeting
co-ordinates for each of the Koran's 99 names for God.
Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and chairman of the
Armed Services Committee, attributed the lack of debate about
the missiles to the need for "unity" when America was
under siege; similar flows of sentiment stifled the asking of
rude questions about the war's long-term aims and short-term costs.
The Democratic members in both houses of the Congress as silent
as the chairs; no memorable speech or hint of eloquence; nothing
but an obedient show of hands and the hushed thumping of rubber
stamps.
Addressing a joint session of Congress on the evening of September
20 the President congratulated the assembled politicians for their
bravery in a time of trouble, thanking them "for what you
have already done, and for what we will do together". Fortunately
for the friends of good government, the patriotic news media have
quarantined the tone of irony for the duration of the campaign
against the world's "evildoers"; otherwise the President's
speech might have evoked not only a round of brisk applause but
also a gust of appreciative laughter. What the Congress had been
doing (in concert with the White House and the federal regulatory
agencies and brazen with the pretence of assisting the war effort)
was looting the country's public interest on behalf of its well-placed
private interests - the Interior Department relieved of its power
to veto mining projects on public lands; the pharmaceutical companies
negotiating the right to sell their drugs at the customary high
prices in the event of a biological or biochemical catastrophe;
the insurance industry collectively seeking a $US10 billion deductible;
best of all, the economic "stimulus package" passed
on October 24 by the House of Representatives in the amount of
$US101 billion, the bulk of the stimulant administered to wealthy
individuals and corporations.
Asked about the apparent senselessness of the repeal of the
corporate alternative minimum tax, Dick Armey, a Texan Republican
and the House majority leader, justified the gifts ($US1.4 billion
to IBM, $US833 million to General Motors, $US671 million to GE,
etc) by saying, "This country is in the middle of a war.
Now is not the time to provoke spending confrontations with our
Commander-in-Chief."
In answer to a related question as to why the $US 15 billion
soothing of economic wounds suffered by the airline industry didn't
allot any money, none whatsoever, to the 150,000 airline workers
who had lost their jobs in September, Armey observed that any
help extended to such people "is not commensurate with the
American spirit".
Who but a decadent Arab could have thought otherwise? Like
Senator Levin, Congressman Armey understood that in time of war
the US can't afford the distraction of petty domestic politics.
The promise of prescription-drug benefits for the elderly will
have to wait; so will nearly everything else that most people
associate with the words "national security" - repair
of the nation's roads and schools and the prospect of decent health
care for the 43 million citizens who can't afford to buy it at
the going rate.
The nation's corporate overlords don't associate the phrase
"national security" with the health and well-being of
the American public; they define the term as a means of acquiring
wealth and as a reason for directing the country's diplomacy towards
policies that return a handsome profit - the bombing of caves
in the Hindu Kush preferred to the building of houses in St Louis
or Detroit. The work goes more smoothly when conducted in an atmosphere
of constant dread, and how better to magnify that dread than by
declaring a war against terrorism? Enemies on every hand and all
of them unseen; nothing safe, not even a postcard from a maiden
aunt. Happy to be of service and proud to protect the American
people not only from bearded strangers but also from themselves,
the Congress in September hurried to the task of forging legal
shackles and restraints, also to the broadening of the government's
police powers and the further destruction of the Bill of Rights.
By the end of October the President had signed the USA PATRIOT
Act, 342 pages of small print that hardly anybody in the Senate
or the House of Representatives took the trouble to read but which
nevertheless permitted the attorney-general to expand telephone
and internet surveillance, extend the reach of wiretaps, open
financial and medical records to searches for suspicious behaviour
and criminal intent. Two weeks later he signed an emergency order
(conceding that it set aside "the principles of law and the
rules of evidence") allowing him to remand to a military
tribunal any foreign national about whom he had "reason to
believe" a rumour of cohabitation with a terrorist organisation,
a nihilist author or an anarchist idea. The FBI in the meantime
was rounding up legal immigrants of Middle Eastern descent (5,000
of them as of November 15) to inquire about their connections
to Saladin and the Third Crusade. Although the corporatist distaste
for the Constitution is nothing new (cf, the deliberate weakening
of the First, Fourth and Sixth Amendments over the past 20 years),
the guarantee of an always present danger extends the government's
prerogative to enforce whatever rule of law happens to prove convenient
to the rule of money.
On November 11 in Atlanta, standing in front of a photomontage
of heroic New York firemen, President Bush told his audience that
the nation "faces a threat to our freedoms, and the stakes
could not be higher". What he said was true, but not in the
way that he intended. There is more to fear from the fatwas issued
in Washington than from those drifting across the deserts of Central
Asia. The agents of Al Qaeda might wreck buildings and disrupt
commerce, maybe even manage to kill a number of US citizens, but
we do ourselves far greater harm if we pawn our civil rights and
consign the safekeeping of our liberties to Mullah John Ashcroft
and the mujahedeen in the hospitality tents of American crusade.
Lewis H Lapham is the editor of Harper's Magazine.
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