Americans face a moral reckoning

By James Carroll | March 26, 2007

YOU HAVE been reading “The Sorrow of War” by Bao Ninh, the classic account of what in Vietnam is called the American war. The title of Bao Ninh’s novel captures the feeling of grief and loss that always comes in the wake of violent conflict. Allowing room for fear, grief, and loss must define the dominant experience in Iraq today, where the suffering caused by this American war mounts inexorably.

But sorrow has also emerged as a note of life in the Unites States lately. Many comparisons are drawn between this nation’s misadventures in Iraq and Vietnam, but what you are most aware of is the return of a clenched feeling in your chest, a knot of distressed sadness that is tied to your country’s reiteration of the tragic error. After the chaotic end of the Vietnam War in 1975, you were like many Americans in thinking with relief that the nation would never know — or cause — such sorrow again.

The sorrow is back. Everywhere you go, friends greet one another with a choked acknowledgment of a nearly unspeakable frustration at what unfolds in Iraq. This seems true whether people oppose the war absolutely, or only on pragmatic terms; whether they want US troops out at once, or over time. Even about those distinctions, little remains to be said. Bush’s contemptuous carelessness, his inner circle’s corrupt enabling, the Pentagon’s dependable launching of folly after folly, the Democrats’ ineffectual kibitzing, even your heartfelt concern for the troops — these subjects have exhausted themselves. The “surge” of the January escalation was preceded by the surge of public anguish that resulted in Republican losses in November. That election was a stirring rejection of the administration’s purposes in Iraq, a rejection promptly seconded by the Iraq Study Group. But so what? Bush’s purposes hold steady, and their poison tide now laps at Iran.

Why should you not be demoralized and depressed? But the sorrow of war goes deeper than the mistaken policies of a stubborn president. Next to Bao Ninh’s book on your shelf stands “The Sorrows of Empire” by Chalmers Johnson. That title suggests how far into the bone of your nation the pins of this problem are sunk. In effect, the disastrous American war in Iraq is the text, while America’s militarized way of being in the world is the context. Armed power at the service of US economic sway has made a putative enemy of a vast population around the globe, and that enemy’s vanguard are the terrorists. Violent opposition to the American agenda increases with each surge from Washington, whatever its character. Both text and context reveal that every dream of empire brings sorrow, obviously so to the victims of imperial violence, but also to the imperial dreamers, whether or not they consciously associate with what is being done in their name.

But the word sorrow implies more than grief and loss. The palpable sadness of a people reluctantly at war can push toward a fuller moral reckoning with the condition of a nation that has made its own economic supremacy an absolute value. To take on the question of an economy advanced with little regard for its sustainability, much less for its justice, implies a move away from the focus on Bush’s venality to a broader responsibility. How do the sorrows of war and empire implicate you?

The simplest truth is that the economic system that so benefits you is steadily eroding democracy by transferring the power to shape the future, both within states and among them, to ever smaller elites. At the same time, wealth multiplies and concentrates itself, while impoverishing more and more human beings. Everything from US oil consumption, to global trade structures, to the iron law of cheap labor, to immigration policies, to the psychology of the gated community, to the gated idea of national sovereignty, to the distractions of celebrity culture — all of this supports what is called the American way of life. Yours. If finally seen to be the source of multiple sorrows at home and abroad, can this way of life prompt a deeper confrontation with its true costs and consequences? You need not reduce social ills to personal morality — or let Bush off the hook for his wholly owned war — to acknowledge the complicity attached to mere citizenship in a war-making, imperial nation. In that case, can you measure your sorrow against the word’s other meaning, which is contrition?

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

By James Carroll | March 19, 2007

Nearly a decade and a half ago, this condemnation of fundamentalism was issued: “The fundamentalist approach is dangerous, for it is attractive to people who look to the Bible for ready answers to the problems of life . . . instead of telling them that the Bible does not necessarily contain an immediate answer to each and every problem. . . . Fundamentalism actually invites people to a kind of intellectual suicide. It injects into life a false certitude, for it unwittingly confuses the divine substance of the biblical message with what are in fact its human limitations.” This robust denunciation came from the Vatican, in a 1993 document entitled “The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church.”

The phenomenon of “fundamentalism” has made an extraordinary impact on the world. But what is it? The scholar Gabriel A. Almond defines fundamentalism as “religious militance by which self-styled ‘true-believers’ attempt to arrest the erosion of religious identity, fortify the borders of the religious community, and create viable alternatives to secular institutions and behaviors.” Some fundamentalists pursue openly political agendas (Northern Ireland, Israel, Iran). Some are apolitical (Latin American Pentecostalism). In war zones (Sudan, Afghanistan, Palestine, Sri Lanka), fundamentalism is energizing conflict. Most notably, the warring groups in Iraq have jelled around fundamentalist religion.

These varied manifestations resist being defined with one word, which is why it is better, as Almond suggests, to speak of “fundamentalisms.” But they all have something in common, and as the Vatican critique of biblical fundamentalism suggests, it is dangerous. The impulse may begin with good intentions, the wish to affirm basic values and sources of meaning that seemed threatened. The term was born when conservative Protestants in early-20th-century America committed themselves to defend the five “fundamentals” of their faith — the inerrancy of the Bible, virgin birth and deity of Jesus, doctrine of atonement, bodily resurrection of Jesus, and his imminent return. That movement was a rejection, especially, of the historical-critical mode of biblical interpretation, and of Darwinian science. These characteristics still animate Protestant fundamentalism.

But all fundamentalisms, rejecting a secular claim to have replaced the sacred as chief source of meaning, are skeptical of Enlightenment values, even as the Enlightenment project has begun to criticize itself. But now “old time religion” of whatever stripe faces a plethora of threats: new technologies, globalization, the market economy, rampant individualism, diversity, pluralism, mobility — all that makes for 21st-century life. Fundamentalisms will especially thrive wherever there is violent conflict, and wherever there is stark poverty, simply because these religiously absolute movements promise meaning where there is no meaning. For all these reasons, fundamentalisms are everywhere.

Even in contemporary Roman Catholicism, with whose condemnation of fundamentalism we began. Catholic fundamentalists are more likely to be called “traditionalists,” and today the Vatican is their sponsor. Instead of reading the Bible uncritically, in search of “ready answers to the problems of life,” they read papal statements that way, finding in encyclicals the “false certitude” that the Vatican warns biblical literalists against. The most recent case in point is Pope Benedict’s “Apostolic Exhortation,” issued last week. What begins as a contemplative appreciation of the Eucharist ends up as a manifesto designed to keep many Catholics from receiving Communion at Mass. The ticket to Communion is an uncritical acceptance of what the pope calls, in a striking echo, “fundamental values,” which include defense of human life “from conception to natural death.” The key declaration is that “these values are not negotiable.”

But culture consists precisely in negotiation of values, and change in how values are understood is part of life. Moral reasoning is not mere obedience, but lively interaction among principles, situations, and the “human limitations” referred to in the 1993 Vatican statement. Take “conception.” The great Thomas Aquinas depended on 13th-century notions of biology, and did not believe that human life began at conception. Negotiation followed. Take “natural death.” Disagreements over its meaning (including among Catholic bishops) were made vivid not long ago in the case of Terri Schiavo. Negotiation followed. The pope affirms universal and unchanging “values grounded in human nature,” as if human nature is fixed, instead of evolving. One detects here, too, a suspicion of Darwin, an invitation to “intellectual suicide.”

The various fundamentalisms are all concerned with “fortifying borders,” and that is a purpose of today’s Vatican. The pope’s exhortation concludes by referring to the Catholic people as the “flock” entrusted to bishops. Sheep stay inside the fence. But what happens when Catholics stop thinking of themselves as sheep?

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.

©Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

 By James Carroll | December 25, 2006

“AS FOR MARY, she treasured all these things, and pondered them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19). What things? The shame of her mysterious pregnancy, the terrible requirement to travel far away, the inhospitable place in which to give birth to her baby, the manger as his only cradle, shepherds crowding round, angels singing in the night. “Listen,” they said, “we bring you news of great joy.”

For those who follow him, today takes its name from Christ, but the events of Christmas belonged first to Mary, exactly as every birth belongs to the mother before it belongs to the child. In the Gospels, Mary is the still point at the center of turmoil. As the narrative unfolds around her — the angelic proclamation of peace, the star in the east, the arrival of three kings, the hint of her baby’s transcendent significance, the jealousy of Herod, the warning in a dream, the flight into Egypt, the murders of innocent children left behind — Mary is the one who knows.

The story of the birth of Jesus serves the Gospels as a prelude, establishing with staggering simplicity the main idea of this entire proclamation. And that idea was enough to strike fear in the heart. “She was deeply disturbed,” Luke says. But then the angel said to her, “Mary, do not be afraid.” (Luke 1:29-30) Those words, in fact, were addressed to the people who first heard this story, because the nativity narrative itself was dangerous.

It is hard to imagine now, when Christmas is the ultimate feast of domesticity, but the sweet tale of the coming of this child was, in its origin, an act of political treason. The Christmas story began, in the scholar John Dominic Crossan’s word, as a “counterstory.” People who first gathered to tell it to one another, as a way of saying what the memory of Jesus had come to mean to them, were signing up for revolution.

The baby Jesus, after all, is explicitly identified as an antagonist to no one less than the emperor of Rome. “Now at this time Caesar Augustus issued a decree . . . ” (Luke 2:1) Augustus, claiming to be a god, was said to have been born of a human mother and a divine father. When a peasant woman from the opposite end of the social order is “found to be with child through the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 1:18), a direct rebuttal is being issued to the self-idolatrous emperor.

When the magi arrive to offer their gifts and bow, they are identifying the baby as a king, when the only king is Caesar. When angels sing of peace, they are defining the character of the kingdom that this child will initiate. Roman violence is challenged and rejected. When Herod, the emperor’s agent, fails in his attempt to murder the newborn, the theme is nevertheless being struck: Roman violence will pursue this child until it gets him. Mary is not afraid, but she is no fool. “A sword will pierce your soul,” a prophet tells her.

Pondering these things in her heart, Mary understands. Even within the nativity story, it falls to her to say what the events of Christmas actually mean. “My soul proclaims the greatness of God,” she begins. God “has routed the proud of heart. God has pulled down princes from their thrones and exalted the lowly. God has filled the hungry with good things, the rich sent empty away” (Luke 1:46-53).

The birth of Jesus is the reversal of the imperial order. The story of that birth is told and told again because the imperial order is always attempting a comeback, always needing to be challenged.

Empire lives in the United States of America, and, despite assumptions of many Christian Americans, Christmas still rebukes the empire. The implications of Mary’s statement for contemporary politics are obvious. Violence marks power as much as ever. Hunger and poverty among masses of people are inevitable byproducts of a market system that rewards the few.

When economic inequity becomes so extreme as to turn the global social order into an effective state of permanent war, which side is God on? The shepherds tell us, and so do the kneeling kings. Above all, Mary tells us.

Those who love her story have no choice but to measure themselves against its meaning. So perhaps we do this every year not only out of sentimental longing for “news of great joy,” but also out the wish to be a better people than we are.

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Humans must colonize other planets: Hawking
Thu Nov 30, 2006 8:45 AM ET

LONDON (Reuters) – Humans must colonize planets in other solar systems traveling there using “Star Trek”-style propulsion or face extinction, renowned British cosmologist Stephen Hawking said on Thursday.

Referring to complex theories and the speed of light, Hawking, the wheel-chair bound Cambridge University physicist, told BBC radio that theoretical advances could revolutionize the velocity of space travel and make such colonies possible.

“Sooner or later disasters such as an asteroid collision or a nuclear war could wipe us all out,” said Professor Hawking, who was crippled by a muscle disease at the age of 21 and who speaks through a computerized voice synthesizer.

“But once we spread out into space and establish independent colonies, our future should be safe,” said Hawking, who was due to receive the world’s oldest award for scientific achievement, the Copley medal, from Britain’s Royal Society on Thursday.

Previous winners include Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin.

In order to survive, humanity would have to venture off to other hospitable planets orbiting another star, but conventional chemical fuel rockets that took man to the moon on the Apollo mission would take 50,000 years to travel there, he said.

Hawking, a 64-year-old father of three who rarely gives interviews and who wrote the best-selling “A Brief History of Time”, suggested propulsion like that used by the fictional starship Enterprise “to boldly go where no man has gone before” could help solve the problem.

“Science fiction has developed the idea of warp drive, which takes you instantly to your destination,” said.

“Unfortunately, this would violate the scientific law which says that nothing can travel faster than light.”

However, by using “matter/antimatter annihilation”, velocities just below the speed of light could be reached, making it possible to reach the next star in about six years.

“It wouldn’t seem so long for those on board,” he said.

The scientist revealed he also wanted to try out space travel himself, albeit by more conventional means.

“I am not afraid of death but I’m in no hurry to die. My next goal is to go into space,” said Hawking.

And referring to the British entrepreneur and Virgin tycoon who has set up a travel agency to take private individuals on space flights from 2008, Hawking said: “Maybe Richard Branson will help me.”

By James Carroll  November 27, 2006 

THE WORSENING conflict between Israelis and Palestinians reached a rare point of clarification last week, but an ominous one. It involved leaked Israeli government documents apparently showing that significant parts of Israeli settlements in the West Bank are on land unjustly appropriated from Palestinians.

“One Third of Jewish Area Is on Private Property,” read the Page 1 headline in The New York Times. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis live in “settlements” that are in politically disputed territory, but the Israeli government has long insisted that the private property rights of individual Palestinian owners have been respected. The official line is that settlements are only created on land that has been legally purchased. But is that so?

Complications of ownership records are part of the story, and so, perhaps, is occasional Palestinian reluctance to openly acknowledge the sale of land to the government of Israel. But the leaked report draws attention back, nevertheless, to the foundational mistake that Israel made decades ago — creating the massive settlements in the first place. Whether individual rights were respected or not, the communal rights of Palestinians were trashed. And now this injustice has backfired, with the ownership dispute laying bare Israel’s larger problem.

Surrounded by hostile populations across the region from the start, the State of Israel, by taking land after the 1967 war, licensed and funded settlements that drew that hostility right into the polity of Israel itself. Local Arab resentment reinforced Arab hatred everywhere.

The negative consequences of the settlements have been multi-faceted. The requirement to support the many Jewish settlers has led the government to create unequal civic institutions, like roads and water sources. Inequities in infrastructure contribute to steadily worsening Palestinian conditions. Protection of settlers involves broad, and often cruel, restrictions on Palestinians. The plight of their cousins in occupied territories has pushed Arab Israelis further away from any identification with Israel. Many Israeli Jews, including members of the Israel Defense Forces, refuse to associate with their government’s settlement policies. The inequities fuel local rage among Palestinians, and regional resentment among Arabs.

The fact that the settlements apparently violate individual Arab property rights only exacerbates the broader violation of Palestinian territorial claims. But from the point of view of Israel, the most important fact may be that all of this, undertaken in the name of security, has probably done more to jeopardize the future of the democratic Jewish state than anything its enemies have done.

Among the factors that derailed the so-called peace process across the years was the on going Israeli expansion of settlements, despite agreements to stop. The integrity of Israel’s word was compromised, and its goodwill was questioned. Settlement construction, especially in the environs of Jerusalem, amounted to a radical prejudicing of any conceivable end-game agreement.

Now, with the controversial security barrier, which amounts in many places to a huge cement wall, Israel is openly appropriating disputed land precisely to protect major settlement enclaves. That wall-and-fence is justified as a block to terrorist incursions, and may be succeeding as such, but it also amounts to a unilaterally drawn de facto border. The barrier makes Israel’s initial self-defeating mistake a permanent one. That such a construction could enhance Israel’s long-term security is shown to be folly by this year’s mobilization from Lebanon and Gaza of relentless rocket fire. No wall will stop that.

Today’s Middle East is marked by political despair. In the near term, no benign outcomes suggest themselves in Iraq or in Lebanon. Syria and Iran are poised for further mischief. Palestinians are led by factions that regard one another as enemies. Israelis have reason to feel isolated and threatened, especially after their government’s wild miscalculations last summer, and the repetition of such miscalculations in Gaza. But the impasse need not last forever, and the greatest mistake would be to shape policy as if it will.

The security barrier must not be accepted as a border. Early Israeli government definitions of the barrier as temporary must be insisted upon. Its route, even temporary, should be redrawn to respect Palestinian rights and requirements. Palestinian property claims should be adjudicated promptly. Extremist calls for the “removal” of Palestinians from Israeli areas must not be allowed to become mainstream.

Today, there may be, as many Israelis insist, no partner with whom to make peace, but no actions should be taken that make the emergence of such a partner impossible.

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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What it will take to end war

By James Carroll | November 6, 2006

THE WAR in Iraq has emerged as a key issue in tomorrow’s election, but in what way can its course be influenced by voting results?

On the one hand, President Bush has just renewed allegiance to Donald Rumsfeld, the contractor of disaster, and to Dick Cheney, the architect. This suggests that, even after abandoning the rhetoric of “stay the course,” Bush remains committed to the present folly. Two more years of Rumsfeld and Cheney in charge mean two more years of needless American casualties, jihadist recruitment, Middle East turmoil, and vast additions to the toll of Iraqi dead. If the elections maintain Republican majorities in Congress, the administration will feel no external pressure to change its Iraq policy. Absent that, Rumsfeld-Cheney will simply carry on.

On the other hand, Democrats could take the House, and perhaps even the Senate. What difference would that make to the war? Obviously, in one or both houses, the opposition could then convene hearings in which both the present conduct of the war and past failures and deceptions could be investigated. Congressional hearings can be a powerful forum. Until now, it has not served the Bush administration’s purposes to have the American public well instructed on the complexities of Iraq, but intensive media focus on testimony by the war’s witnesses, critics, and victims would change that.

We have been here before. Of all the acts of opposition to the war in Vietnam, none was more consequential than the hearings presided over by Senator William Fulbright — a Democrat challenging a Democratic administration. The Fulbright hearings served as the nation’s classroom, with a visceral uneasiness about the war evolving into informed opposition. The decisive election year was 1968, and, sure enough, voters cast their ballots for peace.

But if the past has ever offered instruction to the present, here is one lesson that must not be missed: The Vietnam War dragged on for nearly seven more years after that critical election. Why? Because public uneasiness with the course of the war was not enough. The only way out of the disaster was to accept defeat, and that America was loath to do. President Nixon came into office on the promise that he had a “secret plan” to end the war, but no sooner had he moved into the White House than he swore he would not be the first US president to lose a war. “Peace with honor” became the shibboleth. The killing continued, the air war came into its own, and more people died in Vietnam after 1968 than had died before. The American public’s retreat from concern about the war was epitomized by Nixon’s overwhelming reelection in 1972. How did that happen?

It is one thing to feel uneasy about your nation’s war, or even to move to a position of outright opposition. It is another to face the harsh fact that the only way out of the war is to accept defeat. The goal of “peace with honor” assumes that the nation’s honor has not already been squandered. During Vietnam, for all the widespread opposition to the war, the American public was never ready to face the full truth of what had been done in its name, and so the martial band played on. And on. The war ended not with a bang, but with a whimper, with the United States whining that somehow it had been the victim. Not incidental to the present disaster is the fact that the men dragging out that shameful last moment of Vietnam, when our nation’s abject defeat was made plain for all the world to see, were Ford administration honchos Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

Rumsfeld and Cheney are prepared to do it to their nation again. The question now is whether America will let them? The general uneasiness with the war in Iraq is mostly tied to how badly it has gone. Tactical and strategic planning have been bungled at every level, and the elusive enemy is yet to be understood in Washington. If the Democrats take power with the elections tomorrow, congressional hearings will have a lot of such questions to consider. But what about the moral question? For all of the anguish felt over the loss of American lives, can we acknowledge that there is something proper in the way that hubristic American power has been thwarted? Can we admit that the loss of honor will not come with how the war ends, because we lost our honor when we began it? This time, can we accept defeat?

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

The makings of a nuclear standoff

By James Carroll | October 16, 2006

NORTH KOREA has the bomb. That a regime led by the apparently misanthropic Kim Jong Il is now nuclear capable may undercut the mad balance of deterrence, with disastrous results. How did we come to this?

Washington bet that blustering belligerence was the way to deal with Pyongyang, and lost. In 2002, the Bush administration made two moves preparing the way for the North Korean nuke. The first was to demonize the regime with the language of evil, as President Bush did in that year’s State of the Union address — a transcendent challenge that only bolstered North Korea’s most extreme impulses and destroyed what chances remained of negotiations. The second was the formal promulgation, in the “National Security Strategy of the United States,” of the Bush administration’s determination to replace nonproliferation with “proactive counter-proliferation efforts” — including aggressive regime change. After the US invasion of Iraq, North Korea saw what was coming, and saw, equally, a way to deter it.

At the same time, the Bush administration, in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, began to pursue a new generation of nuclear weapons, sparking equivalent impulses in other nations. George W. Bush emerged as the proliferator-in-chief.

But there were other crossroads moments on the long journey to Pyongyang’s nuclear weapon, and Americans should revisit key turning points to ask, Might the story have gone another way? The Stalinist character of the North Korean Communist regime is like a fossil preserved in amber from another era, but it did not become so by itself — or inevitably. Indeed, the story could have been different at the start.

At the end of World War II, the great strategic contest between the Soviet Union and the United States was focused on Europe, with Berlin as the prize. The Korean peninsula, like Germany, was divided into occupation zones, but because it was of no strategic importance to either side, Moscow withdrew its forces in 1948, and the United States withdrew in 1949. The dividing line at the 38th parallel remained a border between North and South Korea, but that was assumed to be temporary, as the Korean nation would reconstitute itself. In January of 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson declared, in the “Press Club speech,” that Korea was outside of the “defense perimeter” of American security concerns. Less than six months later, North Korea, perhaps taking that as an opening, crossed the 38th Parallel.

The Pentagon, led by Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including Chairman Omar Bradley, agreed with Acheson’s January assessment, and opposed the introduction of US ground troops. The Korean crisis could be perceived more as a civil war than as Moscow’s aggression. (Indeed, we now know that Stalin did not initiate it.) By then, however, Acheson, under attack for having supported the recently disgraced Alger Hiss, needed to prove his anti-Communist “toughness.” He pushed Truman toward war, Truman ordered it, and the decades-long stalemate — the fossil-capturing amber — was the result. The point today is that there was nothing preordained about the Korean War. If the Koreans themselves had been left to sort out their national struggle, even assuming a Communist victory, contemporary Korea would be (at worst) like China.

If American decisions early in the Cold War played a role in creating the present danger, such decisions did so again at the end of the Cold War. After all, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev had put nuclear abolition squarely on the international agenda. At Reykjavik 20 years ago this month, the Soviet leader proposed the elimination of all nuclear weapons by the year 2000, to which Reagan replied, “Well, Mikhail. . . that’s always been my goal.” But it was not the goal of presidents who followed him. In 1994, the Clinton administration, in what may have been its most fateful act, issued the Nuclear Posture Review, a decision to maintain the nuclear status quo as a hedge against the possibility that Moscow might still pose some kind of threat. The United States was no longer committed, even in principle, to the abolition of nuclear weapons. Other nations would now be fully justified in obtaining them. The Nuclear Posture Review, as I heard one wag put it, was the insurance policy that started the fire.

America is not the cause of North Korea’s bomb. The tyrant Kim Jong Il is. But neither is America innocent of this terrible turn in the world’s story. That makes us more obliged than ever to get serious, finally, about ridding the world of nukes, beginning with our own.

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company