War and Distance

We Americans have always had a peculiar attitude toward war, at least since the day Confederate General Joseph Johnston surrendered the last active Southern Army in the Civil War, the last war fought on American soil, to Union General William T. Sherman, concluding that Sherman could be little more than annoyed. Not only do we think we can win every war we enter or instigate, we think we can do it cleanly, with no damage to our military apparatus at large, and certainly no damage to the homefront. That was certainly the prevailing attitude of the United States as it came out of the Second World War as the only major nation that hadn't been partially or completely destroyed. The belief that America was destined to be blessed with divine protection and that nothing but good times were ahead angered many of the soldiers who'd actually fought the war in Europe and the Pacific, as articulated by WWII veteran Paul Fussell, one of America's greatest intellectuals, in his memoirs:

"I was angry at myself for my inability to make sense of this process [that of going from college student to trained killer to professor], to infer from it some general enlightenment instead of cynicism and nihilism. I was angry at the whole postwar atmosphere of public misinterpretation and fatuous optimism, the widespread feeling that the war had produced good for the United States, with good defined as people's ability to buy new cars and refrigerators. So what if 85 million people had been killed, most of them civilians? Here, no one had been bombed, eviscerated, burned to death, raped, or torn apart. Here the war was a sense of fun, for which act of national euphemism became necessary: the War Department was euphmeized into the Department of Defense, the armaments and war budget became the defense budget, and soon air strikes - later, surgical airstrikes - would replace the bombing of women and children. Public rhetoric was growing indistinguishable from commercial advertising, and I came to regard both as the cynical manipulation of the weak of mind by the cunning and the avaricious."

It's only gotten worse since 1945, of course. Thanks to our armaments industry and a military policy devoted to maintaining a steady supply of oil for our consumptive economy, we Americans have grown even more detached from the horrors of war even as we use the heavy hand of force to change a part of the world to our liking. Until recently, this smugness was compounded by the idea that we were invulnerable to violence ourselves, The racial conflagrations of the Vietnam era, which destroyed many of our great cities, did little to change this belief. Those with means simply abandoned Newark or Detroit and fled to the suburbs, turning our cities into perpetual war zones more dangerous than some third-world capitals. So what - we could isolate ourselves from the mostly nonwhite underclass left behind and go on building the Great Enterprise of cheap cars, cheap tract houses and shopping malls, cheap goods, and cheap values. Violence in America happens to anonymous young black men on the six o'clock evening news, not the rest of us.

Despite the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that attitude hasn't changed. Yet it might change this time, with the new war against Iraq. We see the horrors of war more graphically than we ever did when television brought the Vietnam War into American living rooms in the late sixties, and the homefront, fearful of reprisals from an angry, hostile group of Arab martyrs, is bracing for an attack that may or may not come. In short, we are slowly beginning to realize that in war, innocent civilians get hurt - or worse. Because this time it could happen to us, not just innocent Iraqis.

We should realize that our power is not omnipotent or invulnerable, and that no good can come out of any conflict. Also, if and when we have to fight for something a little more precious than black gold, we should recognize that no war, however just, is risk-free, and that we should appreciate the simpler and more spiritually satisfying things in life. It's no accident that the French realize this already. They've lived through war. They've had it delivered to their own homefront. They know better, because they've been there.