The lesson of war

We occupy a turning point in world history. Most historians would agree that it is arguably the most difficult moment that United States democracy has faced in recent decades. But democracy is not something static. Democracy is something fought for and its meaning and practice struggled over by each successive generation of Americans. Each generation is necessarily implicated both in preserving and re-fashioning democracy in its own unique way by the very fact of our inheritance and history as citizens of a democratic state.

As someone who has worked for thirty years in the field of education, I am especially interested in what the youth of this country will learn from this war. The new generation of young people that are filling our classrooms across the nation stands before a crossroads in history, wondering which path to take. They face conflicting positions on the war that have divided communities, school campuses, the workplace, and families.

What, exactly will they learn?

If they choose to read the war in Iraq critically, by examining multiple perspectives and developing a critical capacity to understand the inextricable links among economics, politics, religion, civil society, and the state and situating these connections in light of world history, they may come to conclusions demonstrably different from those of the mainstream pundits they read or listen to in the media.

To read the war critically is not an easy task.

One reason that it is so difficult is that the results might lead to a major shift in one’s moral, political, or philosophical position. At the very least, reading the current war critically can be a shattering experience, and in many instances may result in personal suffering, anger, and a complete unhinging of one’s previous identity as an American citizen. In other words, it could — and often does — lead to a breaking free of the ideological moorings that have secured one’s identity and understanding of the meaning of American democracy. Reading the war critically can set us adrift in a sea of confusion, mistrust, anger, and despair. Many, perhaps most, Americans are not up to the challenge of reading the current conflict in Iraq from a critical perspective. Because to take the path of critical citizenship means risking too much. It means putting at stake everything that has secured one’s identity as a citizen over a lifetime. Moreover, it could lead to the realization that what one has previously believed about the U.S. may indeed rest on a foundation of sand.

Of course, many who belong to today’s generation of students already have been challenged in their high school and college classrooms with differing opinions on past wars involving the United States, such as the war in Vietnam, or have analyzed the painful complicity of the United States government in the massacres of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and elsewhere. But these were conflicts often far removed from the lives of today’s young people.

The war in Iraq is different: young people are living it in their living rooms, their classrooms, their coffee shops, their churches, and among their peer groups. In attempting to engage the war in Iraq from a critical perspective, those courageous enough have had to examine the present state of the union and what they have discovered has not always been flattering. They have discovered that opinions offered by many — and if the polls are correct, the majority of — Americans with respect to the current war are reinforced on a daily basis by a corporate media who publicly position themselves as disinterested but are far from it; they learn that the contracts for extinguishing fires in the oil fields and for rebuilding Iraq after the war will benefit corporate interests that support the current administration; that the supposed evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Quaeda were based on documents lifted from an article written by a graduate student and in some cases documents that the pentagon now admits were forged; that American diplomacy is little more than bribery and bullying; that a war can distract the public from investigations into the alleged connections between the Bush administration and the recent financial scandals involving Enron and other major U.S. corporations; that our presidential oil mafia is threatening to turn Iraq into a theme park for American corporations; that a country on a permanent war footing against terrorism can curtail public outcry against the rolling back of our constitutional rights; that those who oppose the war will be condemned by every right-wing talk show host and most evangelical pulpits; that the American government can engage in an unprovoked, preemptive invasion of a sovereign nation and flagrantly break international law in a large part because the United States has no superpower rival (or group of rivals) that can stop it militarily.

Students learn that their president, who came to power in a controversial selection process, can rally the public behind him in a slaughter of innocent civilians and get away with calling it the liberation of the Iraqi people; that when their government is exposed for scandalous actions that receive worldwide attention — such as spying on members of the UN Security Council — they can’t seem to find the story anywhere in the US media. And when they do find it, it is perfunctorily dismissed with the excuse: “It’s no big deal, everybody does it”. When the President tells the nation that he is fighting the biblical struggle between good and evil, placing the U.S. incontrovertibly on the inviolate side of virtue, they learn that opposing positions from our country’s clerics, when they do occur, are summarily buried in newspapers behind triumphalistic stories describing the impending liberation of Iraq When members of today’s generation of students travel to Latin America, Europe and Asia, they learn that the American authors who are the most revered abroad among their peers, and with whom they have themselves come to identify, such as Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn, are considered in their own country to be left-wing extremists and therefore shunned by the American media.

And to add insult to injury, they are then told by conservatives in the United States that the left wing is in control of the media here, a patently absurd position, true, but one shared by a large number of people. They lesson these young people learn, in short, is that war is peace, truth is a lie, and those who call themselves the good and the just can shame American before the world.

It is difficult to talk of US hegemony now; now we need to speak of near-total domination with perhaps only a few cracks and fissures. The repressive apparatuses of the imperial US state have cast a long dark shadow over the land that has long claimed the “bragging rights” for being the bastion of world democracy and civic virtue. The old imperialism of the eighteenth century and earlier — with similar genocidal outcomes — has become fashionable once again in this country.

Today, we don’t need to dress up imperialism as something else. The disguise is no longer necessary. We follow the cabal of Washington imperialists and seemingly are proud of it. Because we are told that it is a benevolent imperialism that brings freedom to the world’s suffering peoples. Following the same logic of former—and similarly arrogant and dishonest — US administrations whose hands became bloodied by violations of human rights and international law, not to mention war crimes committed in the name of democracy through US-sponsored wars against civilian targets in El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Nicaragua, Panama, Haiti, and other places, the US has sent its imperial legions and its coalition of the bribed and the bought into Iraq, in the service of mighty capital. The blockade imposed on Iraq twelve years ago has already killed more people that those who have died at the hands of all the weapons of mass destruction used in human history. US-driven sanctions against Iraq killed more people than the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Up to 6,000 children have died each month as a result of the blockade, and the calculated destruction of civilian sewage and water treatment facilities and the deployment of cancer-causing depleted uranium shells during the Gulf War of 1991. More than half a million children have died. The same children that now are being killed by playing with unexploded cluster bombs that fell on their city during the campaign of “shock and awe.” We know that the real enemy of Washington’s petroleum presidency is public ownership and use of one of the largest high-quality oil reserves on the planet, oil reserves that were nationalized in 1972. Until Baghdad fell recently, not a drop of Iraqi oil belonged to the US oil barons. That will change shortly. Iraq has the most extensive river system in the Middle East. Will there be work now on a pipeline to bring waters of the Tigris and Euphrates south to the Gulf states, including Israel? Of course, the invasion of Iraq goes beyond oil and water. Primarily it is about maximizing capital accumulation for the rich during a crisis of capital accumulation and overproduction and the necessity of capitalist America to exercise its ruthless power options that will force countries to privatize their resources and deregulate their economies.

But few of these perspectives will ever appear in the mainstream US media. In fact, the left has been so completely shut out of the media debate over the war on Iraq that the neoconservatives of the Bush administration have been emboldened to ratchet up their attack – this time on members of their own party. In a move that was chillingly reminiscent of attacks on the State Department by Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, Newt Gingrich savagely assailed Colin Powell and the State Department recently for considering a plan for a Middle Eastern settlement in concert with the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations. Gingrich and other neoconservatives of the highly influential American Enterprise Institute are furious that Powell and the State Department are veering away from a Defense Department policy of unilateralism in foreign affairs. Republicans that do not toe the most hawkish line will be publicly condemned by the neoconservatives in their own party. Such is the power and influence now accorded this group after the swift defeat of the Republican Guard in Iraq. According to Harold Meyerson:

The neocons… are at their Jacobin moment. In their assessment, they have dispatched the ancien regime and the constitutionalists like Lafayette. Now they must turn on their Dantons and Marats, their fellow revolutionaries who have failed to get with the Jacobin program. All prudent Republicans must now swear allegiance to Wolfowitz and Rove. If they don’t, Newt Gingrich — like Robespierre, a provincial second-rater with delusions of grandeur and an affinity for ruthlessness — is already tinkering with his chopping block. (2003, p. 16)

Today’s students who are interested in reading the war critically will also have to learn that they need to listen to voices of fanatics like Gingrich, because to dismiss them out of hand is to betray the same tactics as the corporate media. They must learn that not only leftists are intellectuals, and that to be critical means a willingness to be open to shifting one’s own position, if and when the evidence warrants it. To do otherwise is to mime the practices of the fascist opponents of democracy. The real tragedy is that many of the critical positions that students support –or would more than likely support-- are not given voice in public debates. While the media serve up to the masses the hawkish politicians like Gingrich, young people are deprived even of the likes of Phil Donahue, fired from MSNBC, and Donahue (who hosted one of the few US television shows that took an anti-war position) can hardly be considered a flaming radical to anyone except perhaps the Christian Coalition.

A new generation of young people are learning a lesson they are not about to forget. It is a lesson that should send shudders into the ranks of both the Republicans and the Democrats and give the nation pause to consider whether or not either party can put forward a platform acceptable to the pursuit of a democracy that is able to live up to its name.

Reference

Meyerson, Harold. (2003). Neocons Run Amok! LA Weekly (April 25-May1), p. 16.

Peter McLaren is a professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, and the author and editor of 40 books. His works have been translated into 15 languages.

Peter McLaren's website is at: www.gseis.ucla.edu/~mclaren/