Written December 2002.
Published in Switzerland, February 2003. Included in German anti-war anthology, "No War," April 2003.
I am against the war in Iraq simply because the war is not necessary. Everything that needs to be accomplished there can be accomplished via patience, diligence, and the cooperation of the international community. In the American media, and, apparently, in the minds of our leaders, war has come to be thought of as a sort of elaborate industrial operation - expensive but necessary. And it will be expensive, but the expense of a different variety than they imagine: Babies will die, limbs will be blown off, farm animals will be reduced to red puddles, men will commit unspeakable acts which wake them from their sleep for the rest of their lives. And this is merely rhetoric: the actual effects, like God himself, are beyond our ability to imagine.
Here is an Iraqi child, waking up begrudgingly for school, one leg thrown out of his bed. Here is another, chewing on a strand of her own hair, nervous because she is the smallest and her father the poorest in the town. At this moment, they are walking around, dreaming of the future, but a number of them - some particular number, we will know it soon - will shortly be obliterated.
Likewise, a particular number of American and Iraqi soldiers are at present living and breathing, with fatherhood ahead of them, perhaps, grandfatherhood, a particular number of nights of mad lovemaking, excellent dinners, neighborly feuds, swims in the ocean, ahead of them - and all of this is to be forfeited, and for what? Presumably the rationale is: these must die so that others - a greater particular number - may live. But I don't believe it. I believe we could maximize the number of futures by working with the international community, with patience and humor and intensity and creativity. But what emanates from Washington these days is mostly anxiety, paranoia, and megalomania - a twisted version of America, poisoned, in my view, by the insularity that follows upon citizenship in CelebrityNation: a tiny fraternity of wealthy people, whose limited view of the world is fed on a mix of ego and rarefied air. I hope my European friends will believe me when I say that these men now running America are as strange, foreign, and inscrutable to most Americans as I expect they are to you.
The horrors of September 11, paradoxically, created a moment of transcendent possibility. Witnessing that horror, we could have vowed to work against horror in all its forms, all its locales. Instead that impulse shrank into a related but inferior one: We vowed to work against the possibility of that particular horror ever happening, to us, again. Then this impulse shrunk further: It seems our government is now dedicated to working to ensure that no horrors, of any kind, will ever happen, to us, again, no matter what the cost. This is a fundamentally neurotic ambition, based on fear, and devoid of the other emotions of September 11: compassion, empathy, deep sadness at the perennial state of human suffering, a resolve to act against this suffering wherever and whenever possible.
To paraphrase Dickens: the child-whores of Calcutta, the crackheads of Detroit, the AIDs-infected African, the weeping Parisian housewife, the insane, frightened Singaporean grandmother, the massacred and downtrodden and abused wherever they are - these are our business. Working to eradicate the darkness in the heart of murderers, this is our business. Inhabiting the most expansive model of the human, that is our business.
And this must be done without, in our zeal, crossing over on to the side of the murderers and the oppressors.
It is difficult to be simultaneously frightened and compassionate. It is difficult to be simultaneously wary and generous. Difficult, but necessary, as this is what constitutes goodness. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the test of an intelligent man is his ability to hold two contradictory ideas in his mind at once. Likewise, the test of an intelligent nation is its ability to be simultaneously vigilant and merciful. A sort of positive brinkmanship must be practiced: we must refrain, until the very last moment, from doing the very cruelest thing.
In a sense, we must decide what sort of species we are - what are our most reliable resources? Forever, one segment of humanity has believed that, through love, all things are possible. And by "love," I do not mean a spineless, smiley-faced acceptance of whatever one is handed, but rather, I suppose, a quality of determined awareness, of gentle abiding - a confidence that even the most disparate human beings are, at heart, more alike than different, and that some solution short of murder is possible.
It is, in my opinion, this confidence that is lacking in the current crisis.
I have spent most of the last few months in this little writing room, venturing out now and then to feed the dog or pick up my kids or chip away ice from the back-yard gate. I don't know the inside story of this war. What news I get comes filtered through the manic and stiff-headed American media, which seems to have become a shill for the status quo. The news seems to consist largely of reports on how well we are progressing towards our "goal" of invading Iraq.
So in the end, because my information and my intellect are limited, I have to base my opinion on images, reminding myself that, in a world of infinite variety, real-world corollaries of these images actually exist, at this very moment: A vase still holding flowers, a child still singing a nonsense song, a dog still barking at the moon, a building still standing, a son still alive.
Speed up the tape: The vase explodes, the child drops, the dog is flung into a stone wall, the building falls. The father sits in a chair, chewing his lower lip, remembering.
