The Moral Equivalent of "War"

By Crispin Sartwell

We are not at war.

In our political discourse - which might gently be described as a "lie" - even a statement that is so obviously true as to be trivial can become too controversial to utter aloud when it conflicts with official ideology.

War is an armed conflict of large scale between groups. And though we may run into the occasional skirmish in rural Afghanistan, we're not actually fighting any battles anywhere these days. There is no combat; there are essentially no military casualties; there is no live fire. Hello. There is no war.

The "war on terror" is at the moment a metaphorical war, like the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on cancer. It is a virtual war, a war that can be fought almost entirely by spokesmen appearing in the media. Indeed, the combatants seem to be Ari Fleischer and Tariq Aziz, who are more likely to gum each other to death than to resort to bayonets.

What we've got here is a possible future war on Iraq, intelligence operations with regard to al Qaeda and other Islamist organizations, and a worldwide consolidation and redeployment of forces.

Why, then, are we all pretending that we're at war? This, it turns out, is a rather easy question to answer. We are at "war" for political reasons, and the "war" is being fought by political means. Though President Bush recently removed much of his economic team in response to the continuing slump, his approval ratings remain fairly high because he has been able to convince us - how, beyond sheer dogged repetition of the word, is not entirely clear - that we are at war and hence that we must stand behind our leadership.

In a crisis like the 9.11 terrorist attacks we demand that leaders take action. But the political demand is not exactly to take action, but to appear to take action. The most dramatic action a president can take is to declare war. And so get have the declaration but not the war. "The moral equivalent of war" is rather an obscure phrase; it seems to denote some real mobilization of spirit and resources. But the political equivalent of war is the appearance of war, the fiction of war, as the political equivalent of morals is the appearance of propriety.

I can sympathize with the dilemma. You've got to do something, but you can't. The folks who attacked us were not soldiers of a foreign power; their organizations do not stay put like a state; they are extremely elusive, diffuse, intangible. You can't fight a war against them because you can't find them. But you want to have a war against them, so you . . . pretend to.

And though we're not at war, we have declared martial law. We're instituting various systems of extra-constitutional trial and imprisonment, searches without warrants, pervasive surveillance, and so on.

How do we justify such actions, which constitute basic destructions of the American way of life? Well, we're at "war."

In fact, it's really a lovely war, because American boys aren't coming home dead. You get all the advantages of war for a ruling group (essentially consolidation of power) without the mess.

Now it may be that eventually people will realize that we're not at war, compromising this consolidation. So maybe in a pinch we can fight a war with Iraq, and though such a war seems essentially unconnected to 9.11, it works politically because Iraqis look to Americans vaguely like Muhammad Atta.

And there is one thing for which we can all be grateful: though war is hell, "war" is merely "hell."