A response to Andrew Sullivan's column in Salon lambasting the anti-war movement:

Dear Mr. Sullivan:

You are right. No American who loves his country can speak of wishing for “a million Mogadishus.” I do not want to see one American soldier dragged to his death through the streets of any city on this Earth. I am no Stalinist. I deeply love my country. I do not say that as mere rhetoric, as I’m quite aware that some do.

Nor am I a pacifist. Had not American soldiers fought for me, I would be living under the children of Hitler. More likely, I would be dead. I honor those Americans. I also honor the idealistic young Americans who volunteered to protect their country and now find themselves in Iraq. Again, I mean this truly, not merely as rhetoric.

But, Mr. Sullivan, I do not want to see children slaughtered in markets in my name. So I will need some advice from you.

Before we get to that, let us first talk about morality, and about evil.

If this is a just war, then it cannot be inherently evil, though it may be executed in ways that prove to be so. Is this a just war?
We will agree that Saddam Hussein is profoundly evil. This, too, is not mere rhetoric. But when I see photographs of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam Hussein’s hand after Hussein gassed his adversaries in the Iran-Iraq war, using American satellite intelligence to find them, you will forgive me for doubting that this is the real reason for war.

(I suppose you might argue that Reagan and Bush 41 were themselves deeply immoral, but that George W. Bush has reversed their policies and is therefore the first moral president in recent history. If that were true, why has he filled his administration with folks like Rumsfeld? Not being as attuned to the subtleties of neoconservative theologies as you are, I see all too much continuity here.)

Do we fight every evil man in the world? Is it immoral not to do so? If not, then, when, and by what criteria? These would seem to be significant questions. Unfortunately, the President has not deigned to share his thoughts with us peons, if thoughts there are. So we will have to try on our own, absent his sage guidance.

We would clearly be morally justified in fighting an evil man who attacked us first. Did Saddam? No. You’ve of course read Bob Woodward’s Bush at War, and noted that when the President’s council cast about for a response to 9/11, your pal Wolfowitz “…seized the opportunity. Attacking Afghanistan would be uncertain. He worried about 100,000 American troops bogged down in mountain fighting.... In contrast, Iraq was a brittle, oppressive regime.... It was doable. He estimated that there was a 10 to 50 percent chance Saddam was involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks.”

So, from the outset, the President’s people knew Saddam was probably not involved in the Al-Qaeda attacks. What’s happened since to convince an objective observer to the contrary? One functionary laid up in a Baghdad hospital? One training camp on the Iranian border which we could’ve bombed any time we chose? Then, Mr. Sullivan, what? If there were any credible and significant evidence, why is Bush now accusing Hussein of supporting “Al Qaeda-type” organizations instead of the real deal?

We know Saddam’s Ba’athists and the Bin Laden-ites have hated each other for decades. We know the only way they’d come together is if forced together by mutual enemies. (As we’re doing now.)

Does the President know this? If the Iraqi exiles had to spend most of their visit with him explaining the differences between Shiites and Sunnites, one has to wonder. (Oh, but it’s OK for the President to be ignorant of “nuances” like that. He’s got the confidence to hire people smarter than he is. For a moment, there, I forgot.)

Well, then, was Saddam Hussein a clear and present threat to America? Yes -- if, as we were repeatedly told, he was just months away from developing nuclear weapons. Those aluminum tubes were a dead giveaway, we were told. We know how well that charge held up. Then it was the uranium ordered from Niger. Who forged those documents?

Or did they find their way into our intelligence briefings because the President’s henchmen have spent the past two years harassing the intelligence agencies into finding more evidence, no matter how weak?

Do you still believe Saddam is months away from nuclear weapons, Mr. Sullivan?

We are at war now. Nobody can know what will happen tomorrow. Perhaps by the time you read this, Saddam will have unleashed his massive, long-awaited chemical attack. We do know our Special Forces have been scouring the country looking for this stuff, and haven’t found it yet.

It seems inevitable that we’ll hear of some discovery, somewhere: perhaps small, perhaps large, perhaps old, perhaps new. Doubtless we will be spared the details. The President will trumpet it as proof. The world will be left to wonder whether the evidence has been planted (again). Given this administration’s track record of telling the truth, who will ever know?

If Saddam is not a clear and present danger to our security, then what? We’ll skip oil. Maybe I’m naïve, but I’ll grant our leaders a bit more subtlety than that.

Are we fighting to remake the entire Middle East in our image? If so, is that any more moral than any ancient Roman conquest? Does the region wish to be remade in our image?

You’ve written eloquently against fundamentalist fanaticism of all stripes. Is that what we’re fighting: a global war against fundamentalism? Heck of a way to do it: by fatally compromising anyone in the region who might be open to our worldview.
But when I listen to our born again President, and watch him savage the separation of church and state at home, it’s hard for me to take this argument seriously. If George W. Bush is the best hope of the Enlightenment in the 21st century, we might as well hunker down for a new dark age. And you know that as well as I do.

(In my darker moments I worry: does he believe these are the end times? Is he trying to bring them on? You know him. Please tell me it’s not so.)

Could we possibly be fighting to promote democracy throughout the region? This seems equally hard to fathom, given that we’ve stirred up so much popular anger that true Arab democracies will be horrifyingly dangerous to us for decades to come. It’s difficult to imagine who the Iraqis, or Saudis, or Egyptians, or Syrians are likely to elect that would be acceptable to the Bush administration.
Any thoughts on this, Mr. Sullivan?

Or did the President truly believe we’d be welcomed with open arms? (Is it less immoral if the President truly believes in what he says and does? Didn’t Robespierre?)

Bush obviously knows Americans very well, but other humans not so well. When those bombs go off, and those children die, how would you expect the locals to react? By thanking the bombers for liberating them?

If the question doesn’t answer itself, let’s try a historical analogy.

It’s 1941, and you’re a Soviet citizen. You’ve been living in terror for decades. Your neighbors have been purged, shot, starved, sent to Siberia. You never know when you’ll be next. Suddenly, you are invaded. Your invader holds your dictator in utter contempt, assuming that his regime will collapse in weeks: “We just need to kick the door, and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.”
Do you fight for Stalin?

Mr. Sullivan, you know what happened. You know that the Red Army’s commissars threatened and shot many reluctant conscripts, but you also know that millions more fought for their homelands with a truly unimaginable passion.

You also know that hundreds, perhaps thousands of expatriates are streaming back into Iraq to fight for their homeland against its invader. Should we be that invader?

I see you sharpening your keyboard already. America’s troops are not Hitler’s. No, thank God, they are not. But look forward, as the logic of this war plays out. Thanks to Saddam’s tactics, Americans are now understandably reluctant to accept surrenders. As Americans see more and more Iraqis who appear (to put it mildly) unappreciative, they will lose patience with the niceties, and protect their own lives. This, too, is human nature.

Already we see the reluctance to bomb near civilian targets beginning to fade, out of frustration and military necessity. If we do invade Baghdad, our troops will face the full furor of urban combat, where it’s “us or them.” What happened in Vietnam when our soldiers could no longer tell civilians from combatants? How many innocent civilians will be killed?

If those won’t be war crimes, won’t they at least be criminally negligent homicide, in which a person ought to know of substantial and unjustified risk that deaths will occur?

At what point will it ring hollow to say that you are liberating these people from a tyrant? One massacre? Two? Ten? A hundred (even if most of them go unreported on CNN?)

Are we liberating people who hate us by killing them? If that’s not Orwellian, what is? Will none of that blood be on our hands?
Or doesn’t it matter, in the geopolitical scheme of things? After all, to make an omelette, doesn’t one have to break some eggs? Stalin thought so. Do you?

Speaking of breaking eggs, we now come to the “Bush doctrine.”

You have to help me out here. This one’s taking some getting used to. I had this crazy old-fashioned idea that Dwight Eisenhower articulated when America was first facing the threat of obliteration by Soviet nuclear weapons: “All of us have heard this term ‘preventive war’ since the earliest days of Hitler… In this day and time . . . I don't believe there is such a thing; and frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing.”

Dwight Eisenhower knew the meaning of war better than any living man, including (maybe especially) George W. Bush. But, of course, Saddam Hussein is a far greater threat to us than the Soviets were in the early 1950s. Isn’t that right, Mr. Sullivan?
Anyhow, as I understand it, we’re now free to pre-emptively attack anyone who might become a threat to us at some point in the future. Is Iran next? Syria? (We’re already watching Donald Rumsfeld shaking his fist at those two nations.)

Or Saudi Arabia? Or Egypt? Or North Korea? Or all of them, at once, via “shock and awe”? Who else shall we “transform, not coexist with”? Who is not capable of becoming an “emerging threat” to us at some point in the future? (Lately, even the U.S. ambassador to Canada is making threats. A big story up there that nobody down here has even noticed. But we Americans have always had the privilege of not paying attention.)

Are we planning to provoke a world war, Mr. Sullivan? If so, who is your President really “morally equivalent” to? It would have to be someone far more terrifying than Saddam Hussein, wouldn’t it?

Are we really fighting for imperium and world dominance? I wouldn’t have thought Americans capable of this, until I read The Future of War and the American Military, by Stephen Peter Rosen, a close colleague of Perle’s and Wolfowitz’s.

Rosen writes: “Now we are in the business of bringing down hostile governments and creating governments favorable to us. Conventional international wars end and troops are brought back home. Imperial wars end, but imperial garrisons must be left in place for decades to ensure order and stability. This is, in fact, what we are beginning to see…”

Is this why we’re dying and killing in Iraq?

Others around the world read this stuff. And folks wonder why they don't trust us.

Forgive me for stating the obvious to someone as sophisticated as you, but if anyone can launch a pre-emptive war at will, we will surrender to the war of all against all: pure international anarchy.

We have spent 50 years trying to build international institutions to fortify us against international anarchy. Have they always worked? No. Have they ever worked? Yes, sometimes. Have they gradually, slowly, painfully gained greater legitimacy over time? Well, yes, they had. Until George W. Bush decided to sledgehammer them into smithereens.

A generation from now, Mr. Sullivan, what’s the endgame?

You honestly don’t see any hubris here?

You honestly don’t see the ancient Athenians invading Sicily and destroying themselves as a result?

You honestly don’t see Justinian squandering the wealth of the Byzantine empire on conquests that disappeared within years, leaving his empire near collapse?

You honestly think that if the rest of the world fears us, that’s enough to keep us safe?

I come to the conclusion that this war cannot be justified on any of the grounds that have been presented. It is not a just war. It is not even a sane war.

Given that America has forced this war over the objections of virtually the entire world, it is an immoral war. If it lasts, it will tear this country apart.

It has already made us shockingly unfree.

We already have the Patriot Act. Have you read the draft of Patriot Act II? Do you believe John Ashcroft should really have the right to revoke your citizenship if he says you belong to a designated “terrorist organization,” whatever that organization is, even if you didn’t know it? Do you believe in secret arrests? Should we be denying people the right to an attorney -- or even to speak with their families -- for months, on the say-so of one government official? How do the Palmer raids and the interning of the Japanese look to you from here?

So now we come at last to the help I need from you.

I deeply love my country, yet I am ashamed of what it is doing.

Imagine yourself the parent of a child who commits a mass murder. You still love your child. A parent cannot but love his child, and I cannot but love my country. But that parent will carry the shame of his child’s actions forever. That parent will always wonder: What did I do wrong? How could I have prevented this?

Rightly or wrongly, this is how I feel.

I’m morally responsible for what’s done in my name. Don’t you agree? I didn’t stand up against this war before it happened. I’ll have an even deeper responsibility if I don’t try to stop it now.

If you were in my position, what would you do?

If I write a letter to my congressman, he’ll ignore me. My senators? They might agree, but they don’t have the guts to say so. The President? He’s got God on his side, why should he care what I think?

Should I wait quietly to cast my vote nineteen long months from now?

Should I march in the streets, and be ignored by a corporate media that’s lined up behind the administration for its own reasons? (Ratings? Fear of being labeled unpatriotic? Personal friendships with George W. Bush, as with Clear Channel’s Tom Hicks, who personally made Bush a millionaire?)

Should I sit down in traffic, alienate the motorists, and strengthen the support for war? Break windows? My God, never. I want less violence, not more.

You walk in the halls of power. The people who make these imperial policies are your friends. You tell me: what can I do to stop them?