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 ry,
"Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war.
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar III.i.270
The tragedy
of war is that the unthinkable soon becomes the accepted. Yet those
who expect the macabre from their bloodthirsty enemies, and are
not awed by it — but rather are grim and ready to answer every
manifestation of evil with overwhelming force while still pledged
to a moral cause — usually prevail. Such is the case now with
America.
We were rather
startled, after Pearl Harbor, that Hitler would suddenly declare
war on the United States. Blinkered Americans woke up on December
8 to discover that all of Europe united under fascism was now every
bit as determined as Japan to wipe us out. Few thought that cannonballs
over Fort Sumter in but four years would lead to battles like Shiloh,
Antietam, and Cold Harbor; ironclads and repeating rifles; Lincoln
assassinated; and 600,000 dead. In the Gulf War, no pundit predicted
that the purportedly battle-hardened army of Saddam Hussein would
collapse within 100 hours — despite missiles raining down on
Israel and the Kuwaiti oil fields afire. When the dogs of war slip
loose, accurate prognosis is almost impossible; the surreal becomes
the typical.
Before Marathon,
the Greeks had purportedly been afraid even to look on the Persians
— yet once they charged head-on at that battle and slaughtered
them, Herodotus would say that a "destructive madness"
had taken hold of them. Saddam Hussein learned that neither the
threat of poison gas attacks on Tel Aviv nor ecoterrorism in the
oilfields could stop American armored divisions from destroying
his military. Not his terror but only American naiveté in
the guise of Realpolitik saved his regime.
In this present
war, we must brace for the unthinkable. The government in Pakistan
could crumble. A few nuclear weapons could conceivably fall into
the hands of renegade officers sympathetic to the Taliban, or be
smuggled out and sold. Far worse germs may reach our inner chambers
of government. A cornered Saddam may well send missiles again into
Israel; the oil fields might again be set on fire. There could be
splits in the Saudi royal family and terrorists' attempts to take
over that government. Tens of thousands of fundamentalists may flee
Pakistan to join the Taliban (promises, promises…). There may
be stored caches of Stinger missiles waiting for our low-level helicopter
attacks. Americans may be targeted in every country in the Middle
East and beyond. Indeed, we may see appalling things in this Götterdämmerung
that few can imagine — but then the vaporization of 6,000 of
our dear citizens, and the toppling of our landmarks, were themselves
rather unimaginable. Two kilotons of destructive power dropped into
downtown New York City at a time of peace is not to be forgotten.
I would not
wish to fight the United States — either militarily, politically,
or culturally. For every threat, our history teaches us that Americans
offer not just a rejoinder, but the specter of a devastating answer
of a magnitude almost inconceivable to those now chanting and threatening
in the streets of the Middle East. Do they have any idea of what
sort of dangerous people we really are? Do they understand the history
of the names of those ships now off their coasts, like the USS Peleliu
or Enterprise, or the pedigree of the 82nd or 101st Airborne?
The Saudis'
princes tease us with polite lectures about our errant policies,
more obliquely suggesting that our bombing may lose "friends"
among the moderate states. Yet America, unlike Saudi Arabia, has
not merely the veneer of modern civilization, but is its wellspring.
In a real war, despite severe dislocation we can survive, as in
the past, without Saudi oil. The royal family and the faux-culture
of the Gulf cannot. Fifteen of their citizens helped to murder 6,000
unsuspecting Americans in a time of peace — a single wing of
American fighters could end their entire regime in a few days of
war. Such are the frightening and horrendous realities that lurk
beneath the unspoken surface when the dogs of war are unleashed.
Battle indeed is the ultimate nightmare because accustomed rhetoric
recedes before the truth of abject military power; and so the more
the United States is shrilly hectored, in still more stark contrast
loom the silhouettes of aircraft carrier groups and B-52s.
We are warned
by the media that Americans might be blown up and shot abroad, but
a simple and quite legal change in our own immigration policy can
— if need be — expel all those visitors on visas from
all suspect countries of the Middle East, and so, besides offering
us increased protection, in a real war deny to thousands the access
to American education and Western technology which so many crave
(and yet apparently hate) all at once. So one of the great tragedies
of the present war is not merely that Americans will be targets
in the Arab world (most will discover that they can live without
seeing the Pyramids or flying a fighter jet out of a Saudi Arabian
hangar), but that an entire generation of Middle Easterners will
be under a veil of suspicion in Western countries. Life for an Egyptian
scientist on leave in Berlin, or a Saudi tourist with a camera in
Los Angeles, or a Lebanese visiting businessman with binoculars
on the bay in Boston, for years hence — terribile dictu
— will not quite be the same. All this sadness and unfairness
was unleashed not by us, but by Mr. bin Laden, who is canonized
by millions in the Muslim world. Yes, he is lionized by millions,
but the next few years will prove that no one in the last century
has done so much to harm so many of the Arab world.
When the dogs
are unleashed, there may be more catastrophes to come — none
of them our own. We are told that the entire Muslim world may turn
on us — a ghastly thought no doubt, but hardly as scary as
a united Europe aroused or a suddenly angered China, which have
real military capabilities. The fact is that the most potent countries
in the world — Japan, Russia, and India — are not mere
neutrals, but daily becoming incensed at Islamic fundamentalists
and enacting policies whose natural evolution can only end in the
isolation of the radical Muslim world.
A once snapping
and American-snarling Europe is hunting out terrorists as never
before and beginning to talk again of "the West." The
really bizarre specter after September 11 is not that the moderate
Muslim world threatens to fall to the side of the fundamentalists,
but that the leisured and sophisticated of Europe are now suddenly
talking as if they were seamen at Lepanto. The truth is that bin
Laden, the Taliban, and the shrieking fundamentalists in the Arab
capitals may have united hundreds of thousands against America,
but in the process their dogs of war have turned billions of the
world against them — a global community which they sorely need
but which, if the truth must be brutally confessed, in scientific
or economic terms, sadly does not need them at all.
After the unprovoked
murder of thousands of Americans, the governments in Saudi Arabia,
Pakistan, Palestine, Iraq, and Iran should not lecture us about
either our policies or morality, but rather should fear that they
themselves are on the edge of a frightening precipice. For the first
time in a half-century, America has the unity and resolve to act
as a nation rather than being paralyzed as a loose affiliation of
squabbling tribes, interests, and cultures. And America has discovered
in its renaissance that it has the military power to end hostile
militaries, the moral anger to confront corrupt governments, the
cultural dynamism to ostracize bellicose societies — and, after
the horrors of September and October, is nearing the recklessness
not to care.
Moderates in
the Middle East must draw us back from the brink to protect
themselves, not us. They must distance themselves far more
forcefully from those who sanction the murders of thousands of Americans.
They should not fund or sponsor radicals on our own shores. Millions
of Americans on Halloween night viewed on C-SPAN perhaps the most
ghoulish expression of unadulterated hatred ever telecast in American
history. Live from the National Press Club, the New Black Panther
Party and their Islamic allies in America — Imam Abdul Alim
Musa, Imam Mohammed Asi, Imam Abdel Razzag al Raggad, and others
of the various mosques in the Washington, D.C. area — cheered
on the Taliban, venting racist, anti-Semitic (and subversive) propaganda
in a time of war. These prime-time hate-mongers blamed Jewish agents
for the September 11 bombing, and were clearly not unhappy at the
deaths of thousands of Americans. Surely similar incendiary groups,
like the foul Ku Klux Klan, would not be given free time on public
television in a time of war. The transcript alone of that disgusting
spectacle before the era of Vietnam would have qualified as evidence
for treason and sedition under the classical definitions found in
Article III of the Constitution.
There is a
growing chorus of rarely-heard-from Americans between the two coasts
— one little known by fundamentalists in the Middle East, or
their agents in our capital — which has had enough of all this.
They are reaching a state of fury over thousands of our dead, constant
germ scares, bomb threats, screaming imams on public television
slandering our dead, sneering caveats from puffed-up academics,
and lectures from corrupt governments mixed with veiled threats.
So most Americans have sadly accepted that the dogs of war have
indeed slipped loose and their anger, as I can discern it from this
central California farm, can be summarized by something like, "Hell,
enough is enough — let's get to it and not stop until the whole
damn thing is over with!" That crescendo, which elites decry
as "unilateralism" and worse, is actually similar to the
mood of resolve and desperation of December 8, 1941, when we didn't
worry much about anything other than annihilating our enemies, and
letting neutrals, allies, threatening enemies, and our own critics
sort it all out and live with the aftershocks.
Reviled by
those in the Middle East, caricatured on campuses at home, and second-guessed
by pundits of every persuasion, our military and its leadership
— by any military standard of the past — have been rather
brilliant in waging a war of unprecedented logistical challenges
against an elusive enemy. In less than a month, America has devastated
an evil government over 6,000 miles distant at a loss of fewer than
five dead! Its planes roam freely over enemy skies; its opponents
are either ensconced in caves, hiding among mosques, or striking
out by the pathetic spectacles of public executions, threats to
poison the food of their own hungry, and the shanghaiing of reluctant
conscripts. Rarely has such a boasting adversary proved to be both
so craven and so foul. Critics of our progress, in the aftermath
of the Gulf War and Kosovo, and in ignorance of military history,
have judged past miraculous and rare victories as typical rather
than as exceptional in the long story of battle, and so have weirdly
defined success only as instantaneous triumph, rather than real
achievement over months — or a few years — of hard fighting.
Remember! —
Those who promised us a generation of suicide bombers three weeks
ago are lurking incognito among women on buses. Unlike the unexpected
attacks on Pearl Harbor or the invasion of South Korea, it has not
taken the United States six months to regroup and attack, but only
a few days. What is maddening to our enemies is not that we are
bombing with untold devastation, but that we are bombing with care
to avoid the innocent and to target the guilty, and all the while
are trying to feed the hungry — and with far more success than
failure.
If we have
learned anything from the 20th century, it is that the braggadocio
of fascism is not the same as the brawn of democracy —
and that the evil and weak should not attack the stronger and better.
Bin Laden and his supporters have let slip the dogs of war; history
teaches us that they more often turn on and devour their masters.
We must be patient and let the dogs reach their fury.
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