SEVEN

BUSH PROPOSES PREEMPTIVE WAR

2002

 

 

 

I was having dinner at a rather expensive restaurant the other night when a man I’d never met before threatened to kill me. He was a distinguished-looking fellow, dressed in a dark suit. I was walking by some appetizing desserts when he approached me, accused me in a harsh voice of bothering him repeatedly, cursed me, and warned that he would kill me if I bothered him again. Then, briskly, he returned to his table. As I went back to my own table in a different part of the restaurant, I mentioned the episode to the maître d’, who promised to keep an eye on the guy.

The unpleasant encounter put me in a strange state of mind. I couldn’t help noticing, as I looked around the room, that people were coming in, they were being given tables, without any questions being asked by anybody, and within about five seconds of sitting down, they were being issued with weapons that could easily be applied with lethal effect against nearby diners. Wielded with speed, even a fork can kill, not to mention a knife.

After a few moments, though, I calmed down. I felt relatively safe. I finished my meal and even enjoyed it.

The fact was that I was safe from most of the diners, because most of the diners had no desire to kill me. That provided a sort of perfect security, in regard to them. As for the one man who clearly did seem hostile, he was frightening and unpredictable, and his perceptions were inaccurate, but it was still unlikely that he’d try to kill me, because, excitable as he was, he probably knew in some way that threatening me, as he’d done, would cost him absolutely nothing, but that killing me would immediately ruin his life.

As I sit here now, reading the week’s newspapers—Iraq, Bush—do I feel safe, or do I feel frightened? Mainly frightened, because we’re living in a system of nation-states that is dangerous in and of itself. Like a restaurant, with its uncontrolled, unlicensed population of diners, our world of nation-states is a world of free atoms. Restaurant diners, though, are usually friendly to one another, because they usually belong to the same social group, and restaurants in most places are planted securely inside a system of laws that are designed to provide a quiet life for the dining population.

For all their snarling at one another, nations have so much in common. All of them want to amass weapons. And one way or another, they all come up with some ruler to be on top of them, some boss of some kind who always believes himself to be a reliable custodian of the amassed weapons. Meanwhile, every nation is tortured by its fear of the weapons and the rulers of the other nations. The system is awful! We’re all so frightened that we even tell our children frightening stories in school about terrifying rulers, all the “madmen” throughout history who’ve tried to “take over the world.” Is there no escape from this?

When the strongest, most successful, and most ruthless person in a group engages in some particularly nasty and aggressive action against a weaker member, and then they claim to have done it because of their overpowering fear of that weaker member—well, it’s terribly hard to take them seriously—especially if, instead of looking frightened, they seem to be excited. But assuming, for the sake of argument, that Bush really wants to preemptively attack Iraq because of genuine fear, then one has to say that this doesn’t make sense.

Bush claims to be frightened by Iraq. But it’s the restaurant that’s dangerous, not one diner. Heavily armed or not, Iraq is unlikely to attack either our country or any other country, for the very same reason that the man in the restaurant didn’t attack me—fear of the consequences. The man was isolated and weak in the face of society’s legal system. Iraq is a small impoverished nation in comparison to any country it might be tempted to attack.

Bush indeed recognizes the danger inherent in a world divided up into armed fiefdoms. His proposed solution is that one of those fiefdoms, his own, should become more powerful than any of the others and should preserve peace, order, and stability by attacking any fiefdom whose ruler is potentially hostile.

The flaw in this proposed solution is that Bush’s fiefdom, the Unites States, will inevitably face many hostile rulers. This is not just a possibility—it’s a certainty, because in the world as it is, most people are degraded for the benefit of the few, and the few happen to include Bush, his friends, and the privileged elite of the United States. The stability Bush hopes to enforce, personally, is known by everyone to benefit him, personally, and the more he identifies himself as the enforcer, the more hostility will be focused on him and on the United States.

If he responds to this hostility by attacking what by definition will be under his proposal much weaker nations, his use of violence, his sowing of destruction and death among the less powerful, will arouse even greater hostility, and more and more fiefdoms around the world will come to be headed by rulers who hate our nation. In other words, Bush’s proposed plan for preventing any possible threats against us, a plan that amounts in practice to an attempt to “take over the world,” can only end in greater and greater isolation for the United States—and ultimately, in the long term, in some sort of military defeat.