Americans turn against Bush and a war on Iraq that is getting nowherehttp://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=645323
Most Americans no longer believe the war in Iraq has made their country safer, and more than 60 per cent of the country believes the military is bogged down in a conflict that was not worth fighting in the first place, according to a new opinion poll offering only bad news to the Bush administration.
Making Politics Personal
Perhaps that is really the effect of 11/9 - It is the moment that politics became personal for us in the west. I mean the moment - depending on your viewpoint. - Either a new and very personal war started against some kind of hidden foe who we must rooted out at all costs; or the moment when the full horror of all those little silent acts of callousness which so defined the west’s attitude to the third world finally became the first’s as well as a third world problem. Either way round, it was the moment that war and politics became personal. Now this is weird. War has for the last thirty years been basically impersonal – and utterly not day-to-day. It was fought in foreign lands and concerned people who were resolutely ‘others’. Even before that, in the days of Vietnam and Korea - although an entire generation might end up serving in the war – the war itself was still removed from the everyday. The point was, that one went away to fight the war – and had problems stopping fighting it – but there was a clear boundary (hopefully) kept between the two. One fought or one did not (and if one did not stop, when it was over, this was clearly identified as a problem). But what if the war is never gone? What if we are all at war all the time – whatever else we might be doing? I guess the only possible comparable type of war would be the Second World War. In that war – everything was affected – and whether one was a farmer or a nurse or a fictional character like ‘Just William’ himself, one fought Hitler by doing one’s bit. But then that was again different. That war involved everyone’s life being turned upside down. The trouble with this war (or whatever it is) is that nothing has been affected. War is somehow then no longer external to us. - Our very act of living is already a war.
Now is a sense there is nothing strange, and in fact there is something profoundly appropriate, about this situation. After all, it has been the case in the Arab world for years. A world with whom we have been tacitly at war, for forty years or so, a war which has caught up every citizen within it. All September 11th amounted to then, was them returning the compliment. But to us, the idea that living – being alive, is already at war is extremely problematic - and problematic for two reasons.
The first is obvious enough. How can one wage a war when what one is fighting is actually absolutely indistinguishable from what one is already is? I mean that potential terrorists are our next door neighbour, our family, our friends, maybe ourselves. One way of course that one could wage such a war would be to change everything and endeavour to stop being callous idiots (i.e. buying things which we know perfectly well were made in sweatshops, diamonds from Burma, and poor countries not paid for their natural wealth, palm oil in foods involving cutting down rainforest, etc.) – but then we really are too idiotic for that. Instead we are more likely to wage war against ourselves - against our own shadow. That is, we are likely to try to discover the odd within the normal – and hope in this action to identify the ‘threat’. Or to put it another way, in short we are likely to wage such a war by fighting against our own freedom.
This by itself is predictable enough. However what makes it more interesting is the way that it is being spliced with a second more critical problem. If war really is close and personal – if it really is about the everyday, then the rules of war clearly change. I mean for time immemorial war has been about command structures and order. There were soldiers and there were officers - the former died, while the latter planned - and that was all very well. And yet this structure cannot be so easily transposed. It is not just that it feels wrong to be ordered about in one’s everyday doings – but also that those everyday doings are themselves impossible if one is being organised for war – as we have traditionally understood it. The result of course is a war really like no other. It is a war fought not by soldiers who are dying for their officer’s – and possibly their country’s honour – but rather a war where effectively we are all officers. That is, where we all feel a part of the conflict, and in a position to make decisions (after all the war is being fought across our lives as we live them…). It is then a strange war – a war of mass democracy. Our lives are at peril – our choices – our freedom is what is being ‘defined’ and defended.
The result of course is then really a war without precedent. Not only is it of course impossible to fight such a war, but also the stakes in fighting it are extremely high. If someone goes against one’s own viewpoint, one’s own freedom, the implication is obvious - they too are threatening our security, our way of life. How else could they be doing otherwise? We are all at risk – all the time - and ‘they’ have made that risk worse - for themselves and for us all. The result of course is an incredible muddying of the water. All clear values are then threatened. We are all experts of our own safety – as it pertains to our day to day living, and feel that anyone who threatens that safety, be they our government, the American government, or whoever are the enemy - and that anyone who offers us the safety we crave - even if that is Bin Laden, is our friend. (Hence the latter’s speech before the U.S. elections, offering us ‘safety’…) Or of course, the other way around – that the governments are our friends, and so on.
In short everything becomes utterly confused – as confused and confusing as our lives. The irony of course then being that this only makes the entire situation worse…
That scary thing being, in a war waged on the level of the everyday is that whether left or right, we all lose our sense of proportion.