Гор Видал - Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace

There have been ominous signs that our fragile liberties have been dramatically at risk since the 1970s when the white-shirt-blue-suit-discreet-tie FBI reinvented itself from a corps of "generalists," trained in law and accounting, into a confrontational "Special Weapons and Tactics" (aka SWAT) Green Beret-style army of warriors who like to dress up in camouflage or black ninja clothing and, depending on the caper, ski masks. In the early '80s an FBI super-SWAT team, the Hostage 270 Rescue Team , was formed. As so often happens in United States-speak, this group specialized not in freeing hostages or saving lives but in murderous attacks on groups that offended them like the Branch Davidians — evangelical Christians who were living peaceably in their own compound at Waco, Texas, until an FBI SWAT team, illegally using army tanks, killed eighty-two of them, including twenty-five children. This was 1993.

Post Tuesday, SWAT teams can now be used to go after suspect Arab Americans or, indeed, anyone who might be guilty of terrorism, a word without legal definition (how can you fight terrorism by suspending habeas corpus since those who want their corpuses released from prison are already locked up?). But in the post-Oklahoma City trauma, Clinton said that those who did not support his draconian legislation were terrorist coconspirators who wanted to turn "America into a safe house for terrorists." If the cool Clinton could so froth, what are we to expect from the overheated post-Tuesday Bush?

Incidentally, those who were shocked by Bush the Younger's shout that we are now "at war" with Osama should have quickly put on their collective thinking caps. Since a nation can only be at war with another nation-state, why did our smoldering if not yet burning bush come up with such a war cry? Think hard. This will count against your final grade. Give up? Well, most insurance companies have a rider that they need not pay for damage done by "an act of war." Although the men and women around Bush know nothing of war and less of our Constitution, they understand fund-raising. For this wartime exclusion, Hartford Life would soon be breaking open its piggy bank to finance Republicans for years to come. But the mean-spirited Washington Post pointed out that under U.S. case law, only a sovereign nation, not a bunch of radicals, can commit an "act of war." Good try, G.W. This now means that we the people, with our tax money, will be allowed to bail out the insurance companies, a rare privilege not afforded to just any old generation.

Although the American people have no direct means of influencing their government, their "opinions" are occasionally sampled through polls. According to a November 1995 CNN-Time poll, 55 percent of the people believe "the federal government has become so powerful that it poses a threat to the rights of ordinary citizens." Three days after Dark Tuesday, 74 percent said they thought, "It would be necessary for Americans to give up some of their personal freedoms." Eighty-six percent favored guards and metal detectors at public buildings and events. Thus, as the police state settles comfortably in place, one can imagine Cheney and Rumsfeld studying these figures, transfixed with joy. "It's what they always wanted, Dick."

"And to think we never knew, Don."

"Thanks to those liberals, Dick."

"We'll get those bastards now, Don."

It seems forgotten by our amnesiac media that we once energetically supported Saddam Hussein in Iraq's war against Iran and so Saddam thought, not unnaturally, that we wouldn't mind his taking over Kuwait's filling stations. Overnight our employee became Satan — and so remains, as we torment his people in the hope that they will rise up and overthrow him — as the Cubans were supposed, in their U.S.-imposed poverty, to have dismissed Castro for his ongoing refusal to allow the Kennedy brothers to murder him in their so-called Operation Mongoose. Our imperial disdain for the lesser breeds did not go unnoticed by the latest educated generation of Saudi Arabians, and by their evolving leader, Osama bin Laden, whose moment came in 2001 when a weak American president took office in questionable circumstances.

The New York Times is the principal dispenser of opinion received from corporate America. It generally stands tall, or tries to. Even so, as of September 13 the NYT's editorial columns were all slightly off-key.

Under the heading "Demands of Leadership" the NYT was upbeat, sort of. It's going to be okay if you work hard and keep your eye on the ball, Mr. President. Apparently Bush is "facing multiple challenges, but his most important job is a simple matter of leadership." Thank God. Not only is that all it takes, but it's simple , too! For a moment. The NYT then slips into the way things look as opposed to the way they ought to look. "The Administration spent much of yesterday trying to overcome the impression that Mr. Bush showed weakness when he did not return to Washington after the terrorists struck." But from what I could tell no one cared, while some of us felt marginally safer, that the national silly-billy was trapped in his Nebraska bunker. Patiently, the NYT spells it out for Bush and for us, too. "In the days ahead, Mr. Bush may be asking the nation to support military actions that many citizens, particularly those with relations in the service, will find alarming. He must show that he knows what he is doing." Well, that's a bull's-eye. If only FDR had got letters like that from Arthur Krock at the old NYT .

Finally, Anthony Lewis thinks it wise to eschew Bushite unilateralism in favor of cooperation with other nations in order to contain Tuesday's darkness by understanding its origin (my emphasis) while ceasing our provocations of cultures opposed to us and our arrangements. Lewis, unusually for a New York Times writer, favors peace now. So do I. But then we are old and have been to the wars and value our fast-diminishing freedoms unlike those jingoes now beating their tom-toms in Times Square in favor of all-out war for other Americans to fight.

As usual, the political columnist who has made the most sense of all this is William Pfaff in the International Herald Tribune (September 17, 2001). Unlike the provincial war lovers at the New York Times , he is appalled by the spectacle of an American president who declined to serve his country in Vietnam, howling for war against not a nation or even a religion but one man and his accomplices, a category that will ever widen.

Pfaff: The riposte of a civilized nation: one that believes in good, in human society and does oppose evil, has to be narrowly focused and, above all, intelligent.

Missiles are blunt weapons. Those terrorists are smart enough to make others bear the price for what they have done, and to exploit the results.

A maddened U.S. response that hurts still others is what they want: It will fuel the hatred that already fires the self-righteousness about their criminal acts against the innocent.

What the United States needs is cold reconsideration of how it has arrived at this pass. It needs, even more, to foresee disasters that might lie in the future.

War is the no-win all-lose option. The time has come to put the good Kofi Annan to use. As glorious as total revenge will be for our war lovers, a truce between Saladin and the Crusader-Zionists is in the interest of the entire human race. Long before the dread monotheists got their hands on history's neck, we had been taught how to handle feuds by none other than the god Apollo as dramatized by Aeschylus in Eumenides (a polite Greek term for the Furies who keep us daily company on CNN). Orestes, for the sin of matricide, cannot rid himself of the Furies who hound him wherever he goes. He appeals to the god Apollo who tells him to go to the UN — also known as the citizens' assembly at Athens — which he does and is acquitted on the ground that blood feuds must be ended or they will smolder forever, generation after generation, and great towers shall turn to flame and incinerate us all until "the thirsty dust shall never more suck up the darkly steaming blood. and vengeance crying death for death! But man with man and state with state shall vow the pledge of common hate and common friendship, that for man has oft made blessing out of ban, be ours until all time." Let Annan mediate between East and West before there is nothing left of either of us to salvage.