TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/121090/1210104.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 14KB | 278 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 40

A Long Hallucination of War


As TV broadcasts battle preparations, Americans ponder the moral
case for war

By LANCE MORROW -- Reported by Joseph J. Kane/Atlanta and
Priscilla Painton/New York, with other bureaus


    Two military precedents flicker almost subliminally through
the mind when Americans imagine war with Iraq: the conflict
might look like the Six-Day War. Or it might look like Vietnam.

    Those are the hypothetical extremes: best case, worst case.
Americans in a muscular frame of mind (not quite trusting it,
however) like to think that they might repeat Israel's 1967
victory: the brilliant lightning strikes, the armies flashing
across the desert, the war over quicker than Saturday-morning
cartoons.

    At the other emotional pole, the depressive version presents
itself, all darkness: a memory of Vietnam's self-delusions and
waste, its follies on an epic scale, its nightmares of the
unforeseen.

    In the four months since Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the
nation has been drifting amid vivid, dangerous possibilities,
sleepwalking. It has been a long, strange time. Rarely before
has a nation had such leisure for premeditation of war -- or
for premonition of its consequences.

    Television brought Vietnam into America's living rooms only
when the fighting was well under way. This time, Americans are
watching the preparations in the sand on television every
night: an instant, electronic diary. "We are being told how
many casualties we can expect on the first day, on the second
day," says Alan Chartock, a political scientist at the New
Paltz campus of the State University of New York. "The enemy
is talking to us, giving us nightly forecasts of doom."

    The crisis, half a world away, has become a presence of
bizarre intimacy. The nation's designated killers in the desert
look very young on camera and confess that they are scared.
Soldiers say hello to the nation on the morning television
shows, like kids away for spring break at some overheated,
militaristic Lauderdale. One trooper proposed marriage to his
girlfriend back home via satellite.

    In earlier wars, people cheered, the soldiers went marching
off, the battles got fought, then after a time the bodies --
and the cost of it all -- started coming home. Reality had its
cause and effect, its dramatic pace. Now the natural rhythms
of warmaking have gone electronic -- a good thing, possibly,
but disconcerting. Time gets dismantled somehow; slaughter gets
projected into the hypothetical. The adrenaline rushes
prematurely; the cost gets reckoned before the deployment. So
much anticipation overworks the nerves. The process causes
hallucinations and jitters. Normally war begins without such
neurotic projections.

    A tentative, uneasy atmosphere has settled over the American
mood. Says former United Auto Workers president Douglas A.
Fraser: "I'm not one who thinks we shouldn't be there. I think
there is general support for being there. But there is general
apprehension about a shooting war. Forever and a day, people
will say, `If he had waited until June, we wouldn't have had
to have a shooting war.'"

    The circuits of the historical imagination have been
overloaded anyway. The end of the cold war, the "peace
dividend," even the "end of history," as announced by one
thinker -- all these came tumbling by chaotically, and then
immediately darker themes set in: recession and the apocalyptic
clouds in the gulf.

    In the South, a historically bellicose region, a traveler
sees a random yellow ribbon tied on a mailbox. Church suppers
are putting together toilet kits to send to the soldiers in the
gulf. Mothers with children serving in the Middle East are
still sympathetic celebrities in the neighborhoods. And yet,
as a conservative civil engineer in Atlanta remarked wearily
last week, "every time I turn around, we seem to be going to
some damned war or another. It just doesn't seem to stop."

    In the Minneapolis suburb of Apple Valley, a middle school
teacher startled his students with a warning about the Desert
Shield pen pals to whom they had been writing since September.
"You need to prepare yourselves," Todd Beach told the class,
"because there is a possibility that the people you are writing
to might die."

    Many articulate opinions were still being expressed in favor
of the war effort. Gerald R. Thompson of Chesterfield, Mo.,
wrote in a letter to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "The crisis
in the gulf is driven by economic realities, not just political
ideals. Black gold, or Texas tea, is worth shedding American
lives for because oil is the blood that flows through the veins
of the American economy. Without economic freedom, our
political freedom is in serious trouble. The two go hand in
hand."

    But new hairline fractures have begun to appear in American
opinion. Some of the divisions are generational. Those with
memories of earlier wars seem warier than the young about new
military adventures. Vietnam veterans are especially cautious
about a new war. Says Richard Zierdt of Circle Pines, Minn.,
who served as an Air Force sergeant in Vietnam: "Veterans are
the least willing to create new veterans. War is never really
inevitable until you fire the first shot. But I think our
current policies are taking us that way."

    Polls suggest that young Americans are sometimes more eager
for battle, or anyway less wary. A 20-year-old seaman aboard
the U.S.S. Wisconsin in the gulf wrote to his family, "I am
glad I am the only one of my generation in our family to
volunteer to serve his country. Hopefully I will make a
triumphant return to Norfolk with a bunch of medals pinned to
my uniform. It looks like the combat service ribbon is a
shoo-in."

    One of the noisiest Vietnam poltergeists, of course, is the
draft. Since the Iraqi invasion in August, Army recruiting has
fallen off considerably. Many of those opposed to American
military action fear that a gulf war would revive conscription.
"If they come after my son," an Orlando mother vows, using
language from another era, "I am going to send him to Canada."

    On the op-ed page of the New York Times last week, an
independent television producer named Adam Wolman published an
ambivalent soliloquy about himself and the draft: "I know none
of us has the luxury of clinging to pacifism in this world; I
know it's not right to reap the joys of living here (or
anywhere) without earning my keep . . . But I just can't see
myself over there with a gun. I can't see myself running away
either. But believe me, I'm thinking about it."

    It is unlikely, however, that the U.S. will bring back the
draft. The armed forces now number 2 million, with l.5 million
reservists. Congress has ordered the military to cut its ranks
by 80,000 by next year. A draft would become necessary only if
the U.S. planned to maintain an enormous deployment of troops
abroad for a number of years, or if it suffered extremely high
casualties. Both of those conditions are unlikely for political
reasons. The entire thrust of the Bush strategy, after all, is
to get a war over quickly, if one comes. "Assuming we don't,"
says former Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb, "the
American people won't let you take enough casualties to need
a draft."

    Some, like former Navy Secretary James Webb, believe the
draft should be revived so that any American war effort would
be broadly, democratically based, the fighting and dying shared
by all classes. It is true that some 30% of Army enlisted men
are black, although blacks make up 12.4% of the population. But
the armed forces are no longer drawn as heavily from the ranks
of the poor, as they were, for example, in the volunteer force
of the late 1970s. Most U.S. soldiers now come from the middle
working class, with both affluent and very poor urban
populations underrepresented.

    Whether a draft would result in a fairer military service
is debatable. A renewal of conscription, however, would no
doubt restore to full vigor an antiwar movement that is already
beginning to stir. "One way to really get the fire going," says
Martin Binkin, a military manpower specialist at the Brookings
Institution, "is to start talking about a draft. I think what
you'd see is that normally quiet campuses, like Berkeley,
M.I.T. and Harvard, would explode with demonstrations: `Hell,
no, we won't go! We won't fight for Texaco.'"

    Organizers of a teach-in at the University of Michigan were
surprised when more than 1,500 people turned out to hear a
discussion of the Persian Gulf. "I figured we'd get 300," says
an organizer.

    Most Americans are morally clear about Saddam Hussein and
the nature of his crime against Kuwait. He may not be another
Hitler, as Bush overstated the case, trying to turn Saddam
Hussein into a sort of world-historical Willie Horton. But he
is villain enough to need to be stopped. Virtually no American
dissenters from the Bush policies idealize Saddam Hussein in
the way, say, that American radicals in the '60s praised the
Viet Cong ("Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh/ Viet Cong is gonna win!"). The
argument is whether to go in and fight now or to wait, isolate
Iraq and gamble that international sanctions will produce a
solution.

    But Americans do not enjoy much moral clarity about their
mission in the gulf or its motives. Says Lee Miringoff,
director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion in
Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: "There has been a major mobilization
without an underlying rationale at a time when people are
concerned about education, about the environment, the homeless,
and how they are going to pay the bills this month."

    The Administration's case for a military operation against
Iraq has a number of movable parts, moral components that have
periodically changed in emphasis and importance: Are Americans
in the gulf to stop Saddam's naked aggression? To restore the
rulers of Kuwait? To ensure international law and order in the
aftermath of the cold war? Or to protect the West's access to
oil? To separate Saddam Hussein from his nuclear weapons?

    Bush's performance at his Friday press conference may repair
a lot of the damage he sustained earlier by failing to explain
clearly, persuasively, his case for sending the troops.
Americans, a people who have historically required a sense of
their own virtue almost as a matter of self-definition, have
not felt entirely clean or clear about their motives in the
gulf. Says Hermann Eilts, director of Boston University's
Center for International Relations: "The split is going to be
over questions like Why are we doing this for the Kuwaiti royal
family? Or why are we doing this for Saudi Arabia?" Americans
feel least clean, least morally comfortable with themselves
when they think they are going to war to protect their own
profligate consumption of oil.

    Making war is an atavistic business that may require a
profound harmony of purpose among people, a sort of tribal
agreement. Americans feel a moral dissonance about certain
stray complexities involved in the gulf. The problem is full
of crosscurrents and moral baffles. The National Organization
for Women, for example, fired off a bitter statement about the
Saudi subjugation of women. Why would America defend such a
system? If there is war in the gulf, some American women
soldiers may die. Some will leave widowers in the U.S. That
prospect produces a novel moral disturbance in the American
mind.

    War, as the military theorist Karl von Clausewitz said,
depends to a large extent upon imponderables, including the
enormous, unpredictable force of public opinion. One of the
profound lessons of Vietnam is that no President can fight a
war (except the quick Grenada-Panama kind) without the full
backing of the American people.

    Bush may yet obtain that support, but it will not be nearly
enough. Bush is a sort of flawed perfectionist working on a
colossal project -- as he says, the making of a new world
order. To keep his enterprise in the gulf together, he must
orchestrate not only American opinion but also that of the
international alliance.

    If character is destiny, is the President's character
America's fate? In times of war, it is a disturbing thought
that is in some sense true: think of Abraham Lincoln and the
Civil War, Franklin Roosevelt and World War II, Lyndon Johnson
and Vietnam.

    In an article in the Boston Globe, M.I.T. political
scientist Barry R. Posen argued, "President Bush is doubling
U.S. strength in the Persian Gulf to create an offensive
option. Since the President cannot want war, his purpose must
be to frighten Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait. This is coercive
diplomacy." But, as Posen adds, the chaotic multiple voices of
American democracy can sometimes sabotage a President who is
trying to make a point: "Democracy thrives on debate, but once
a policy of coercive diplomacy has been well and truly launched,
debate can only reduce the odds of success."

    Being the Commander in Chief in a democracy is one of the
dangerous mysteries of American leadership, as Lyndon Johnson
found out. Unless George Bush, a President with some royalist
tendencies, learns to fear that mystery, it might destroy him.