Fuel for War

As Then, Pray God Again:

                             Author’s Second Foreword, Ten Years Later

            Poems relating to a long war ending over 30 years ago, and to a short war ending over 15 years ago, may seem not only dated but irrelevant.  After all, it’s the current war in Iraq—38 months and counting, 2448 American lives and counting, twenty (at least) times as many Iraqi lives (not to mention their country savaged) and counting—that consumes our attention.  As for what led to this war in Iraq, and to its smaller counterpart in Afghanistan, current opinion seems to point no further back than 9/11/01, the clear pretext for America’s “war on terrorism.”

            The poems that follow hope to call this judgment into question.  The military mindset of those elected to be our leaders, and the patriotic mindset of an obedient citizenry necessary if said leaders are to successfully prosecute their agenda, sadly were alive and well long before 9/11.  The degree, in fact, to which Desert Storm in the early 90s contributed to 9/11 a decade later is worthy of serious pondering.  Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, it will be remembered, formerly had received CIA support in their fight against the occupying Soviets in Afghanistan before the subsequent ravaging of Iraq and massive buildup of America’s military presence in the Arab Middle East.  We might, in other words, be considerably less sanguine when assessing our “success” in the First Gulf War.  9/11/01 had a context.  This is not to exonerate the horrific and unconscionable escalation of attacks employed by bin Laden and al Qaeda on 9/11.  But neither does it exonerate the horrific and unconscionable escalation of attacks—with far greater casualties, civilian as well as military—employed by America against a nation presumed, on the basis of intelligence later proven erroneous, to have had a role in 9/11.

Commensurate with the world’s sympathy for America after September of 2001 was the world’s judgment against America after her preemptive attack on Iraq in March of 2003.  

            The extraordinary breadth and depth of America’s militaristic-leadership-dependent-on-patriotic-docility is not encouraging for the prospects of anything beyond interlude peace.  When push comes to shove, history is clearly on the side of the hawks, to use the Vietnam era term.  A cogent case can be made that such is human nature, so we might as well get used to it. But with the sophistication and potency of weapons advancing, we’d better not get used to it.  Earth and reason won’t stand for it.

            A remarkable thing happened during the Vietnam war, indeed a historic thing.  Enough Americans awakened from what this volume calls the patriotic entrancement—love it or leave it, God is on our side, we have to support our troops, protesting only gives comfort to the enemy, etc.—that the machinery for war was actually stopped!  Not without fierce opposition then and seething resentment since—the hell-fury of a woman spurned, I suggest, is less than that of a hawk spurned—but millions of loyal American citizens, deeming the war not only unwinnable (later acknowledged by the then Secretary of War Robert McNamara) but morally wrong, protested for so long and in such numbers that America for the first time in its history (except for the South in the Civil War) was forced to retreat and accept non-victory if not defeat.