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Ground Zero
by Scott McConnell
Antiwar.com
February 26, 2002
Earlier this month, sixty scholars signed a document saying that the war the United States was waging fully satisfied the doctrinal requirements for a Just War. The statement failed to make clear whether this meant war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, or included war against the other countries that have appeared on the administration's target list. That list obviously includes Iraq, Iran, and North Korea; Norman Podhoretz, writing in the February Commentary, suggests we may have to smash – "willy-nilly" he puts it – five or six or seven Muslim governments, (including Norman's particular bęte noir, the Palestinian Authority) before final victory is achieved. If Just War doctrine can be stretched to accommodate that, it is unlikely ever to return to recognizable shape.
But
higher moral guidance to break the fever of self-absorbed hypernationalism is
sorely needed. The other day on the way back from lunch I stopped to pick up a
prescription at the pharmacy, my mealtime reading (The National Interest)
in hand. The pharmacist, a competent
and engaging man in his thirties, looked at the journal. The headline the "The
Future of Iraq" caught his eye. "You know what I think," he said,
lowering his voice. "Iraq shouldn't
have a future."
I
replied as if he meant divide it into ethnic cantons, perhaps impose on it some
sort of de-industrialization and pastoralization plan like one of Roosevelt's
advisors urged for defeated Nazi Germany. But I think he was hoping for genocide.
This
was a man who would jump through hoops to find a way to fill a prescription
if an Iraqi mother with a sick child happened into his store. A man who I don't
believe has ever been in any way harmed by someone from Iraq. The war fever
does strange things to moral sensibility.
And
not just to average workaday people. Writing in The Progressive's web site,
Matthew Rothschild
notes an item buried deep in the Bob Woodward's long Washington Post
series on post 9-11 decision making. The
Pentagon was preparing a slide show briefing for President Bush on war options,
and NSC advisor Condi Rice and her aide Frank Miller came by to screen the material
before it was shown. One of the options the Secretary of Defense had prepared
for W was "Thinking Outside the Box: Poison the Food Supply." Rice
and Miller objected even before the
slides were shown to the President – a biological attack on food would
violate the Geneva Convention and other treaties the US has signed.
When
thus challenged, Rumsfeld agreed. "You're right," he said. But Rotchshild
has a good point when he notes "Why this wasn't a major story in itself
is beyond me: The Secretary of Defense wanted to propose to the President that
he poison Afghanistan's food supply."
The
only chance the war on terror has of remaining a Just War is if it is focused
on the Al Qaeda terrorist networks and isn't transformed into a crusade against
the Muslim world. In this case a prudent moral sensibility isn't at cross purposes
with victory, but actually is a requirement for it.
For
when you think through the alternative vision, the expanded war against six
or seven Islamic regimes pushed by Norman Podhoretz and the Wall Street Journal
editorial page, it truly is a war without end with no prospect of success (the
likelihood of success is a key provision of of a war being considered, by Christian
Doctrine, a Just War).
At
the root of War Party's misconception is the superficial and ahistorical notion
that "bad" Muslim regimes can simply be uprooted – presumably
by very precise laser guided bombs – and that out of the resulting chaos,
pro-Western forces can emerge and transform the countries into pacific democracies.
As evidence Podhoretz points to the fact that the US managed in a few short
years to transform Nazi Germany and imperial Japan into capitalist democracies,
and that even in the "heartland of the evil empire" a similar transformation
seems to be happening in Eastern Europe and Russia. He adds that there is ample
evidence of yearning, in the Muslim world, to be part of the global marketplace.
The flood of interest in Western videos after the Taliban fled Kabul
demonstrates this, he writes.
But this is not persuasive. Germany was not a part of fundamentalist Islam, but a nation at the heart of the bourgeois West for many decades before Hitler. What was required after 1945 was de-Nazification (not so difficult since virtually all Nazis were then trying vigorously to separate themselves from whatever they might have believed five years previously). In Japan, the process was more complex, and required a lengthy military occupation on the heels of a horribly destructive war. Russia and Eastern Europe were historically part of Christendom, long before they were "the heartland of the evil empire." When Podhoretz suggests that that radical Islam would be sloughed off in a vanquished Middle East as easily as Marxist-Leninism was sloughed off in post-1989 Poland, he sounds extremely foolish.
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