An Audible Silence | 1, 2, 3, 4


OR THE NEXT THIRTEEN MONTHS the hope of a national political awakening was smothered under the pillows of cant. For having had the temerity to question the premise of Washington's war on terror, the actor Tim Robbins was removed from the list of guests invited to a summer festival at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York; Chris Hedges, a New York Times reporter, began a commencement address at Rockford College in Illinois with the truism "War in the end is always about betrayal; betrayal of the young by the old, soldiers by politicians, and idealists by cynics," and within a matter of minutes his microphone was unplugged and his presence booed off the stage; in Portland, Oregon, a state senator proposed a bill identifying as a terrorist any person taking part in a street demonstration intended to disrupt traffic, conviction of the crime bringing with it an automatic sentence of twenty-five years to life in prison.

President Bush meanwhile mounted flag-draped rostra at West Point and Virginia Military Institute to proclaim America "the single surviving model of human progress" and to threaten with the wrath of eagles "men of mad ambition"; in Texas and Maine he hopped out of golf carts to tell the traveling White House press corps that "regime change" was coming soon to downtown Baghdad. Senior administration officials found time in their busy schedules to inform the American television audience that other terrorist attacks were both imminent and inevitable. Vice President Dick Cheney on May 19: "The prospects of a future attack against the United States are almost certain... not a matter of if, but when." Robert Mueller III, the director of the FBI, on May 20: "There will be another terrorist attack. We will not be able to stop it." Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defense, on May 21: "It's only a matter of time." The Defense Department meanwhile bolstered the president's credibility with distributions of documents, supposedly top-secret, that sketched out the Pentagon's tactical solutions to the problem of blitzkrieg -- the advantages of a simultaneous attack from three directions balanced against the surprise of a swift commando raid; requisitions for three hundred thousand troops compared with those for only eighty thousand; something grandiloquent and imperial along the lines of the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor as opposed to something stylish and postmodern with parachutes, two divisions of light infantry, and a diffusion of Turkish auxiliaries.

Against every precedent of international law, in violation of the United Nations Charter, and without consent of the American Congress, the Bush administration was preparing to sack a heathen city that had done it no demonstrable harm, but the news media were content to forgo any moral or legal questions in favor of their obsession with the logistics. Competing television networks scheduled different time slots for the forthcoming fireworks display -- before and after November's congressional election; in early January when the weather around Baghdad improved; in April 2003 because the air force needed six months to replenish the inventory of precision-guided bombs consumed by the retail markets in Afghanistan. Competing newspaper columnists advanced competing adjectives to characterize the "extreme danger" presented to "the entire civilized world," but none of them offered evidence proving that Saddam possessed weapons likely to harm anybody who didn't happen to be living in Iraq; important military authorities appeared on the Sunday morning talk shows to endorse policies of forward deterrence and anticipatory self-defense ("America will act against emerging threats before they are fully formed"), but none of them could think of a good reason why Saddam would make the mistake of attacking the United States. On July 22, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld issued a secret directive to special operations forces, allowing them to "capture terrorists for interrogation or, if necessary, to kill them" anywhere in the world; two weeks later, in its lead editorial for August 3, The Economist summed up in two sentences the consensus of approved opinion: "The honest choices now are to give up and give in, or to remove Mr. Hussein before he gets his bomb. Painful as it is, our vote is for war." Give up to whom? Give in to what? The questions were neither asked nor answered. The government didn't stoop to simpleminded explanations, and the emissaries from the print and broadcast media were content to accept the purpose of a policy apparently directed at nothing else than the fear of the future, that always dark and dangerous place where, in five years or maybe ten, something bad is bound to happen.

On the following day, August 4, Senator Joseph Biden (D.-Del.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, granted an audience to the television cameras on Capitol Hill in which he said, "I believe there probably will be a war with Iraq. The only question is, is it alone, is it with others, and how long and how costly will it be?"

During the last weeks of August the newspapers brought daily reports of the American armada gathering in the Middle East (a fleet of merchant ships already at sea heavily burdened with armored vehicles, helicopters, and large stores of ammunition), and the rumors of imminent invasion served as prologue to the Republican victories in the November congressional elections. When Tom Daschle (D.-S.Dak.), the Senate minority leader, suggested that the Bush administration's rush to foreign war might be seen as a function of its domestic political ambitions, Trent Lott (R.-Miss.), the Senate majority leader, smeared him with the mud of treason: "Who is the enemy here? The president of the United States or Saddam Hussein?"

The Justice Department and the FBI supported the election campaign with upgrades of the USA PATRIOT Act (more stringent guidelines governing "the use of confidential informants") and with the steady hoisting of signal flags (yellow, orange, red) announcing the approach of doom. Ten murders committed in early October by two American assassins at large in the Washington suburbs lent further credence to the government's story of never-ending threat, and by election day the American people apparently had become so heavily sedated with the drug of fear that the opinion polls were showing a 70 percent approval rating for President Bush, 60 percent in favor of sending the army to exterminate Saddam, four of every five respondents saying that they gladly would give up as many of their civil rights and liberties as might be needed to pay the ransom for their illusory safety.

Which might have been all well and good and a blessing for America's newfound theory of immortal empire if the numbers could be believed. The anecdotal evidence was by no means so straightforward as the arithmetic. My own observations traveling around the country during the months of September and October suggested the widespread presence of attitudes more heavily weighted with ambiguity and doubt. In California, Texas, Oregon, and Iowa, I could find little trace or sign of the militant spirit presumably eager to pat the dog of war. The responses to the president's repeated attempts to explain the reasons for a descent on Baghdad (America "did not ask for this present challenge, but we accept it") often bordered on sarcasm:

"Who does the man think he's talking to -- to people so stupid that they can't see through the window of his lies?"

"Who can take seriously the reasoning of a man armed with so few facts?"

"Why must the security of every other nation in the world be subordinated to the comfort of the United States?"

"I thought we learned from our mistake in Vietnam that we don't know how to do regime change."

A chorus of senior editorial voices followed the scripts prepositioned by the White House and the Pentagon, solemnly interpreting the policy of preemptive bombing, precision guided and mercifully brief, as a form of compassionate conservatism. It wasn't that America would go willingly to war, but neither could it allow the forces of evil to recruit a quorum in the deserts of Mesopotamia. War was never easy and not to be undertaken lightly, but catastrophe loomed on both the far and near horizons, and who could doubt that Saddam must be destroyed? Not Citigroup or ExxonMobil; not The New York Times, CBS, The Washington Post, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, or USA Today.

Prior to the autumn congressional elections, the Democratic candidates uttered barely a squeak of objection to the administration's war policy, and on November 7 the Republican Party added the capture of the Senate to its possession of the White House, the Supreme Court, and the House of Representatives, thus shifting the de facto imbalance of power further to the evangelical right. On November 8, the day after the votes were counted, the United States presented the United Nations with Resolution 1441, delivering to Saddam Hussein the ultimatum of war unless he complied, within forty-five days, to the Security Council's demand for "unconditional and unrestricted access to all of Iraq."

For the next three months the authorities in charge of what passed for the national political argument talked of little else except the long-postponed and soon-arriving duel in the sun: Would Saddam bow to the American fiat? Could the United Nations weapons inspectors find a nuclear warhead hidden in a palm tree or a palace? Why were the Germans and the French so reluctant to see the light of reason or accept the verdict of history? Was America an empire, and, if so, who had given empires a bad name; where and how had they come to be known for their corruption instead of their glory? Senior figures in the Bush administration carried their military sales promotion into all the major markets -- the president to Capitol Hill with the State of the Union address, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice into the presence of Tim Russert and George Will, Secretary of State Colin Powell to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 26, 2003, and then on February 5 to the United Nations Security Council.

The news media provided fanfares of loyal support. The no-nonsense cover lines on the New York Times Magazine for January 5 ("The American Empire, Get Used to It") were matched by the brass-band rhetoric of the lead article written by Michael Ignatieff, a brand-name foreign policy intellectual recruited from the faculty of Harvard:

Imperial powers do not have the luxury of timidity, for timidity is not prudence; it is a confession of weakness...

[The United States] remain[s] a nation in which flag, sacrifice, and martial honor are central to national identity...

Americans are required, even when they are unwilling to do so, to include Europeans in the governance of their evolving imperial project. The Americans essentially dictate Europe's place in this new grand design. The United States is multilateral when it wants to be, unilateral when it must be; and it enforces a new division of labor in which America does the fighting, the French, British and Germans do the police patrols in the border zones and the Dutch, Swiss and Scandinavians provide the humanitarian aid.

Ignatieff briefly raised the question of terminology (America as democratic republic, America as military empire) but then went on to say that it doesn't make much difference how America chooses to name or see itself. The words don't matter. The country is what it is, so rich and powerful and good that it can't help but do what is just and right and true. America, the world's unrivaled hegemon, an empire in fact if not in name, its sovereign power the only hope for less fortunate nations groping toward the light of free markets and liberal democracy. Be not timid, do not flinch. Shoulder the burden of civilization and its discontents. Lift from the continents of Africa and Asia the weight of despotic evildoers. Know that if Americans do the fighting, other people will do the dying.

In concert with Ignatieff's marching song, Newsweek discovered in President Bush the character of "a warrior king... comfortable in ermine," and the bestselling hagiographies hurried into print by Bob Woodward (Bush at War) and David Frum (The Right Man) poured forth phrases perfumed with myrrh and frankincense -- "steely, eye-of-storm serenity," "casting his mission and that of the country in the grand vision of God's master plan," "impervious to doubt." Every newspaper in the country welcomed Secretary Powell's performance at the United Nations with corroborating sighs of helpless infatuation. The secretary held up air force surveillance photographs requiring the same kind of arcane exposition that New York art critics attach to exhibitions of abstract painting, displayed a vial of white powder (meant to be seen as anthrax but closer in its chemistry to granulated sugar), and rolled tape of two satellite telephone intercepts of Iraqi military officers screaming at each other in Arabic. The theatrical effects evaded an answer to the question, Why does America attack Iraq when Iraq hasn't attacked America? In lieu of demonstrable provocations Mr. Powell offered disturbing signs and evil portents, and when the voice of Osama bin Laden turned up a week later on an audiotape broadcast from Qatar, the secretary seized upon the occasion to discover a "partnership" between Al Qaeda and the government of Iraq. No such conclusion could be drawn from even a careless reading of the transcript, but to Mr. Powell the sending of a message (any message) proved that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had somehow morphed into the same enemy. The secretary's power points didn't add to the sum of a convincing argument, but then neither had the advertising copy for the Spanish-American War or the sales promotions for the war in Vietnam, and if the agitprop failed to persuade the French, Russian, or Chinese representatives to the Security Council, it was more than good enough for the emissaries from the major American news media.

Next page | At Fox News the talking heads transformed their jingoistic fervor into an article of totalitarian faith
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