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393 During the war in Bosnia, in an attempt to express my impatience—if that’s the word—with fellow leftists who opposed American intervention in the Balkans, I wisecracked, “Some people would oppose intervention if New York were invaded.” Little did I know: this is an age when absurdum outstrips all efforts at reductio. Yes, my title is a provocation. I’m not really against peace; what I’m against is Peace as a mantra—Anti-Imperialism being another—that wards off thought. What I’m against is the illusion that by opposing military action anywhere at any time Americans can somehow avoid the moral ambiguities inherent in being citizens of the most powerful nation-state in a world largely shaped by the reality or threat of force. Those ambiguities weighed heavily from the first moment of impact on September 11. The shock of the attack itself was compounded by the aftershock of realization that all the decisions about how to respond to it would be made by the most reactionary presidential administration in my lifetime, with any fallout from the stolen 2000 election now to be swept away by the deference and goodwill commonly accorded a wartime commander in chief. The immediate worry, given Bush’s cowboy rhetoric and sentiments of Defense Department hawks (along with their cheering section in the press), was that we would reflexively launch an indiscriminate bombing campaign in Afghanistan, make preemptive war on Iraq, or declare most of the Middle East our enemy. I believed the situation called for military force. Not to retaliate for a massacre of Americans, clearly aimed at the United States as such, would be to abdicate our government ’s most basic function, providing for the common defense. But a measured, carefully targeted retaliation was one thing; the larger “war on terrorism” was a far more complex problem, not conducive to solution through sheer firepower. Why I’m Not for Peace 394 THE AUGHTS So I was relieved when Bush stopped hyperventilating and settled, for the moment at least, on a limited war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The administration said the right things about minimizing civilian casualties, distinguishing between the Afghan people and their oppressive regime, and preventing mass starvation (granted that our token airlift of food was hardly a serious response to that threat). It even appeared to backtrack on its aversion to “nationbuilding ,” suggesting that it had learned from past mistakes and would devote money and energy to reconstructing a post-Taliban Afghanistan. I supported, and still support, the basic outlines of this policy: as the saying goes, even a blind hen sometimes finds a pea. It’s impossible not to be happy that a regime of totalitarian lunatics is gone; not to be moved by the photographs of women showing their faces on the Kabul streets—or, for that matter, not to get ironic satisfaction from our president’s belated conversion on women ’s liberation. Cynical, to be sure: but that certain words are pronounced on the international stage is more important, in the long run, than the motives of the speaker. The objections I have had from the beginning—and still have—are not to the fact of our war in Afghanistan but to the way we’ve conducted it. I object in general to our modus operandi of avoiding American casualties by depending on air power and using local troops as our proxies. If we have a legitimate stake in a war we should take responsibility for it by putting our own troops on the ground. Bombs, however “smart,” inevitably hit civilians and should be kept to the absolute minimum necessary to destroy an opponent’s military capacity— yet even after the Taliban’s collapse, and under conditions of maximum confusion between soldiers and civilians, we kept on bombing. As for the decision to let the Northern Alliance fight our war, the predictable result is that the warlords are back in control, the provisional government has no means of enforcing its authority, and rampant banditry is once again the rule. In interview after interview with ordinary Afghans, they plead for an international presence to establish law and order. Yet for all its lip service to reconstruction, the United States refuses to send troops or allow other countries to send them in anything like the numbers needed. My frustration, in other words, is not that we took action in Afghanistan but that we have not done enough. We should have fought the...

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