Why Are We at War? by Norman Mailer Read Free Book Online

famous for their inability to speak foreign languages, will suddenly be encouraged and over-encouraged to become linguists in order to handle the overseas tasks of empire. The seriousness of purpose will be back in American life. These are, I suspect, their arguments.
    What they don’t take into account is the exceptional perversity of human affairs. Indeed, the entire scheme could fail. The notion reeks of overweening hubris.
    DREAD: A LARGE AND UNANCHORED UNEASINESS
    This war, if it proliferates over the next decade, could prove worse in one respect than any conflict we have yet experienced. It is that we will neverknow just what we are fighting for. It is not enough to say we are against terrorism. Of course we are. In America, who is not? But terrorism compared to more conventional kinds of war is formless, and it is hard to feel righteous when in combat with a void, for then the action smacks of rage and relative impotence, a frightful combination that deprives warrior and citizen alike of any sense of virtue. Be it said, the sense of national virtue is crucial to waging a war.

    We violate Christianity with every breath we take. Equally do the Muslims violate Islam. We are speaking of a war then between two essentially unbalanced and inauthentic theologies. It may yet prove to be an immense war. A vast conflict of powers is at the core, and the motives of both sides do not bear close examination. At bottom, the potential for ill is so great that we can wonder if we will get through this century. We could come apart—piece by piece, disaster after disaster, small and large, long before a final conflagration.
AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE : The conflict between communism and capitalism seems so much more sensible and manageable in comparison.
NORMAN MAILER : Looking back, it was kind of logical. Capitalism and communism had clear and opposed objectives, but neither was ready to destroy the world. Certainly, the more that conflict ebbed into its end days, the less danger was present that the big bang would come.
AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE : You have cast the fight as Allah versus moolah, Islam versus money. If ours is indeed a post-Christian society in which materialism is the highest good and it takes a faith to fight a faith, are they not better suited to combat us?
NORMAN MAILER : Are they better suited? No, I don’t think so. It does seem to me, on the face of it, that if we did nothing in terms of attacking them, that might delay such a war for fifty years. The next argument would be, well, can we afford to delay? We can win it now and we might lose it in fifty years. But my notion is that this war is so unbalancedin so many ways, so much power on one side, so much true hatred on the other, so much technology for us, so much potential terrorism on the other, that the damages cannot be estimated. It is bad to enter a war that offers no clear avenue to conclusion. Terrorism can proliferate. It is not that complicated to be an effective terrorist, after all. Pick up the phone, make a call, and disrupt traffic for half a day. The real question is how pervasive can terrorism get, not whether you can wipe it out. There will always be someone left to act as a terrorist. If we try to become an empire, the real question will soon be whether we are able to live with terrorism at the level that the Israelis, let us say, are living with it now.
    A NOTE ON PRESIDENTS
    Given the rigors of presidential campaigns, most men who run successfully for president have been rubbed down by then to their lowest common denominator. They are not all that impressive any longer as humans . So it is worth taking a quick look at their resources and their foibles. Compulsive adoration of our leaders is poison, after all.

    I once sat on Reagan’s left at a lunch for eight people. This was in 1972, at the convention that nominated Nixon for the second time. I spent the entire meal trying to figure out a tough question to ask him. I always found that if you