Who's Really Winning In America's
Jihad?
by Lewis H Lapham
Harper's Magazine, January, 2002
Randolph Bourne - War is the health of
the state.
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.
Democracy
in America
Home Page