Harry Kreisler: From the start, Jihadists came to believe that it would be ideal if American troops would be drawn back into the middle east. The idea was that if they attacked [on 9/11] and we came back at them in Afghanistan, the US would be destroyed in Afghanistan like the USSR had been.
They were wrong about that. But then… the invasion in Iraq.
Lawrence Wright: Iraq looks a lot like what bin Laden had in mind for us in Afghanistan.
If you read the memoirs of the inner-circle and ideologues of al-Qaeda, they confess that al-Qaeda was essentially dead after November, December 2001, when American and coalition forces swept aside the Taliban and pummeled al-Qaeda, accomplishing in a few weeks what the Red Army had failed to do in 10 years.
Eighty-percent of al-Qaeda membership was captured or killed, according to their own figures. And although we didn’t get the leaders, the survivors were scattered, unable to communicate with each other, destitute, and repudiated all over the world.
So this was a movement that was in a kind of zombie-like state.
It was Iraq that set the prairie on fire, that gave them another chance. Ironically, Iraq was never on bin Laden’s list of a likely candidate for Jihad because he knew it was a largely Shia nation, and al-Qaeda of course is an Sunni organization.
So it wasn’t high on his list. But we gave him an opportunity. And he took it.
“There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome’s allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted.
The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome’s duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs. They were enemies who only waited to fall on the Roman people…
Thus there is but one way to an understanding: scrutiny of domestic class interests, the question of who stood to gain.
It was certainly not the Italian peasant…
True, it was this class that gave rise to the caste of professional soldiers who remained in the military service beyond the minimum term of enlistment. But in the first place, the rise of that estate was only a consequence of the policy of war, and, in the second place, even these people had no real interest in war. They were not impelled by savage pugnacity, but by hope for a secure old age, preferably the allotment of a small farm… As for war booty, the emperor used it to pay his debts or to stage circuses at Rome. The soldiers never saw much of it.”
How Emperor Tiberius responded to the mindless senate of his day
Louis Brandeis explains why “a government’s contempt for law is contagious”
How Greeks self-medicated (through booze) to cope with imperialist fatigue
The top photo is of the Ludovisi Battle sarcophagus, an ancient Roman sarcophagus discovered near the Porta Tiburtina in Rome’s Aurelian walls. It dates to about 250 CE and depicts a battle scene between the Romans and Goths.
President George W. Bush, speaking at his second inauguration: “America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal, instead, is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way. The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations. The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it. America’s influence is not unlimited; but fortunately for the oppressed, America’s influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom’s cause…”
Interviewer: Gore Vidal, your response to these words?
Gore Vidal: Well, I hardly know where to end, much less begin. There’s not a word of truth in anything that he said. Our founding fathers did not set us on a course to liberate the world from tyranny. Jefferson just said, “all men are created equal, and should be free,” et cetera, but it was not the task of the United States to “go abroad to slay dragons,” as John Quincy Adams so wisely put it; because if the United States does go abroad to slay dragons in the name of freedom, liberty, and so on, she could become “dictatress of the world,” and in the process “She would lose her soul.” That is the lesson we should be learning now, instead of this declaration of war against the entire globe.
He doesn’t define what tyranny is. I’d say what we have now in the United States is working up a nice tyrannical persona for itself and for us. As we lose liberties he’s, I guess, handing them out to other countries which have not asked for them. That’s the reaction in Europe — and I know we mustn’t mention them because they’re immoral and they have all those different kinds of cheese — but, simultaneously, they’re much better educated than we are, and they’re richer. Get that out there: The Europeans per capita are richer than Americans, per capita. And by the time this administration is finished, there won’t be any money left of any kind…
And none of this we heard about in the last election. We were too busy with homosexual marriage and abortion: two really riveting subjects. War and peace, of course, are not worth talking about. And civilization, God forbid that we ever commit ourselves to that…
__________
A selection from Gore Vidal’s critiques of President Bush’s Second Inaugural Address, which were recorded this week in 2005.
I’ve uploaded a recording of the rest of Vidal’s brilliant, biting response below. It’s relevant and worth a watch even today.
As we now watch President Obama deliver this year’s State of the Union, almost 9 long years to the day since Bush uttered those words, it’s worth reflecting on how little has changed.
The War in Afghanistan, with it’s unprecedented 82% disapproval rate, is almost as unpopular as the Congress which kind of, sort of, almost authorized it. Still, we’re spending about $400 million there each day. Meanwhile, as I walk a block from my downtown apartment in America’s beautiful capital city, I see schools moldering and potholes flecking every street. (That 400,000,000, by the way, does not include the additional $130 million which we are daily funneling into Iraq, nor does it account for the $5.5 to $8.4 billion which we will spend annually to care for our veterans from both wars over the next three, four, five decades.)
Our Constitutional liberties remain largely ignored (much less restored) by a burgeoning surveillance state which, a decade later, is yet to make a single arrest that has prevented a terrorist attack. There are now over a million names on our terrorist watch list: a hay stack that, as it distends, obscures the few needles hiding inside it. Correspondingly, a million people now hold “top secret clearance” to access classified government information — a label fit for the gruesome world of Winston Smith and farcical enough for Peter Sellers or the President of Faber College. It took one in a million — Mr. Edward Snowden — to finally reveal what this unelected, unmonitored, and undomesticated appendage of the federal government was doing with our money and to us and our allies (in Brazil, in Germany, in South Korea), but he, like other whistle-blowers under this administration, was hardly honored for that act of conscience. While his stand has produced some valuable backlash against these security developments, the direction of their momentum remains unchanged; as the surveillance state becomes more opaque to us, we become more transparent to it.
Of course tonight’s pageantry is amounting to little more than a string of platitudes, but nevertheless, it is worth hoping that the coming days will reflect a glimmer of the promise that we are turning away from the imperial and the tyrannical, and turning towards Constitutionality at home and diplomacy abroad.
In the summer of 1821, Greek Revolutionaries rose up to fight for their independence from the Ottoman Empire, and petitioned the United States to join in their struggle. John Quincy Adams, who was then Secretary of State, presented the following response to the U.S. Congress, outlining why America would not intervene.
“Let our answer be this — America… in the assembly of nations, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has… without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations, while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings.
Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world: but she would be no longer the ruler of her own soul…
Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of mind. She has a spear and a shield; but the motto upon her shield is Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.”
As Secretary of State from 1817 to 1824, John Quincy Adams became one of America’s finest diplomats in what was a crucial, formative era in the young nation’s history. Serving in the cabinet of James Monroe, Adams was the chief architect of the famous Monroe Doctrine, which declared the United States would resist any European attempts to colonize the Americas, while also remaining unaligned and uninvolved in the internal affairs of European states and colonies.
In 1821, this doctrine was put to the test, as the Greek Revolution erupted along the northeastern corner of the Ottoman Empire. With European powers rushing to the side of the Greeks in their struggle against Turkish occupation, the revolutionaries petitioned the United States for assistance.
Adams looked with sympathy upon the Greek fight for independence. He viewed it as one battle in a larger struggle between Islam and the West, and along with President Monroe, held deep misgivings about the Ottoman Empire, especially in the wake of the Barbary Wars. Yet Adams refused to commit the United States to the struggle for Greece (which would last until 1832, three years after Adams himself would retire from the White House.)
In July 4th, 1821, Secretary Adams delivered a speech to Congress in which he answered the Greek revolutionaries’ request for aid and outlined the broader American approach to foreign policy. His words above are, in addition to very eloquent, a fine summary of the moral and economic merits of non-interventionism.
“We should go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” That’d look nice on a bumper sticker in ’16, don’t you think?
“He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. ‘Ye shall know the truth,’ says Jesus, ‘and the truth shall set you free.’ Now, I’ve chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal…
Now, of course, one of the difficulties in speaking out today grows the fact that there are those who are seeking to equate dissent with disloyalty. It’s a dark day in our nation when high-level authorities will seek to use every method to silence dissent. But something is happening, and people are not going to be silenced. The truth must be told, and I say that those who are seeking to make it appear that anyone who opposes the war in Vietnam is a fool or a traitor or an enemy of our soldiers is a person that has taken a stand against the best in our tradition…
A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death…
Let me say finally that I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and, above all, with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. And there can be no great disappointment where there is not great love…
America has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism. The home that all too many Americans left was solidly structured idealistically; its pillars were solidly grounded in the insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage. All men are made in the image of God. All men are bothers. All men are created equal. Every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Every man has rights that are neither conferred by, nor derived from the State — they are God-given. Out of one blood, God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. What a marvelous foundation for any home! What a glorious and healthy place to inhabit. But America’s strayed away…
And don’t let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, ‘You’re too arrogant! And if you don’t change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I’ll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn’t even know my name. Be still and know that I’m God.'”
As a small note: King was channeling John F. Kennedy when he cited Dante above. In 1963, when he was signing the charter that established the German Peace Corps in Bonn, West Germany, Kennedy remarked, “Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” This comment is probably based on a simplistic reading of the third canto of The Inferno.
But since I’ve just slogged through the relevant part of Stanley Lombardo’s translation of Dante, I feel I can be petty enough to say that both King and Kennedy seem to have never picked up The Divine Comedy. In Dante’s vision of the underworld, it is traitors — not cowards or equivocators — who get it the worst. In Kokytos, the ninth and final circle of the underworld, there are four concentric rings, starting with Caina, for traitors to blood relatives (hence, “Cain”), and ending with Judecca, for those who are traitorous to their masters. I’ll let you infer the namesake of that circle. And one more thing, the punishment isn’t fire; it’s ice.
…Well, that got morbid. Back to King. His opposition to Vietnam was so unwavering and so cogent. Dissent is not disloyalty; but, then as now, people don’t seem to get that. They assume that supporting government policy, even in its most baseless and ruinous permutations, is equatable to supporting the people whom government is tasked with representing. And as one of the vast majority of Americans who explicitly oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I can’t help but overlay his comments atop the decade-high pile of imperial waste we have just burned through.
Watch a short clip of King discussing Muhammad Ali in the context of the Vietnam War:
