Contemplations on the war

War – an entire people’s will bent toward the annihilation of others. It’s a decision to… War – an entire people’s will bent toward the annihilation of others. It’s a decision to suspend the notion that life is sacred. Lacking insanity, deviance or immediate provocation, murder is not an easy act. To force men to go into battle and people to support such deeds, requires mythology and desperation. Fanaticism helps transform other humans into the enemy. Need breeds fanatics.

“Our nation [the Islamic world] has been tasting this humiliation and this degradation for more than 80 years. Its sons are killed, its blood is shed, its sanctuaries are attacked and no one hears and no one heeds.” Osama bin Laden’s rhetoric certainly evokes images of need and he has exploited local religion and American actions to support the myth required to take men and turn them into bombs.

The American government decided not only to fight the terrorists’ image of need with the United States’ need for defense, but it chose to fight their myth with one of our own. I found “The War on Terror” to be an absurd name the first time I heard it. I recognize the need of scared and wounded people to gather around something, anything that gives them comfort.

With no simple enemy to name, I suppose declaring war on a feeling seemed the thing to do. I thought the government was using “terror” to stand in for some real enemy it had in mind. It seems that battling “terror” makes for a better myth than battling an Iraqi dictator or cave-dwelling guerrillas. So long as the myth goes on, the war can.

Those who’ve actually committed violent acts against Americans and those who have supported and planned these actions are by definition enemies, but despite what our government may say, their tactics and justifications are not novel, nor should they be unfamiliar to us.

Our nation was born from a revolt justified by God-given rights and made legitimate only by victory. The freedoms won with that war are in far worse jeopardy than I’d imagined. The greatest victory of the Revolutionary War was the definition of the people living in this nation as free, brave and equal.

Whoever our enemies may be today, they’re winning. We have allowed our grip on the essence of American ideals to loosen intolerably. Having seen that weakness, our modern enemies are using our fears and our mythology to tear from us our true identity.

I’d heard people mock Cheney. I mostly ignored him until I stumbled across a Google News headline reading, “One might also argue that untruthful charges against the commander in chief have an insidious effect on the war effort itself.”

Cheney did actually say this at the American Enterprise Institute recently. Not wanting to write a column blasting the man for something out of context, I read his remarks in their entirety. It was horrifying and sickening. It was at once shocking and expected. The assumptions underlying his every comment and justification are portents of the worst kind:

“We have faced, and are facing today, enemies who hate us, hate our country, and hate the liberties for which we stand -we’ve never had a fight like this, and the Americans who go into the fight are among the bravest citizens this nation has ever produced. All who have labored in this cause can be proud of their service for the rest of their lives- we are making the world a better place.”

The vice president has decided we should “lay the foundations for a better world” with American bodies. All he’ll accomplish is to fuel every suffering soul outside of these borders with the same fire that led to our revolution, albeit colored by local mythology. Win or lose, that’s a war in which any nation born as ours was should never be.

We need to demolish the American myth a bit before we can build anything else. Our efforts to guarantee safety at home and freedom worldwide is costing the world its safety and us our freedom. The transaction is evident in the perversion of hollow words that were once full of significance – words that come from the mouths of our leaders.

E-mail Zak Sharif at rzs8@pitt.edu.