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That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

"What huge imago made/ A psychopathic god": the question echoed like an
explosion, as the sight of the twin towers collapsing shocked the world. In
America, however, it was not permitted to explore the final lines: to
suggest that the evil unleashed by Osama bin Laden might actually be
something that happened in history, and be susceptible to historical
analysis, was immediately pronounced traitorous -- as if the desire to
understand somehow was the same as justifying this horror.
Some things, it was argued then and now, cannot and should not be
understood. Some evils are cosmic obscenities, anomic, existing outside all
reason and causation. President Bush's declaration that the terrorists
struck not for any reason but because "they hate our freedom" was a crude
statement of this point. The impulse to declare that catastrophes are beyond
the human order is as old as Job. And there is truth in it -- but not the
entire truth. If all evil is unfathomable, chaos would have engulfed
civilization long ago, for catastrophes befall us all.
Auden himself grappled with this issue. As Alan Jacobs pointed out in a
penetrating essay published last year, Auden later repudiated his poem --
and he did so because he came to believe he had been too quick to explain
away evil. The poem asserts that the harsh sanctions imposed by the Allies
on Germany after World War I were one of the causes of Nazism. And he drew a
moral comparison, perhaps even an equation, between those sanctions and
Nazism: "Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return."
Jacobs explains that as Auden came to understand the true nature of the Nazi
regime, he realized that his lofty rhetoric, which implicitly posits that
all have sinned equally and all are equally culpable, failed to distinguish
between the sins of the Allies and the infinitely greater sin of Nazism.
In short, Auden came to believe that he had arrived too quickly at that
moral-aesthetic height from which the varieties of human folly become
indistinguishable.
Was Auden right to repudiate his poem? There is no single answer. But the
fact that it still speaks to people indicates that he may not have been. In
fact, the verses about Germany were never as crudely exculpatory of Nazism
as he came to believe. In any case, as time passes, even the most dreadful
horrors come to be seen sub specie aeternitatis: indeed, poetry that
attempts to engage too specifically and polemically with politics is not
usually the poetry that lasts. As an engaged work, a rallying cry of
defiance to Hitler, "Sept. 1, 1939" falls short; but as a meditation on the
darkness that infects the human condition, and a haunting description of
what it felt like to watch the world collapse from the "neutral air" of New
York, it remains strange and alive.
It is the strange life that courses through Auden's poem that has made it,
remarkably, relevant not once but three times: in 1939, after Sept. 11 and
again today. Indeed, it may speak even more pointedly to us now, as we once
again observe horror unfold in slow-motion -- this time a horror of our own
making.
By a terrible irony, the poem that so many Americans read after Sept. 11 to
comfort themselves and their wounded and victimized nation now reads as an
indictment of our folly -- and an elegy for our lost reason. The "offense"
is the terrorist attacks. And the culture that has been driven mad is our
own.
This, at least, is the view of most of the people in the world -- one
forcefully expressed by the British novelist John le Carré, who wrote a
piece in the Times of London called "The USA has gone mad." It isn't just
the Security Council, or the U.N., although America's isolation there is
disturbing enough. That the overwhelming majority of people on earth --
regardless of their paid-off or strategically-aligned governments' official
positions -- believe that America is going down a terribly wrong path is
something that should inspire far deeper reflection, and doubt, among
American policymakers, and the general public, than it has. When millions of
people -- many of whom had wept and marched in solidarity with the great
city of New York, capital of the modern world, just a year and a half
earlier -- took to the streets in dozens of cities around the globe, Bush
dismissed them as a "focus group." So much for the largest worldwide
demonstrations in human history, a first stunning street plebiscite in a
nascent global democracy.
America is about to launch the first unprovoked war in its history (or the
second, if you count what Neal Gabler called its true precedent, the
Spanish-American War), and it will do it essentially alone. After Bush's
strangely robotic press conference last Thursday (the Washington Post's Tom
Shales and the Times' Maureen Dowd spoke for many when they observed that
the president appeared to be drugged), in which he was completely incapable
of answering why a beefed-up inspections regime, backed by force, could not
keep Saddam under control, there seems no hope that an invasion can be
averted by diplomacy. Perhaps Britain will succeed in pushing back the date
of the war resolution by a few days or weeks. But the hot weather is coming,
the troops will soon lose their edge, and so very soon Bush will either
press for a resolution authorizing force -- which the Security Council will
reject -- or simply issue the invasion order. And soon thereafter thousands
of tons of bombs will begin falling on Iraq, home of a vile and murderous
tyrant and 23 million Iraqis, many of whom will die before their fellow
citizens are released from Saddam's bondage and into an unknown future.
That future will be determined by three things: the fortunes of war,
American commitment, and fate. Of those three, it is impossible to say which
is the most fickle.
It is equally impossible to say with certainty whether invading a large
sovereign Arab state will make America safer or not. Unless the war and its
aftermath unfold as smoothly as a game of Risk played against a 6-year-old,
however, the odds are it will not.
As the United States stands in rigid and increasingly pathological
isolation, prepared to take an incredible gamble for no good reason, Auden's
poem, with all its incredulity, bitterness, dread and humanity-lacerating
guilt, resonates with uncanny power. It is music for the coming shadows.

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

We have become all too familiar with "the lie of Authority," which
promulgates patriotic myths to ensure compliance with demands that the
individual might reject: It is on Fox News and its imitator MSNBC nightly.
But Auden's audacity in this stanza is to link this familiar lie with the
"lie in the brain" -- a lie of which all humans, Americans and Iraqis and
French alike, are guilty. This is the lie that we exist alone, the lie of
egotism, the lie that we do not need to love our fellow man. In a brilliant
stroke, Auden reveals that these two apparently separate untruths work in
the same way, making us susceptible to demagoguery and fear-mongering,
leaving us short of our full humanity. Indeed, they are identical. The
resonance with Christianity is unmistakable: "Though I speak with the
tongues of man and angels, if I have not love, I am but sounding brass and a
clanging cymbal ..."
What does any of this high-flown talk of love have to do with the looming
war with a dangerous dictator? It would be absurd to interpret Auden's
famous injunction "We must love one another or die" (which he later
denounced as a "lie" and amended to the darker "We must love one another and
die," before repudiating the entire poem) literally in this context -- as
did the human shield in Baghdad who told Salon that he wanted to bring
"inner peace" to the Iraqis and his fellow activists. The Saddam Husseins of
the world do not need a hug. But there is a link between the poet's call for
a revolution in every heart and the question of whether war is really needed
to protect America.
That link is found in the high moral and intellectual seriousness needed to
arrive at the decision to go to war. And the fact is that the
administration's deliberations and arguments have not even come close to the
necessary threshold. Here the uncertainty of the American people, as well as
the rest of the world, is a vital indicator. They are not afraid of Saddam
Hussein: If they were, they would be clamoring for war. They recognize that
he poses a threat, but it is a distant one. Their wisdom derives from the
oldest human instinct: to believe that history is a guide, that events are
predictable, that someone will not do something he has not done before. They
recognize that they could be wrong: when dealing with hypotheticals, no
arguments can be definitive. But they are also painfully aware of risk.
The Bush administration, and its faithful valet across the pond, insists
that the threat to America posed by Saddam Hussein is so great and so
imminent that we must kill thousands, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands,
of people to get rid of him. But they have not given compelling reasons for
war. And although their crystal ball works perfectly when assessing the evil
that Saddam will do, it suddenly goes dark when it comes to predicting the
evil that removing him could do, or even how much money it will cost.
One cannot reach the place of honesty required to answer the question
whether war is required if one does not first accept what war means, and
look long and hard down that hellish road. Nor can one do so without
examining one's previous beliefs about the threat posed by Saddam. Those who
simply transfer rage at the terrorists who struck on Sept. 11 onto Saddam
are not acting in good faith.
And here Auden's words are useful. What the poet is calling for is not
quietism, not turning the other cheek, but making the painful attempt to see
beyond oneself, to recognize the Other as fully human. This vision, to
borrow Stendhal's description of the temperament needed by the novelist, is
clear, dry, without illusion. But if Auden rejects bleeding-heart
sentimentality, the habitual pitfall of the left, he also rejects the
variant favored by the right, brutal sentimentality. And it is precisely a
species of brutal sentimentality that lies behind the bizarre, almost
unnoticed sleight-of-hand trick successfully pulled off by Bush:
transferring Americans' rage at al-Qaida into rage at Saddam Hussein.
Behind the vulgar flag-waving bombast of the mass media, behind the pro-war
chest-beating or too-little, too-late reservations of the nation's leading
newspapers, behind the embarrassing attempts to blame the Bush
administration's worldwide isolation on the French, there is a great
hollowness -- the sinking, empty feeling that follows the dissemination and
absorption of a Big National Lie.
The lie is the claim that the threat to America posed by Saddam Hussein is
so urgent that only immediate war can stop it. What is noteworthy about this
lie is not just that there are no convincing arguments for it, not just that
it depends on gross appeals to emotions stirred by a completely unrelated
event, but that most of those who have accepted it have no intellectual
justification in doing so.
I propose the following axiom: Those who did not believe and publicly state
before Sept. 11 that Saddam Hussein represented an unacceptable threat to
the United States have no credibility when they now argue that he does.
The reasoning behind this axiom is simple: The events of Sept. 11 have no
relevance to the threat posed by Iraq, nor has any new information been
unearthed since then about Iraqi threats. Therefore, all those who are only
now calling for the U.S. to invade Iraq are basing their change of heart
purely on an emotional reaction to Sept. 11, not a reasoned analysis of risk
factors. This is an argument made in bad faith. For 10 years they were not
afraid of Saddam Hussein. What changed their mind? The fiery spectacle of
Sept. 11, they claim. Bush has invoked the date repeatedly as he has tried
to scare Americans into supporting his war. But try as they might, none of
these hawks in or out of the Bush government has been able to prove a
connection between Osama bin Laden's spectacular assaults and the Baghdad
regime.
That this obvious point has scarcely been raised indicates the extent to
which emotion, not argument, has come to dominate public discussion of this
issue. The patriotic intimidation, the groupthink, the shunning and shaming
of those who dared to raise unpopular perspectives -- these reflexes still
govern the national dialogue on Iraq.
This helps explain why it is not acceptable to question whether even
al-Qaida, whose all-powerful, demonic nature must constantly be invoked to
prop up war with Iraq, is as powerful, resourceful and threatening as is
believed. Obviously, it represents a very serious threat, and all necessary
resources must be devoted to hunting it down and destroying it. But it is
not necessarily correct to assume that the true strength and significance of
a terrorist movement is equal to the success it enjoys in a given operation.
Of course, emotional reactions can be valuable. U.S. intelligence agencies
knew for years that bin Laden and his associates were responsible for
terrorist attacks against U.S. targets; they failed to act effectively.
Sept. 11 served as a wake-up call, and no one would argue that it should not
have.
But Iraq, according to CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack, whose well-researched
pro-war book "The Threatening Storm" has probably been cited by more
born-again liberal hawks than any other, had nothing to do with Sept. 11, or
indeed with al-Qaida, and very little to do with international terrorism in
general. As Pollack and most other analysts have noted, handing weapons of
mass destruction out to people he can't control is not Saddam's style. The
position of the CIA itself, until director George Tenet was taken away and
retrofitted with a new pro-war sound system, embarrassingly contradicted
Bush's agenda: The agency said it was unlikely that Saddam would use weapons
of mass destruction unless an invasion forced him into a corner.
Let us be impolitic enough to recall the universal assessment of Saddam
Hussein before 9/11 -- an assessment borne out by studies of Iraq from Kanan
Makiya's "Republic of Fear" to Khidhir Hamza and Jeff Stein's "Saddam's
Bombmaker." The picture that emerges is of an appallingly vicious Stalinist
thug, a murderous despot who has some pan-Arab leadership pretensions, and a
vicious hatred of Jews and Israel, but whose overriding instincts are to
expand and consolidate his own power and save his own skin. There is nothing
in his sordid résumé to indicate that he would support an al-Qaida-like
group in terror actions against the U.S.: He is too much of a survivor, too
pragmatic and too secular to trade the messianic, apocalyptic joys of
killing Americans for the likelihood that the connection would be discovered
and his head consequently impaled by the 101st Airborne on the gates of
Baghdad. (For that matter, in the current climate, even if no such
connection was discovered, Saddam might well still answer for it. Which is
why there is reason to believe that if he had anything to say about it, all
terror actions against the U.S. would cease immediately.)
Saddam is delusional, not mad: He strikes when he thinks he can get away
with it. He believed he could defeat Iran, not least because the U.S. was
backing him. (In 1983 the United States knew Saddam was using chemical
weapons against Iran: The Reagan administration not only raised no
objection, it sought closer ties and soon restored diplomatic relations.
Reagan's Middle East envoy at the time: Donald Rumsfeld. They can be seen
amiably shaking hands in an old news photo in wide circulation on the Web.
These kinds of facts make it difficult to have complete faith in the high
humanitarian pronouncements of the Bush administration -- which is not to
say that the liberation of the Iraqi people would not be a great good.)
Saddam thought he could get away with invading Kuwait (which he regarded,
with some reason, as a part of historic Iraq that was artificially broken
off by the British when they carved up the Ottoman Empire) in part because
of the infamous "yellow light" given him by the senior Bush's ambassador,
April Glaspie, and in part because of his own megalomaniacal fantasies and
shaky grasp of external political realities.
The most dangerous things about this rather classic paranoid, sociopathic
despot are his delusions and his lack of good information about the outside
world. But there is no reason to believe either of these things makes him an
imminent threat to the U.S. His delusions are those of a cunning man, too
cunning to assure his own doom by handing weapons to terrorists; his lack of
information leads him to do stupid things like drag his feet on inspections,
but not self-destructive ones like attacking the U.S. For me, the most scary
scenario in Pollack's book is that on his deathbed, Saddam might launch
missiles at Tel Aviv. But a nation cannot base its foreign policy on trying
to stave off theoretically possible future threats. Nor is it America's duty
to make war on Iraq, and risk its own national self-interest, to protect
Israel: Israel has shown itself quite capable of dealing with him in the
past.
The administration has made crude, increasingly desperate attempts to tout
connections between Saddam and al-Qaida, including wildly overdrawn claims
that his sketchy relationship with the anti-Kurdish Islamist group Ansar
Al-Islam proves his connection to al-Qaida. (The campaign may have reached
its humiliating nadir when Colin Powell tried to use Osama bin Laden's
latest tape, in which he called for Muslims to rally around Iraq against
America while denouncing Saddam as godless, to connect the two -- a line of
argument worthy of the Michael Savage show, but one that may be effective
with that large percentage of Americans who believe that Osama is Saddam.)
So why, absent any connection between Osama and Saddam, would Sept. 11 have
served as a wake-up call about Iraq? It apparently had that effect on many
influential voices in the media, including the New York Times' editorial
page, their influential foreign affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman, and
the editorial page of the Washington Post. (The Times, which was calling for
war just a few weeks ago, has since reversed course. Alarmed by the world's
rejection of the plan, and perhaps having second thoughts about the national
security arguments it had earlier accepted, in the last few weeks the
editors went first into an awkward semi-retreat, then reversed course and
explicitly came out against it Sunday. Friedman, too, has been changing his
tune, although his case is slightly different because his enthusiasm for the
war has been based less on national security arguments than on the
idealistic hope that a democratic Iraq could help rebuild the region. Why it
took Friedman so long to realize that the Bush administration was not a
trustworthy instrument to execute this noble goal is a mystery.) In any
case, the fact remains that these extraordinarily important commentators all
accepted Bush's plan to invade Iraq -- a position none of them had held
before Sept. 11. The only logical explanation for their change of heart is
that only after Sept. 11 did they realize the gravity of Saddam's threat.
Sept. 11, by this line of reasoning, was just a catalyst: somehow the
arsonist who tossed a firebomb through the front window made them remember
that they had left a convicted murderer in the unlocked basement.
If this is actually what happened to the reborn hawks, it's at least a
defensible position. And perhaps it is -- although none of them, as far as I
know, have issued any mea culpas for ignoring, for 10 years, a threat to
America's security so great that only launching an incredibly risky war
right now, without any delay, can remove it.
It seems more likely that what really happened, not just to the media but to
the spineless Democratic Party and to the country as a whole, was a little
less respectable. The fact is that the rush to invade Iraq simply
exemplifies, on a huge, international scale, that old slogan "A
neoconservative is a liberal who got mugged." We got mugged on Sept. 11, so
we have to lock up all those criminal bastards, whether they were the ones
who stole our wallet or not. War on Iraq is like California's barbaric, yet
so gratifying, "three strikes" law, just upheld by the five justices on the
Supreme Court who brought us the Bush presidency. You shoplifted three golf
clubs -- 25 years. Al-Qaida is scaring us -- invade Baghdad.
This is the triumph of brutal sentimentality: the boozy appeal of raw anger,
unreflective rage -- a populist version of what Nietzsche called
ressentiment. It has long been the favorite rally-the-troops appeal of the
right wing of the Republican Party. And, dressed up as "moral clarity," it
worked: America is pursuing a war policy that could have been drawn up by
those yahoos who chant and sing "Burn 'em!" while executions take place. It
is a commonplace that the reason we have laws is so that the injured
parties, whose passions understandably cloud their judgment, do not decide
the fate of the accused. But we now have a policy that enacts the
psychological fantasies of, and draws much of its support from, the
angry-victim wing of the Republican right -- red-faced white men filled with
rage, slavering and clamoring to hang 'em high.
Revenge, of course, is not the principle motive driving Bush. There are
several. With his domestic agenda a disaster, his popularity plummeting (the
latest poll has him losing to an "unnamed Democrat" by four points), and his
administration slowly bleeding to death in the Security Council, he has no
political choice except to roll the dice on war. He seems to have convinced
himself that Saddam really does pose a threat. And he has big geopolitical
ambitions in the Middle East -- some concerning oil, some about defending
Israel and placing it in a stronger position to dictate terms to the
Palestinians, and perhaps some genuinely well-meaning ones about freeing the
Iraqi people from tyranny and setting the region on a better course.
Nonetheless, revenge disguised as self-defense (or, in down-market
Republican circles, self-defense dressed up as revenge) is what he's using
to sell the war. It helps that Bush is from Texas, home of all-American
ressentiment.
By definition, victim rage is abandoned, luxurious, orgiastic: It wallows in
its emotions in a kind of sexual frenzy. Not surprisingly, it rubs up
against racism and tribalism: once all repressive constraints are thrown
off, it is irresistible to indulge in forbidden thoughts, whose "truth" is
only confirmed by the taboo that has been shattered. The usual litany: Black
people are oversexed criminals; Latinos are lazy and stupid; Americans are
corrupt, godless infidels; Jews are greedy and deceitful; Arabs are dirty,
unscrupulous liars.
A tincture of genteel racism, usually though not always masquerading under
the respectable cloak of a "clash of civilizations," is part of the crusade
against Iraq. To describe this impulse as "Kill all the ragheads and let God
sort them out" would be too simplistic, but a crude leveling impulse related
to that kind of bigotry surely explains, at least in part, the inability of
so many Americans to grasp the profound differences between Saddam Hussein
and Osama bin Laden -- or to mention the group upon whose fate the outcome
of Bush's whole gigantic gamble may rest, the Palestinians.
The Bush administration's reactionary policies with regard to the
Israeli-Palestinian crisis have given this unacknowledged racism an official
imprimatur. By framing the entire crisis in terms of Palestinian terrorism,
rather than Israeli occupation and Palestinian terrorism, Bush has subtly
equated the Palestinians with al-Qaida. In Bush's view, as in Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon's, the Palestinians have no history, no grievances, no
claims of any kind on the world's conscience: Their acts of violence are
completely evil, exactly like those of al-Qaida. All Arabs, it seems, must
pay the price of 9/11.
Bush has done something no American president has ever done: He has pushed
U.S. policy so far to the right on the Middle East that it is now virtually
indistinguishable from that of Sharon, the father of the settlements, whose
Cabinet includes Israeli politicians who openly advocate ethnic cleansing,
aka "transfer."
That extraordinary fact, and its possible consequences, are only just now
dawning on people in Israel and America alike. His empty recent speech about
a Palestinian state notwithstanding, it is becoming more and more clear that
Bush not only shares Sharon's vision of how to solve the Israeli-Palestinian
crisis -- slaughter and starve the Palestinians until they are prepared to
accept whatever wretched Bantustan Israel offers them -- he intends to
approach the Arab world the same way.
For those Israelis who dream of a way out of the hell Sharon and Hamas have
led them into, the parallels have become too painful to ignore. In Ha'aretz
on March 6, Gideon Samet wrote, "Sharon's continuing success also includes
the enlistment of the American president in the cause to prevent any
initiative for a peace process. Indeed, there's something hypnotic and
almost horrifying about George Bush Jr.'s behavior. He's becoming a kind of
American Arik [Sharon], leading his country, against stiff opposition, into
a war for which seemingly there's no alternative."
An American Arik:Those words should send shudders down the spine of every
American -- and every Israeli and every Palestinian. The nightmare scenario
since 9/11 has always been that Bush, led by the rabidly pro-Likud members
of his inner circle, guided by his fervent Christian affinity for Israel,
plotting to strip critical Jewish votes and money from the Democrats in the
runup to the '04 elections, filled with a genuine hatred for Yasser Arafat,
ignorant of the history of the conflict, angry at traitorous,
pro-Palestinian Europe, and supported by a public whipped up into an
anti-Arab frenzy by war against Iraq, abandons the peace process and the
"road map" (which last week he once again refused to accept, out of
deference to Israeli sensibilities) and refuses to challenge even a single
one of Sharon's repressive policies.
Coupled with the possible dire fallout from the Iraq war in the Arab world,
this would have the effect of making the U.S.'s relations with the Arab
world finally and definitively indistinguishable from Israel's -- an outcome
dreamed of by hardcore Likudniks and their American supporters, but a
nightmare for everyone else.
Despite these fears, and even accepting that Saddam poses no threat
whatsoever to the U.S., the peculiar thing about the war we are about to
undertake is that it could end up being completely successful and completely
justified. Freeing the Iraqi people from Saddam is a worthy goal (unless we
kill so many that the benefit is lost). The war could, as Christopher
Hitchens predicted in a debate with Mark Danner, be "rapid, accurate and
dazzling." Iraqis could greet us in the streets. And if the U.S. doesn't cut
and run, postwar Iraq could become stable and prosperous, and help move the
region toward democracy. The war might not serve as a recruiting tool for
thousands of bin Ladens. The precedent established by the launching of a
preventive war is troubling, but it could prove harmless. It might even
deter rogue states from seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
Despite the blow to its power and prestige, the U.N. could recover. Our
allies could work with us again.
No critic of the war who reflexively denies that these outcomes are
possible, on the grounds that America has ugly aims (or has an ugly
history), can be taken seriously. Good results can follow from bad
intentions -- and in this case America's intentions are not even uniformly
bad.
But the war could also go completely wrong, in ways more horrifying to
contemplate than it is satisfying to imagine the ways it could go right.
A reasonable alternative to war exists, and key elements of it are already
in place. A beefed-up inspections regime should be installed, with a
diminished but still significant military force offshore, paid for by the
allies. The allies would reserve the right to use air strikes to punish
Saddam if he fails to make sites available to inspectors or otherwise flouts
the process. Recalcitrant neighbors like Saudi Arabia could be persuaded to
sign off on using their territory, since the alternative is war. (The most
cogent argument for war, Pollack's "The Threatening Storm," argues that
containment has failed -- but Pollack does not discuss containment of this
magnitude, backed by force.) This allied pressure would keep Saddam boxed
up -- and could point the way to a new form of international conflict
resolution along a kind of SWAT team model, stronger than police action but
less catastrophic than war.
That the Bush administration is not willing even to try this approach
reveals that it sees value in using its unparalleled military machine simply
for the sake of using it. This approach may cow some potential rivals, but
it will alienate more. Above all, it will open the ultimate Pandora's box --
war.
"September 1, 1939" is a great poem about history, a less great one about
politics. This is why, in many ways, it sums up our present dangerous and
ambiguous moment better than it did the aftermath of 9/11. For we have gone
from being in a political moment to a historical one.
I use the words somewhat eccentrically, to distinguish between events that
are simple enough to be fully explicable ("political") and those that are
too complex to be defined ("historical"). The war against Afghanistan took
place in what I am calling the political realm: It had a clear, limited and
achievable goal, one understood by all -- and widely supported around the
world. The impending war against Iraq, on the other hand, is a historical
event. It cannot be explained or defined. When it comes, it will simply
exist, with the opacity of history. Its outcome is not foreseeable.
The distinction also has a moral dimension. To exist in history is to have
passed beyond the pieties and slogans of the political. History is tragic:
politics is not. History is glorious. It is also fatal.
The two great competing ideologies of the 20th century, fascism and
communism, were both self-consciously historical movements. As Czeslaw
Milosz brilliantly noted in his classic study "The Captive Mind," it was
precisely the abstraction of communism, its claim to have attained the
summit of morality and to have incorporated into itself all possible
contradictions, that made it so meticulously horrifying. In similar fashion,
fascism contained a kind of blankness at its core: the self-glorifying
violence of the state simultaneously concealed and revealed the emptiness of
its founding concept, the national tribe.
The lesson every government should have learned from the bloody 20th
century, one written in blood across the tortured soil of old, very old
Europe, is very simple: Avoid history at all costs. History is too big, too
abstract, too dangerous. Avoid men with Big Ideas -- especially stupid men
with Big Ideas. Take care of politics: let history take care of itself. In a
word, don't play God.
George Bush is a deeply religious man, and he deeply believes in the
God-given mission of the United States to shed light -- Auden's "affirming
flame" -- upon the world. But as we wait for the bombs to fall, we can only
pray that he does not release darkness.

"September 1st, 1939"
By W.H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence