‘Stop The War’

As I walked across Union Square in Manhattan the other day, I came across one of the peacenik booths that one can always find on the southern steps. Interested in the specific policies that might at this point be advocated by one of these types, I strolled by and picked up a flyer.

‘STOP THE WAR,’ it shouted in full capitals. It then went on with details of people killed, monies spent, and conspiricies that ranged from obvious to nonsensical. But I couldn’t get past the title. I had known, of course, that there were rather a lot of people in America who wanted our troops semi-immediately pulled out of Iraq. While this wasn’t something that I personally wanted, I could imagine a number of different reasons for wanting this result, all of which being, if not correct by my reckoning, at least internally consistent.

But the idea that withdrawing American and British troops from Iraq would ’stop the war’ was a new one on me. It would stop it for us, to be sure. But I didn’t imagine that the folks who wrote up this flyer or the ones who distributed it were that cold-blooded - that they would care only about the lives of American citizens and not those of Iraqi civilians.

No, these people were somehow convinced that once American troops left Iraq, the bombings and assassinations that have been claiming a good 20 Iraqis a day would somehow stop. The US would go home, everybody would cheer, and the situation on the ground in Iraq would ‘work itself out’ or something. The flyer gave no indication as to how exactly this would happen.

The truth is that an Anglo-American withdrawal would not call the killing to a halt. The level of violence directed towards the fledgling Iraqi government would not decrease, and the sudden loss of US protection would allow much more of this violence through. The Iraqi government, teetering on the brink of collapse in the best of times, would fall completely.

It would be replaced on a local level by tribal militias and at a national level by nothing at all. The money, weapons, and men that Syria has been funneling to Sunni Arab paramilitaries would now be given out in the open and in far greater numbers. The same would be true for Iran’s support of Shiite groups. While Syria and Iran fought their proxy war for influence in the oil-rich South, Turkey (which already has troops placed a hundred miles within Iraqi borders in the North) would annex outright Iraqi ‘Kurdistan’ on the claim that if they did not, their own Kurdish rebels would simply grow too powerful.

Far from stopping the war, then, an immediate US withdrawal would cause the total collapse of the Iraqi state. The north would be absorbed in all but name by Turkey. The center and south would each become a de facto state, but without the benefits of central government. Slow, simmering war over oil wealth would continue for years. Iraq could join Sudan, Yugoslavia, and the Congo in the list of failed states beset by decades of brutal war.

But I want to return to the flyer, because I think there is something far more important there than just a misunderstanding of how people conduct their political affairs. What much of this debate really comes down to is that many of the ‘anti-war’ set have a truly exaggerated idea of the power of the US military. They really do believe that the Defense Department could create a civil war out of nothing, and then when domestic pressure became too much, stop on a dime and end the war singlehandedly. No one who is actually in the military, or who supports the military and could be considered generally hawkish, would ever suggest such a thing. But the very people who consistently distrust the military’s motives and methods, and oppose its employment to achieve US goals, these are the people who have a boundless faith in its ability to achieve its objectives.

But perhaps this should not be so surprising, because the former must certainly follow the latter. If one believes in an all-powerful conspiracy among all levels of the US government, arms manufacturers, oil companies, major news networks, and foreign governments, then it certainly makes sense that one would fear and oppose such a confluence of powers. If I thought that the US military were that powerful, and a member of such a grand coalition, then I would not only have opposed our invasion of Iraq, but indeed any exercise of US military power.

The same holds true for any other imagined conspiracy of powerful actors. Since its inception, the UN has struck terror in the hearts of thousands of Americans. It was to displace national governments, abolish religion, and perhaps even usher in the end of the world. But after almost 60 years, far from organizing world conquest, the UN has proven that it can’t even successfully manage a sanctions regime against a small third-world nation.

And in truth, everyone has dark, shadowy forces that they fear. Pat Robertson fears homosexuals, Pat Buchanan fears Jews, Lyndon LaRouche fears pretty much everybody. Tribal groups fear the tribes they border, and where religion meets religion there arises suspicion and distrust. To fear others and their intentions is as natural as breathing.

But when we allow our fears to dominate our thinking, when we ignore Occam’s injunction to act on the basis of our most reasonable assumptions, we start down a dangerous path. If we learn about that which we fear and remain afraid, then so be it; there is much to be wary of in this world. But when we fear that which we do not know, we begin to live in a world of chimeras and simulacra, and we commence our march down a road whose end is dissonance, solipsism, and strife.