The Mosquito and the Hammer

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Sun, 11 Sep 2005 22:06:48 -0700

The Mosquito and the Hammer

 

 

 

 

 

Tomdispatch Interview: James Carroll on Our Post-9/11 World

 

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?

pid=21456

 

[Note to Tomdispatch readers: This is the second in an ongoing

series of interviews at the site. The first was with Howard Zinn.

More will appear later in the month or in October. Tom]

 

 

The Mosquito and the Hammer

A Tomdispatch Interview with James Carroll

 

We pull into the parking lot at the same moment in separate cars,

both of us slightly vacation-disheveled. He wears a baseball-style

cap and a half-length purple raincoat in anticipation of the

downpour which begins soon after we huddle safely in a local coffee

shop. As I fumble with my two tape recorders, he immediately demurs

about the interview. He may have nothing new to say, he assures me,

and then absolves me, now and forever, of the need to make any use

whatsoever of anything we produce through our conversation.

 

The son of a lieutenant-general who was the founding director of the

Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, a former Catholic priest and

antiwar activist in the Vietnam era (the subject of his book, An

American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us),

Carroll has long pursued his interest in the ways in which faith and

force can coalesce into historically fatal brews. From this came,

for instance, his bestselling book Constantine's Sword: The Church

and the Jews.

 

Within days of the attacks of September 11, 2001, he became perhaps

our most passionate -- and prophetic -- columnist in the mainstream

media. His columns continue to appear, now every Monday, in the

Boston Globe. The Bush administration, with its fundamentalist

religious base, its Manichaean worldview, its urge toward a

civilizational conflict against Islam, and its deeply held

fascination with and belief in the all-encompassing powers of

military force, was, in a sense, made for him. And he grasped the

consequences of its actions with uncanny accuracy from the first

moments after our President announced his " war on terror, " just days

after 9/11. A remarkable collection of his Globe columns that begins

with the fall of the World Trade Center towers and the damaging of

the Pentagon and ends on the first anniversary of the invasion of

Iraq, Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War, will certainly prove one

of the best running records of that crucial period we have.

 

He speaks quietly and straightforwardly. You can almost see him

thinking as he talks. As he reenters the world we've passed through

these last years, his speech speeds up and gains a certain emphatic

cadence. You can feel in his voice the same impressive combination

of passion and intelligence, engagement and thoughtfulness that is a

hallmark of his weekly column. I turn on the tape recorders and we

begin to consider the world since September 11, 2001.

 

Tomdispatch: In September 2003, only five months after the invasion

of Iraq, you wrote in a column, " The war in Iraq is lost. What will

it take to face that truth this time? " Here we are two years later.

What has it taken, what will it take, to face that truth?

 

James Carroll: It's interesting to me that the tribunes of the truth

right now are the people who have felt the loss of the war most

intensely, the parents of the dead American soldiers. I find it

astounding that facing the truth in the month of August has been the

business almost solely of these parents, pro and con. Cindy Sheehan

on the one side, clearly saying that, whatever its imagined values,

this war's not worth what it's costing us and it's got to end

immediately; on the other side, parents, desperately trying to make

some sense of the loss of their child, who want the war to continue

so that he or she will not have died in vain. Both are facing a

basic truth of parental grief and, I'd also say, responding to the

same larger phenomenon: the war being lost. I'm not certain we'd

hear from any parents if the war were being won. Given the great

tragedy of losing your child to a war that's being lost, nobody gets

to the question of whether it's just or not.

 

It's heartbreaking to me that, in American political discourse, what

discussion there is of the larger human and political questions has

fallen to these heartbroken parents. Where are the Democrats? Where,

for that matter, are the Republicans? On the floor of Congress, has

there been a discussion of this war? I mean in the Vietnam years you

did have the astounding Fulbright hearings. [Democratic Senator

William] Fulbright was in defiance of [Democratic President] Lyndon

Johnson when those hearings were initiated, that's for sure. Where

are the hearings today? We have a political system that is supposed

to engage the great questions and they obviously aren't being

engaged. How long will it take us to face the truth? It's just

terrible that the truth has to be faced by these heartbroken

parents, because even if they're opposed to the war -- as I am --

they're not the ones to whom we should look for political wisdom on

how to resolve the terrible dilemma we're in.

 

TD: In March 2004, on the first anniversary of the invasion -- and

this was the piece with which you ended your book , Crusade -- you

wrote again, " Whatever happens from this week forward in Iraq, the

main outcome of the war for the United States is clear, we have

defeated ourselves. "

 

Carroll: I was already instructed by the history of the twentieth

century, summarized so well by in his book The

Unconquerable World. He cites numerous instances in which broad-

based, national resistance movements couldn't be defeated even by

massively superior military power. It was his insight that the last

century was rife with examples -- the most obvious for Americans

being Vietnam -- where a huge superiority in firepower was

irrelevant against even a minority resistance movement based in an

indigenous population; and it's clear that this so-called insurgency

in Iraq is a minority resistance movement, largely Sunni, and that

it doesn't matter if it's a minority. There's an indigenous

population within which it resides and which fuels it. And all of

that was quickly evident. In fact, I think it was evident to George

H.W. Bush in 1991. It wasn't Vietnam we needed to learn from first

in this case; it really was the first Gulf War and Bush's

realpolitik decision to stop it based on the sure knowledge that

there was no way of defeating an indigenous popular religious

movement prepared to fight to the death.

 

Presiding Over the Destruction of the U.S. Army

 

TD: So where are we now as you see it?

 

Carroll: It's already become clear to people that we can't win this.

Who knows what being defeated means? I said we had lost because

there's no imposing our will on the people of Iraq. That's what this

constitutional imbroglio demonstrates. A month ago, Donald Rumsfeld

was insisting that there had to be a three-party agreement. In

August, it became clear that there would be none. So now there's a

two-party agreement and the Sunnis are out of it. Basically, this

political development has endorsed the Sunni resistance movement,

because they've been cut out of the future of Iraq. They have no

share of the oil. They have no access to real political power in

Baghdad. They have nothing to lose and that's a formula for endless

fighting.

 

TD: I was struck by recent statements by top American generals in

Iraq about draw-downs and withdrawals, all of them clearly

unauthorized by Washington. At the bottom, you have angry military

families, lowering morale, and the difficulties of signing people on

to the all-volunteer army; at the top, generals who didn't want to

be in Iraq in the first place and don't want to be there now.

 

Carroll: Well, they've been forced to preside over the destruction

of the United States Army, including the civilian system of support

for the Army -- the National Guard and the active Reserves. This is

the most important outcome of the war and, as with Vietnam, we'll be

paying the price for it for a generation.

 

TD: Knowing the Pentagon as you do, what kind of a price do you

think that will be?

 

Carroll: I would say, alas, that one of the things we're going to

resume is an overweening dependence on air power and strikes from

afar. It's clear, for instance, that the United States under the

present administration is not going to allow Iran to get anywhere

near a nuclear weapon. The only way they could try to impede that is

with air power. They have no army left to exert influence. If the

destruction of the United States Army is frightening, so is the

immunity from the present disaster of the Navy and the Air Force,

which are both far-distance striking forces. That's what they exist

for and they're intact. Their Tomahawk and Cruise missiles have

basically been sidelined. We have this massive high-firepower force

that's sitting offshore and we're surely going to resume our use of

such power from afar.

 

One of the things the United States of America claims to have

learned from the `90s is that we're not going to let genocidal

movements like the one in Rwanda unfold. Well, we've basically

destroyed the only military tool we have to respond to genocidal

movements, which is a ground force. You can't use air power against

a machete-wielding movement. And if you think that kind of conflict

won't happen in places where poverty is overwhelming and ecological

disaster is looming ever more terrifyingly, think again. What kind

of response to such catastrophe will a United States without a

functional army be capable of?

 

You know, in this way, we're now like the Soviet Union once it

collapsed into Russia. When it could no longer pay the salaries of

its soldiers, Russia fell back on its nuclear arsenal as its only

source of power. In a way the Soviet Union never was, Russia is now

a radically nuclear-dependent military power. The Red Army doesn't

really count for much any more. And we've done that to ourselves in

Iraq. This is what it means to have lost the war already. We didn't

need an enemy to do it for us. We've done it to ourselves.

 

TD: " We " being the Bush administration?

 

Carroll: Yes, the Bush administration, but " we " also being John

Kerry and the Democrats who refused to make the war an issue in the

presidential election campaign last year. I fault them every bit as

much as I fault the Republicans. At least Bush is being consistent

and driven ideologically by his unbelievably callow worldview. The

Democrats were radical cynics about it. They didn't buy the

preventive war doctrine. They didn't buy the weapons of mass

destruction justification for this war. They didn't buy any of it

and yet they didn't oppose it! The cynicism of the Democrats is one

of the most stunning outcomes of this war. And even now, as the

political conversation for next year's congressional election

begins, where's the discussion from the Democrats about this, the

second self-inflicted military catastrophe since World War II. At

least the first time, the Democrats were there. In the election of

1972, when they lost badly, George McGovern and company really did

engage this question.

 

We're desperately in need of a Eugene McCarthy, someone who will

speak the truth in a really clear and powerful way and in a

political context so that we can respond to it as a people. Eugene

McCarthy is putting it positively. I'd say negatively what we could

use is a Newt Gingrich, someone who could marshal political

resistance going into this next election period in a way that would

make the war a lively issue in every senatorial and congressional

election. We really need someone. In America, our system requires

someone of the political culture to invoke this discussion.

 

A Civilizational War against Islam

 

TD: In the first column you wrote after September 11, 2001, you

said, " How we respond to this catastrophe will define our

patriotism, shape the century, and memorialize our beloved dead. "

Four years later, how do you assess our response to each?

 

Carroll: Patriotism has become a hollow, partisan notion in our

country. It's been in the name of patriotism that we've turned our

young soldiers into scapegoats and fodder. The betrayal of the young

in the name of patriotism is a staggering fact of our post-9/11

response. The old men have carried the young men up the mountain and

put them on the altar. It's Abraham and Isaac all over again. It's

the oldest story, a kind of human sacrifice, and that's what's made

those cries of parents so poignant this August. But those cries also

have to include an element of self-accusation, because parents have

done it to their children. We've done it to our children. That's

what it means to destroy the United States Army. Night after night,

we see that the actual casualties of that destruction are young men,

and occasionally women, between the ages of 18 and 30. And this in

the name of patriotism.

 

On the second point, the shape of the world for the century to come,

look what the United States of America has given us --

civilizational war against Islam! Osama bin Laden hoped to ignite a

war between radically fundamentalist Islam and the secular West. And

he succeeded. We played right into his hands. Now, we see that war

being played out not just in Iraq and the Arab world generally, but

quite dramatically in Europe.

 

TD: You picked up on this in the first few days after 9/11 when you

caught Bush in a little slip of the tongue. He spoke of us entering

a " crusade " …

 

Carroll: … " This war on terrorism, this crusade. "

 

TD: Yes, which, you said, " came to him as naturally as a baseball

reference. " Are we now, with the protesting military families,

seeing a retreat from this kind of sacralizing of violence?

 

Carroll: No! I think the warnings signs are all around us for what

has happened -- the politicization of fundamentalist Christianity. I

mean, we've had that since the early days of the Cold War when Billy

Graham became a tribune of anticommunism. But what's new is the way

in which this marginal fundamentalist Christianity has entered the

political mainstream and taken hold on Capitol Hill. Dozens and

dozens of congressmen and senators are now overt Christian

fundamentalists who apply their theology -- including religious

categories like Armageddon and end-of-the-world justifications for

violence -- to their political decisions. The kind of apocalyptic

political thinking that Robert Jay Lifton has written about has now

become so mainstream that we even see it in the United States

military. For the first time, at least in my lifetime, overt

religiosity has emerged as a military virtue and I'm not just

talking about General [William] Boykin, the wacko who deliberately

and explicitly insulted the Islamic religion…

 

TD: …and who was promoted.

 

Carroll: And is still in power. Not just him but this most alarming

and insufficiently noted phenomenon of the rise of fundamentalist

Christianity at the Air Force Academy, conveniently located in the

neighborhood of the two most politicized fundamentalist religious

congregations in the country, Focus on the Family and the New Life

Ministries. A significant proportion of the cadet population is

reliably understood to be overt, born-again Christians and the

commandant has been explicit in his support of religious conformity

in the cadet corps. These are the people we are empowering with

custodianship over our most powerful weapons in a war increasingly

defined in religious terms by the President of the United States.

All of this is our side of a religious war against an increasingly

mobilized jihadist Islam.

 

Meanwhile in Europe, Great Britain had, until recently, been a far

more tolerant culture than the United States (as indicated by the

British welcome to large populations of Muslim immigrants over the

last generation). All of that is now being firmly and explicitly

repudiated by British lawmakers. You see it in the great cities of

Europe everywhere. When people in the Netherlands and France vote

against the European Constitution in some measure because it

represents to them an opening to Turkey and the world of Islam,

something quite large is happening.

 

Lighting the Dry Tinder of History

 

TD: Doesn't this take us back to a period you've studied deeply --

the Middle Ages?

 

Carroll: It's true. We don't sufficiently appreciate how the

paradigm of the crusades never ended for Europe. Europe came into

being in response to the threat of Islam. The European structure of

government, the royal families of Europe, they're all descended from

Charlemagne, grandson of the man who defeated the Islamic armies at

Tours. More than a thousand years ago, a system of identity first

took hold in Europe that defined itself against Islam. This is the

ultimate political Manichaeism in the European mind.

 

We're the children of this. Of course, Islam had been forgotten in

our time. Never mind that there were more than a billion Muslims in

the world. All through the Cold War, we thought that the other, the

stranger, the enemy was the Communist. But the Muslim world never

forgot about us. The crusades are yesterday to them. They've

understood better than we have that the West has somehow defined

itself against them.

 

It's in this context that we have to understand the Israeli-

Palestinian conflict. A thousand years ago, as now, the political

fate of Jerusalem was the military spark for the marshaling of a

holy war. The crusaders, after all, were going to Jerusalem to

rescue the Holy Land from the infidel, and the infidel was defined

as a twin-set, Muslims and Jews. The attack on Muslims happened

simultaneously with the first real attacks against Jews inside

Europe. The ease with which, in the Middle East, the conflict in

Israel has come to be subsumed as the defining conflict with the

West is part of this phenomenon.

 

In Cologne [Germany] last week, I met with the head of the Jewish

congregation and also the imam who heads the Muslim community, and

they both reported the same experience. They both feel they're on

the table -- the table of sacrifice -- in Europe. They're both

feeling vulnerable to attack and they're right to feel that way.

It's a very curious turn.

 

Anyway, the United States of America didn't understand the tinder it

was playing with and George Bush, in his naïve reference to the

crusades, demonstrated his profound ignorance of how deep in the

history of our culture these conflicts go. Osama bin Laden

understood this much better than Bush. It's no accident that the two

epithets of choice the jihadists use for the American enemy

are " crusaders " and " Jews, " and they're mobilizing epithets for vast

numbers of Muslim Arabs.

 

TD: Do you think that, in dancing with Osama bin Laden, Bush has

somehow turned him into something like a superpower? You know, a

word you used early on caught my eye. You said, " Mr. Bush's

hubristic foreign policy has been officially exposed as based on

nothing more than hallucination. " However clever bin Laden has been,

isn't there also something hallucinatory about all this?

 

Carroll: It's true that if you begin to treat an imagined enemy as

transcendent, at a certain point he becomes transcendent.

 

The Mosquito and the Hammer

 

TD: You said we " forgot " Islam. A theme of your writings and maybe

your life -- if you'll excuse my saying so -- is an American-style

willed forgetfulness. Two key concerns of yours that

seem " forgotten " in American life are the militarization of our

society and nuclear weapons. Your father was a general. Your next

book is about the Pentagon. What's the place of the Pentagon in our

life that we don't see?

 

Carroll: When George W. Bush responded to the crisis of 9/11, two

things came into play: his own temperament -- his ideological

impulses which were naïve, callow, dangerous, Manichaean,

triumphalist -- and the structure of the American government, which

was sixty years in the making. What's not sufficiently appreciated

is that Bush had few options in the way he might have responded to

9/11.

 

What was called for was vigorous diplomatic activity centered around

cooperative international law enforcement, but our government had

invested little of its resources in such diplomatic internationalism

in the previous two generations. What we had invested in since World

War II was massive military power, so it was natural for Bush to

turn first to a massive military response. The meshing of Bush's

temperament and a long-prepared American institutional response was

unfortunate, but there it was. As somebody said, when he turned to

his tool bag to respond to the mosquito of Osama bin Laden, the only

tool he had in it was a hammer, so he brought it down on Afghanistan

and destroyed it; then he brought it down on Iraq and destroyed it,

missing the mosquito, of course.

 

Something has happened in our country since the time of Franklin

Roosevelt that we haven't directly reckoned with. The book I've just

written has as its subtitle, " The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise

of American Power. " That polemical phrase " disastrous rise " comes

from Eisenhower's famous military-industrial-complex speech where he

explicitly warned against " the disastrous rise of misplaced power "

in America -- exactly the kind that has since come into being.

 

TD: And yet one of the hallucinatory aspects of this, don't you

think, is that when we responded after 9/11…

 

Carroll: …the power was empty. That's the irony, of course. We've

created for ourselves the disaster an enemy might have liked to

create for us. That was the essence of the Eisenhower warning. We've

sacrificed democratic values. What accounts for Abu Ghraib and

Guantánamo? What accounts for the abandonment of basic American

principles of how you treat accused people? We've abandoned this

fundamental tenet of American democracy ourselves! We didn't need an

invading force to take away this one chief pillar of the

Constitution. We took it down ourselves.

 

And we've barely begun to reckon with the war machine that we

created to fight the Soviet Union and that continued intact when the

Soviet Union disappeared. Of course, that was the revelation at the

end of the Cold War when the threat went away and our response

didn't change. This isn't a partisan argument, because the person

who presided over the so-called peace dividend which never came was

Bill Clinton; the person who presided over the time when we could

have dismantled our nuclear arsenal, or at least shrunk it to

reasonable levels (as even conservative military theorists wish we

had done) was Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton was the person who first

undercut the ideas of the International Criminal Court, the Nuclear

Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

When George Bush became president, he stepped into space created for

him by Bill Clinton. This isn't to demonize Clinton. It's just to

show that our political system had already been corrupted by

something we weren't reckoning with -- and the shorthand for that

something was " the Pentagon. "

 

TD: The bomb also arrived at that moment 60 years ago and you often

write about it as the most forgotten of things.

 

Carroll: Marc Trachtenberg, the political scientist, has this

phrase " atomic amnesia. " Everything having to do with atomic weapons

we seem to forget which is why the United States of America has had

such trouble reckoning with the authentic facts of what happened in

1945, the negotiations around the Japanese surrender impulse, the

invasion of Japan, and all of that. The first week of August every

year we see this flurry of American insistence on the necessity of

the bomb (almost all of which has been thoroughly debunked by

professional historians across the ideological spectrum). At the

other end of the spectrum, we have not begun to reckon at all with

the nonsense of American policies toward nuclear weapons today --

the fact that we're resuming their production even now, that we

continue to threaten their use even now. How can these questions be

so unreckoned with? Well, the answer is that they're part of this

larger phenomenon, the elephant in the center of the American living

room that we just walk around and nobody speaks about.

 

The Roman Empire -- and Ours

 

TD: I was thinking of that relatively brief moment just after 9/11

and before Iraq when pundits were talking about us as the new Roman

Empire; when there was this feeling, very much connected to the

Pentagon, that we had the power to dominate the world, from land,

from space, from wherever. Do you have anything to say about that

now?

 

Carroll: We're not sufficiently attuned to the fact that we of the

West are descended from the Roman Empire. It still exists in us. The

good things of the Roman Empire are what we remember about it -- the

roads, the language, the laws, the buildings, the classics. We're

children of the classical world. But we pay very little attention to

what the Roman Empire was to the people at its bottom -- the slaves

who built those roads; the many, many slaves for each citizen; the

oppressed and occupied peoples who were brought into the empire if

they submitted, but radically and completely smashed if they

resisted at all.

 

We Christians barely remember the Roman war against the Jewish

people in which historians now suggest that hundreds of thousands of

Jews were killed by the Romans between 70 and 135 CE. Why were the

Jews killed? Not because the Romans were anti-Semites. They were

killed because they resisted what for them was the blasphemous

occupation of the Holy Land of Israel by a godless army. It would

remain one of the most brutal exercises of military power in history

until the twentieth century. That's the Roman story.

 

We Americans are full of our sense of ourselves as having benign

imperial impulses. That's why the idea of the American Empire was

celebrated as a benign phenomenon. We were going to bring order to

the world. Well, yes… as long as you didn't resist us. And that's

where we really have something terrible in common with the Roman

Empire. If you resist us, we will do our best to destroy you, and

that's what's happening in Iraq right now, but not only in Iraq.

That's the saddest thing, because the way we destroy people is not

only by overt military power, but by writing you out of the world

economic and political system that we control. And if you're one of

those benighted people of Bangladesh, or Ghana, or Sudan, or

possibly Detroit, then that's the way we respond to you. We'd do

better in other words if we had a more complicated notion of what

the Roman Empire was. We must reckon with imperial power as it is

felt by people at the bottom. Rome's power. America's.

 

Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch