And those are just the consequences of the war that we can see now. The future may be far grimmer. The Israeli-Palestinian crisis is deteriorating daily and could blow up at any moment. The U.S. and Russia could start up a new Cold War, using Middle Eastern pawns as proxies. The Saud dynasty could lose its grip on power, with devastating consequences for the global economy. And if Musharraf falls in Pakistan, the prospect of an unstable nuclear regime could suddenly become a reality.
It is now widely accepted that the Iraq war is destined to go down in history as one of America's greatest foreign-policy debacles. But I think it will come to be seen as something much stranger: as an almost incomprehensibly frivolous act of hubris, a bizarre tempting of fate. When all the political arguments and partisan rancor have been long forgotten, people will remember this war's utter weightlessness, using that word in the sense that Milan Kundera does in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," to denote a kind of enigmatic half-reality. Mark Danner astutely called it "the war of the imagination" -- a Perfect War, like a Platonic Idea, that existed only in a timeless realm. The gap between the airy vacuity of the arguments for the war and the hideous war that then appeared, literally out of nowhere, is confounding. To this day, there is something creepily magical about it, as if a troupe of two-bit magicians had brought their pathetic act to a provincial town, waved their handkerchiefs in the air, and pulled out of their hats a ... real, live, 50-foot-tall demon, which proceeded to rush out into the street and begin knocking down real buildings and devouring real people.
In "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," the veteran war correspondent Chris Hedges describes the kind of collective patriotic mania that seizes nations as they prepare to go to war. In the case of Iraq, something even odder took place: a collective blank, a kind of stunned, passive acquiescence. Bush invoked the passions and fears stirred by 9/11 to rally support for his war, but for most Americans, a year and a half after the attacks, those passions had cooled: They went along with the war dutifully, in deference to a patriotic appeal they neither accepted nor rejected. This was not a hot-blooded war. It was one we sleepwalked into.
But America is not the first country to be led like a half-hypnotized lamb to the slaughter by a delusional leader. The ultimate responsibility rests with Bush. Which raises a final question: Where did Bush's fatal hubris come from? Why did he think he could challenge God?
The question of how a president's faith affects his decisions is, of course, a matter of conjecture. But there is ample evidence that Bush's delusions about Iraq are inseparable from his religious faith. Of course, there are millions of deeply religious people whose faith has not led them to abandon reason. But Bush's faith appears to have only deepened his native arrogance: He sees it as a form of humility, a poor sinner's acceptance of God's will. Bush believes that God is on the side of this war, and that everything will therefore come out all right in the end. He does not care about the real world -- because for him it isn't the true reality. The war in Iraq, that horror in which real human beings are dying, is merely a stage before good finally triumphs over evil. And if that victory does not take place in our lifetime, it doesn't matter: All that matters is that he fought the good fight. This is why he did not concern himself, and still doesn't, with details such as whether this war is winnable in any non-biblical time frame.
So there are two related lessons America should take away from the Iraq disaster. First, don't treat war lightly. It is an insanely powerful and unpredictable agent, one that can destroy everything it touches. Second, beware of leaders whose devotion has not brought them real humility -- and beware of their wars. They will see war as a toy, which they control, or which is controlled by their God. But nobody controls war. Not even God.
About the writer
Gary Kamiya is a writer at large for Salon.
Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)
Salon Directory (browse by topic)