Why Are We at War? Read Online Free PDF Page A

embodiment of the old Roman Empire, moral reform can stride right back into the picture. The military is, obviously, more puritanical than the entertainment media. Soldiers are, of course, crazierthan any average man when in and out of combat, but the overhead command is a major everyday pressure on soldiers and could become a species of most powerful censor over civilian life.
    To flag conservatives, war now looks to be the best possible solution. Jesus and Evel Knievel might be able to bond together, after all. Fight evil, fight it to the death! Use the word fifteen times in every speech.
    There is just this kind of mad-eyed mystique to Americans: the idea that we Americans can do anything. Yes, say flag conservatives, we will be able to handle what comes. We have our know-how, our can-do. We will dominate the obstacles. Flag conservatives truly believe America is not only fit to run the world but that it must. Without a commitment to Empire, the country will go down the drain. This, I would opine, is the unstated, ever-denied subtext beneath the Iraqi project, and the flag conservatives may not even be wholly aware of the scope of it, not all of them. Not yet.
    Besides, Bush could count on a few other reliablesentiments that will buttress the notion. To begin with, a good part of American pride sits today on the tripod of big money, sports, and the Stars and Stripes. Something like a third of our major athletic stadiums and arenas are named after corporations—Gillette and FedEx are two of twenty examples. The Super Bowl could only commence this year after an American flag the size of a football field was removed from the turf. The U.S. Air Force gave the groin-throb of a big vee overhead. Probably half of America has an unspoken desire to go to war. It satisfies our mythology. America, goes our logic, is the only force for good that can rectify the bad. George W. Bush is shrewd enough to work that equation out all by himself. He may even sense better than anyone how a war with Iraq will satisfy our addiction to living with adventure on TV. If this is facetious, so be it—the country is becoming more loutish every year. So, yes, war is also mighty TV entertainment.
    More directly (even if it is not at all direct), a war with Iraq will gratify our need to avenge September 11. It does not matter that Iraq is not the culprit. Bush needs only to ignore the evidence. Which he does with all the power of a man who has never been embarrassed by himself. Saddam, for all his crimes, did not have a hand in September 11, but President Bush is a philosopher. September 11 was evil, Saddam is evil, all evil is connected. Ergo, Iraq.
    The President can also satisfy the more serious polemical needs of a great many neocons in his administration, who believe Islam will yet be Hitler Redux to Israel. Protection of Israel is okay to Bush, electorally speaking, but it is also obligatory, especially when he cannot count on giving orders to Sharon that will always be obeyed. Sharon, after all, has one firm hold on Bush. With the Mossad, Sharon has the finest intelligence service in the Middle East if not in the world. The CIA, renowned by now for its paucity of Arab spies in the Muslim world, cannot afford to do without Sharon’s services.
    These are all good reasons Bush can find to go to war. As for oil, allow Ralph Nader a few statistics:
The United States currently consumes 19.5 million barrels a day, or 26% of daily global oil consumption.… The U.S. [has to import] 9.8 million barrels a day, or more than half the oil we consume.…
    The surest way for the U.S. to sustain its overwhelming dependence upon oil is to control the sixty-seven percent of the world’s proven oil reserves that lie below the sands of the Persian Gulf. Iraq alone has proven reserves of 112.5 billion barrels, or 11% of the world’s remaining supply.… Only Saudi Arabia has more.
    I would add that once America occupies Iraq, it will also gain a choke hold