|
Excerpt
'The Kind Of War We Are In' And Our Cultural Vulnerabilities
4 November 2002. In contradistinction
to the phenomenon of love, if someone is at war with you--even if you
don't
know it--you're at war. If someone is in love with you, even if you
don't
know it, you're not necessarily in love. In both cases, however, reality
is that which doesn't go away, even when you stop thinking about it. If
someone is designedly and resourcefully--as well as patiently and
protractedly--at
war with you, you are at war. No matter what the legal determination
might
imply, or the diplomatic evasions and political sophistries might say or
bloviate[1], you are actually at war. Even when you are entirely
uncomprehending
of the nature of the war that you are in, you are thereby a provocative,
indeed manifold, target.
The most important question to pose and answer, according to Carl von
Clausewitz,
before you enter into a war--or come to find yourself surprised by war
and
its grand-strategic protractedness and implications--is to understand
'the
kind of war' you are in. What do we mean, however, when we speak of a
war
on poverty, or crime, or drugs--and now a war on terrorism? Poverty,
crime,
drugs, and terrorism are all unspecified abstractions, often vague and
always
'open-ended,' thus implying a permanent condition of war against certain
states of life or against certain methods of pleasure, greed, and
conflict.
Even as we are now further and resourcefully preparing to go into a
preëmptive
(or 'preventative') war with Iraq, we also find ourselves already
immersed
in the 'global war on terrorism,' or 'the GWOT,' at least by declaration
of our Executive Branch of Government. [...]
1 blovˇiaˇte intr. v. -atˇed,
-atˇing, -ates slang. To discourse at length
in a pompous or boastful manner. [Mock-Latinate formation, from BLOW.]
-bloviation
n. (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed.
(Boston,
MA: Houghton Mifflen Co., 2002), p. 200
|
