DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The mosquito and the hammer
Interview with James
Carroll, conducted by Tom Engelhardt
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 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, 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
September 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 past 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 20th century,
summarized so well by Jonathan Schell 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 US 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, [Secretary of Defense] 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. [1] Eugene McCarthy is putting it
positively. I'd say negatively what we could use
is a [Former Speaker of the House] 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
warning 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 [evangelist] Billy
Graham became a tribune of anti-communism. 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 naive
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 naive, callow,
dangerous, Manichaean, triumphalist - and the
structure of the American government, which was 60
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 [Dwight D]
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 Guantanamo? 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
20th 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.
Note [1] Eugene Joseph
McCarthy, Democrat Representative and a Senator
from Minnesota, 1949-1971, was a strident voice
against the Vietnam War.
Tom
Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture.
(Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch. Used by
permission.)
