George Packer went to Ukraine to write for the Atlantic, and in the very first paragraph he begins levitating the Pentagon, in his way: “I told myself and others that Ukraine is the most important story of our time, that everything we should care about is on the line there. I believed it then, and I believe it now, but all of this talk put a nice gloss on the simple, unjustifiable desire to be there and see.”
This is a massive red flag. War as an opportunity for perfect moral clarity leads so many astray. Christopher Hitchens wrote after 9/11:
In order to get my own emotions out of the way, I should say briefly that on that day I shared the general register of feeling, from disgust to rage, but was also aware of something that would not quite disclose itself. It only became fully evident quite late that evening. And to my surprise (and pleasure), it was exhilaration. I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a traveling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated. On one side, the ethics of the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan. (Those are the ones I love, by the way.) On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic fascism. I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials. And because it is so interesting.
This delusion was possible before the complicated matter of actually dealing with the war — before the reality presented itself that releasing democratic and demotic energies in Iraq would inevitably and predictably result in the persecution to near extinction of Chaldean Christianity and the Yezidis. It was possible to believe the war on terror had something to do with cosmopolitanism and secularism before the AUMF was used to ally with “moderate rebels” in Syria — who carried on beheading kids and persecuting Shia Muslims in kind.
But how many times are we going to repeat the error of Guy Crouchback in Waugh’s Sword of Honor trilogy? Many times.
“It ought to be possible to want Ukraine to win this war and still tell what you see and hear there honestly,” writes Packer. He will go on to narrate the mini-Stalingrads Russia is creating in the Ukrainian countryside. Packer’s piece promises that Ukrainians are fighting for the values America claims to hold dear. But does Packer have much affection for America?
I had come from a country where the bonds of trust have been worn down to nothing, where earnest declarations about building a new country while winning a war can’t be swallowed without a heavy dose of irony, and where cynicism is a protective reflex against these losses. So, as an American, I had begun to question Olesya’s cheerful optimism. Yet almost every Ukrainian I met shared it: “We will win.” And also: “No compromise.”
The moral and political unity forced on a people by an invasion of their country is not something to envy, actually. Not for someone who values democracy. And in fact there are clues in Packer’s piece that Ukrainians know better. He relays that many Ukrainians shared with him criticism of Volodomyr Zelensky, something that has been deeply frowned upon in American newsrooms since the war began.
The piece ends by reiterating Packer’s preference for a society united by war to the one he lives in. He reflects for a moment that the American volunteers he meets might not be latté liberals like himself:
I didn’t know what these men thought of American politics, and I didn’t want to know. Back home we might have argued; we might have detested each other. Here, we were joined by a common belief in what the Ukrainians were trying to do and admiration for how they were doing it. Here, all the complex infighting and chronic disappointments and sheer lethargy of any democratic society, but especially ours, dissolved, and the essential things—to be free and live with dignity—became clear. It almost seemed as if the U.S. would have to be attacked or undergo some other catastrophe for Americans to remember what Ukrainians have known from the start.
Well, with Packer’s readers in charge of American foreign policy, I’m sure catastrophe is in the mail. In the end, he lands on confusion. Russia must lose, he says; otherwise, “authoritarians in Ankara and Tehran and Beijing will understand that history is on their side.” Packer should ask Google which side of the war Ankara is on.
But of course this would risk understanding that wars such as these aren’t about pure moral and political abstractions, but about long-term national interests. “Moral clarity” of the sort sought by Packer is a deluded man’s way of justifying a persistent and stubborn geostrategic confusion. It is actually the refusal to think both strategically and morally.