Since I was a junior in high school I wanted to go into journalism. No, I didn’t want to just go into journalism; I wanted to be absorbed in journalism, to be a throwback to the old-school guys, to be Henry in The Paper who finally gets to yell ‘Stop the presses!’ This went through several phases of wanting to be, in order: a cityside reporter for the New York Daily News; the next Hemingway; a correspondent for the New York Times; a page designer for really any major paper; an assistant editor for Rolling Stone; the next HST; and finally a page designer for a major magazine, before I finally burnt out and dropped out of the J-School (which was a primary motivator for coming to KU in the first place).
It’s a little odd, yes, considering that most of the past decade of my life has revolved around journalism to the point that I was recruited out of Humboldt to start and being the founding editor of a community college newspaper, that I would then give up a prime slot in journalism school. But by the time I got here I just didn’t see the J-School as giving me the guidance and education that I craved; I felt that at least majoring in history or poli sci would give me the tools I needed to truly understand the world around me. The journalistic training could come on the job. Thus I decided that my only contact with journalism would be in token slots as an editorial board member for the Kansan, while I pursued what I thought would be my actual calling: a PhD in sociology, leading to a professorship and the possibility of writing books exposing and destroying the idea of American exceptionalism.
But always in the back of my mind was that twinge of envy when read a barbed, reasoned column in the Guardian, or saw a stunningly designed magazine or front page (a fix that not even two years as designer of the Jayhawker can seem to cure). I had been reading the works of Lewis Lapham, Frank Rich, and James Fallows for a few years, and appreciated the depth and breadth of their columns and essays enough to know how they achieved it: years of study combined with writing whenever and wherever they could. I realized that I had, in a pique of purity and indignation towards the state of journalism and J-Schools in our modern society, perhaps gone about this the wrong way. Reading Hendrik Hertzberg last winter confirmed it.
I bought his compendium, Politics: Observations & Arguments, 1966-2004, last August, but due to the pressures of 18 course hours (plus said yearbook duties and the hassle of a crash course in applying for grad schools) I didn’t get around to it until winter break. While I read it all in the matter of a week, it was not one of those books that hit me right away; the wit, the complexities, the vitality, and the process of reflection that Hertzberg used in his writing were all notable at first glance, but they took a while to sink in. So did the issues he wrote about.
A year later and I’m still rereading his essays, much more so than I am with any other writer (and considering the guys I mentioned above, that’s saying something). I could say that Hertzberg and Lapham and Rich have influenced me to apply to the School of Journalism at NYU, specifically its Cultural Reporting and Criticism master’s program, but more importantly it was the understanding that they crafted their style to get their positions, and then used the freedom of those positions to use that style to its greatest advantage, that pushed me towards that program. (Realizing that I’m not ready for a five-year doctoral commitment now, despite how much I love social theory, was also, admittedly, a factor.) Will it all be moot if I can’t figure out how to pay for a year and a half in NYC, attending a graduate school of journalism? I hope not, but whatever the outcome of the next few months of waiting, I’m pretty sure that this gut feeling is the right one; it’s possible that by burning out and dropping out of the J-School, I’ll end up with an even stronger love of journalism, and a better intuition for where it’ll take me.
••••
I bring all of this up by way of responding to a recent blog posting by my colleague from this summer, Vince Myers. Vince is a committed conservative, as he has made clear many times, and I have found his writings to be thoughtful and clearly rooted in his ideals. On the issue of Iraq, we have a history of clashing over U.S. policy and the future of that nation in the midst of a continued insurgency.
When I said that reading Hendrik Hertzberg’s book didn’t fully hit me at the time, one of his essays was an exception then, and continues to be today. Though written over two decades ago while Hertzberg was editor of the New Republic, his “Why the War Was Immoral” is I believe a classic in essay writing; the demolition he delivers to the twin pillars of the rationale behind the Vietnam war is as stunning in its brevity as it is in its ethical & political examination of that turbulent time.
Hertzberg finds that with Vietnam, there were those two pillars to why we were there: the geopolitical and the moral. He exposes the geopolitical ‘domino’ theory for the straw house that it was: our Cold War understanding of Communist aggression/expansion was rooted more in fear than in reality. It was combined with the notion that we should continue the war in Vietnam because to pull out would show weakness: “We said we would fight, therefore we must fight: at many a juncture along the way that logic seemed compelling. But it was not a compelling reason to fight forever. Our guarantees were not worthless. It was the war that was worthless. (35)”
Dispatching this, Hertzberg than focuses on why the war was said to be moral, because it would save South Vietnam from communism. “And to the extent that the war was fought for this aim, it was fought for a moral aim. But this says no more than that the war was fought with good intentions rather than evil ones, which is saying very little. If good intentions were enough, there would be no neoconservatives. (35)”
He finds in examining the moral case for war that for it to be sustained, “the war must be judged to have been winnable–winnable, moreover, at a lower cost in suffering and death and than the cost of a communist victory. (36)” But as he explains, there had to have been a point where victory can be reached, where the cost-benefit balance tilts our way, where the suffering can be justified, where North Vietnam would have given up. This point didn’t exist.
“If the North Vietnamese were willing to accept limitless casualties, if they were willing to pay any price, than the war could not have been won except by the physical destruction of North Vietnam and the killing of a large proportion of its people. … Of course no American wanted to kill everybody in Vietnam. Americans are not monsters. But Americans are not losers, either. Americans are winners. But the logic of winning in Vietnam was inescapably the logic of genocide. We did not lose in Vietnam. We chose not to win. (37)”
In writing this essay Hertzberg is responding to Norman Podhoretz, who wrote that victory was beyond our the moral capabilities. “Yes, it was beyond our moral capabilities–except that what he understands as a moral failure I understand as a moral success. It wasn’t cowardice that finally impelled us to quit. It was conscience. (37)”
••••
One of the things that always infuriated me about the anti-war movement was the ‘No war for oil!’ signs and slogans. The mindset that the war was all about material gain, about staffing the oil fields with Halliburton men and stacking the tax rates in favor of foreign contractors permeated the entire movement before the war started, and refuses to go away. It is a dangerous, debilitating mindset, one that has hindered the movement in ways that they don’t even understand yet. Because, you see, the war was in fact about oil.
Not in terms of seizing tankers and bringing back $1.20/gallon gasoline; that would negate the need for ANWR. No, the war was about oil in that it was about power; if the world is a chessboard, than the Middle East is the center four squares. Control it and you dictate the rest of the board; you don’t even need to occupy those squares, but simply have your knights, rooks or bishops in a position to strike with one move and reestablish dominance.
In the middle part of the century, we wanted control and friendly relations with Middle Eastern nations in order to satisfy our oil needs as we became a superpower engaged in a struggle that would eclipse all geopolitical rivalries before it. To have access to the petroleum reserves would allow our military and economy to function at full-out expansion; anything less was unacceptable. And thus we chained ourselves to sultans and monarchs who governed with an iron fist, just as we allied ourselves with murderers and despots in Vietnam and Latin America to curb ‘aggression’.
Now, however, it’s not our oil needs that satisfied, but the rest of the world. The Middle East accounts for a fraction of our total oil inflows; the lion’s share of our petroleum comes from this hemisphere, with Canada as our biggest supplier, followed by Mexico and Venezuela (Hugo Chavez will be a topic for another day). But, the rest of the industrialized world isn’t as diversified as we are (or perhaps simply doesn’t have the kind of sway that have historically claimed within this half of the world). The European Union and Japan have been much more dependent on Middle Eastern oil for the past few decades; the East Asian tigers revitalized that part of the world and in a hurry during the 1990s, and caused massive economic and social changes to their nations. Now the elephants are stirring; India and China are ever increasing their economic output, which means industrialization, which means new money, which means cars. Lots of them. And no emissions standards to hold them back either.
By holding onto the center of the chessboard, the U.S. is desperately clinging to its power over the developed and developing world. Keeping military units in stationed in the Middle East allowed the U.S. to effectively say to those industrialized countries “You want to step in and take care of this? No? Okay then.” When we invaded Iraq, it was a further step to reassert our control; by grasping to a geopolitical (stopping the spectre of Islamic fundamentalist theocracy) and a moral (spreading democracy) framework, we bet the house on the prospect that the rest of the world would respond and work with an America that has only the best interests of the world at heart. It is clearer now, more than ever, that we have lost that bet.
Thus my frustration at the protestors I mentioned above; they are looking at the world through glasses that do not fit anymore, and thus they fail to address the greater injustices of a global culture that allows for despots and democracies to operate unhindered in the guise of neoliberalism. I do not subscribe to the theory that we are in the midst of an American Empire; I believe we had our empire, and are now on the tail-end. Our economy is showing signs of strain that were not thought possible in the late 1990s; every day trucks full of U.S. hard currency roll into the Chinese central bank to finance our debt. Brazil will surpass us in agricultural output by the end of the decade; we are losing our industrial capacity in the name of unfettered global capital; we are eroding our scientific and technological edge in the name of intelligent design. Our moral credibility decreases with each new mention of black sites in Europe and elsewhere; we have failed to heed the lessons of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, and in so doing consigned ourselves to a shame that could have been avoided had we heeded the lessons of the Trail of Tears. Our military is tied down in Iraq to the point that we may be witnessing in front of our very eyes the destruction of the modern volunteer army, and certainly the national guard system; if needed to operate in a theater of war in the near future, there is much reason to fear the responsiveness of units and troops called upon to fight a war by people whom I swear to God seem to have never read a history book.
There is reason to debate policy in Iraq. There is reason to believe that our policies are not working, just as there is reason to believe that perhaps we can pull it out. But any and every discussion must start with a frank and solid grounding of our aims and our capabilities to fight and ultimately win in Iraq. Is there a point at which we can claim victory in Iraq? This presumes that the insurgency will eventually draw down and fail; this presumption, in history, has been the cause of too much suffering and destruction to keep rolling the dice. How much is enough? A half a trillion dollars and 3,000 U.S. soliders? A trillion dollars and 5,000 soliders?
Too often we look at the cost-benefits and try to find that magic equation that will solve everything, but terror and democracy and nationalism can’t be plugged in like regular integers. They are factors that govern the actions of men more so than armor plating or dollar bills, and thus they are beyond our capabilities to control or fight. The North Vietnamese were prepared to sustain losses we couldn’t even imagine in order to drive out what they perceived as an occupying army; in throwing numbers at the variables, we failed to see the absurdity of the equation. At the time we could explain and justify it, but how can we do so now?
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