The Mosquito and the Hammer
A Tomdispatch Interview
with James Carroll
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 local 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, 2001, 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 9/11. 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 last
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 twentieth 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 U.S. 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, 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. Eugene McCarthy is putting it
positively. I'd say negatively what we could use is a 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 warnings 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 Billy Graham became a tribune of
anticommunism. 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 naïve 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 naïve,
callow, dangerous, Manichaean, triumphalist -- and the structure of the
American government, which was sixty 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 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 Guantánamo? 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 twentieth 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.
Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch
[Note
to Tomdispatch readers: This is the second in an ongoing series of
interviews at the site. The first was with
Howard Zinn. More will appear later in the month or in October.
Tom]
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