American Way of War

by Tom Engelhardt

  We know as well that some of those plans were on the table in the 1990s and that those who held them and promoted them, at the Project for the New American Century in particular, actually wrote that “the process of transformation [of the Pentagon], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”

  We also know that within hours of the 9/11 attacks, many of the same people were at work on the war of their dreams. Within five hours of the attack on the Pentagon, Rumsfeld was urging his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq. (Notes by an aide transcribe his wishes this way: “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden].… Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”)

  We know that by September 12, the president himself had collared his top counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council, Richard Clarke, in a conference room next to the White House Situation Room and demanded linkages. (“‘Look under every rock and do due diligence. ’ It was a very intimidating message which said, ‘Iraq. Give me a memo about Iraq and 9/11.’”) We know that by November, the top officials of the administration were already deep into operational planning for an invasion of Iraq.

  And they weren’t alone. Others were working feverishly. Only eight days after the attacks, for instance, the complex 342-page Patriot Act would be rushed over to Congress by Attorney General John Ashcroft, passed through a cowed Senate in the dead of night on October 11, unread by at least some of our representatives, and signed into law on October 26. As its instant appearance indicated, it was made up of a set of already existing right-wing hobbyhorses, quickly drafted provisions, and expansions of law-enforcement powers taken off an FBI “wish list” (previously rejected by Congress). All these were swept together by people who, like the president’s men on Iraq, saw their main chance when those buildings went down. As such, it stands in for much of what happened “in response” to 9/11.

  But what if we hadn’t been waiting so long for our own 36-hour war in the most victorious nation on the planet, its sole “hyperpower,” its new Rome? What if those preexisting frameworks hadn’t been quite so well primed to emerge in no time at all? What if we (and our enemies as well) hadn’t been at the movies all those years?

  Planet of the Apes

  Among other things, we’ve been left with a misbegotten memorial to the attacks of 9/11 planned for New York’s Ground Zero and sporting the kinds of cost overruns otherwise associated with the occupation of Iraq. In its ambitions, what it will really memorialize is the Bush administration’s oversized, crusading moment that followed the attacks.

  Too late now—and no one asked me anyway—but I know what my memorial would have been.

  A few days after 9/11, my daughter and I took a trip as close to “Ground Zero” as you could get. With the air still rubbing our throats raw, we wandered block after block, peering down side streets to catch glimpses of the sheer enormity of the destruction. And indeed, in a way that no small screen could communicate, it did have the look of the apocalyptic, especially those giant shards of fallen building sticking up like—remember, I’m a typical movie-made American on an increasingly movie-made planet and had movies on the brain that week—the image of the wrecked Statue of Liberty that chillingly ends the first Planet of the Apes film, that cinematic memorial to humanity’s nuclear folly. Left there as it was, that would have been a sobering monument for the ages, not just to the slaughter that was 9/11, but to what we had awaited for so long—and what, sadly, we still wait for; what, in the world that George W. Bush produced, has become ever more, rather than less, likely. And imagine our reaction then.

  Safer? Don’t be ridiculous.

  The Billion-Dollar Gravestone

  According to a report commissioned by the foundation charged with building Reflecting Absence, the memorial to the dead in the attack on the World Trade Center, its projected cost was, at one point, estimated at about a billion dollars. For that billion, Reflecting Absence was to have two huge “reflecting pools”—“two voids that reside in the original footprints of the Twin Towers”—fed by waterfalls “from all sides” and surrounded by a “forest” of oak trees. A visitor would then be able to descend thirty feet to galleries under the falls “inscribed with the names of those who died.” There was to be an adjacent, 100,000-square-foot underground memorial museum to “retell the events of the day, display powerful artifacts, and celebrate the lives of those who died.” All of this, as the website for the memorial stated, would vividly convey “the enormity of the buildings and the enormity of the loss.” The near-billion-dollar figure did not even include $80 million for a planned visitor’s center or the estimated $50-$60 million annual cost of running such an elaborate memorial and museum.

  So what was Reflecting Absence going to reflect? For one thing, it would mirror its gargantuan twin, the building that is to symbolically replace the World Trade Center—the Freedom Tower. As the Memorial was to be driven deep into the scarred earth of Ground Zero, so the Freedom Tower was to soar above it, scaling the imperial heights. To be precise, it was to reach exactly 1,776 feet into the heavens, a numerical tribute to the founding spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the nation that emerged from it. Its spire would even emit light—“a new beacon of freedom”—for all the world to see and admire. Its observation deck would rise a carefully planned seven feet above that of the old World Trade Center, and with spire and antennae, it was meant to be the tallest office building on the planet.

  The revelation of that staggering billion-dollar price tag for a memorial, whose design has grown ever larger and more complex, caused the New York Times to editorialize, “The only thing a $1 billion memorial would memorialize is a complete collapse of political and private leadership in Lower Manhattan.” Because the subject is such a touchy one, however, no one went further and explored the obvious—that, even in victimhood, Americans have in recent years exhibited an unseemly imperial hubris. Whether the price tag proves to be half a billion or a billion dollars, one thing can be predicted: the memorial will prove less a reminder of how many Americans happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time on that September day, or how many—firefighters, police officers, bystanders who stayed to aid others—sacrificed their lives, than of the terrible path this country ventured down in the wake of 9/11.

  Consider the prospective 9/11 memorial in this context:• The National World War II Memorial (405,000 American dead): $182 million for all costs

  • The Vietnam Memorial (56,000 American dead):$4.2 million for construction

  • The Korean War Veterans Memorial (54,000 American dead): $6 million

  • The USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor (2,390 American dead; 1,177 from the Arizona): $532,000

  • The Oklahoma City National Memorial (168 American dead): $29 million

  • The 1915 USS Maine Mast Memorial at Arlington Cemetery (260 American dead): $56,147.94

  • The Holocaust Museum in Washington (approximately 6 million dead): $90 million for construction/$78 million for exhibitions

  Or, imagine a listing of global Ground Zeros that might go something like this:• Amount spent on a memorial for the Vietnamese dead of the Vietnam wars (approximately 3 million): $0

  • Amount spent on a memorial to the Afghan dead in the civil war between competing warlords over who would control the capital of Kabul in the mid-1990s (unknown numbers of dead, a city reduced to rubble): $0

  • Amount spent on a memorial to the victims of the December 26, 2004, earthquake and tsunami in the Pacific and Indian Oceans (at least 188,000 dead): $0

  • Amount spent on a memorial to Iraqis confirmed dead, many with signs of execution and torture marks, just in the month of April 2006 in Baghdad alone (almost 1,100), or the Iraqis confirmed killed countrywide “in war-related violence” from January through April of that year (3,525): $0

  The Victors Are
the Victims

  The dead, those dear to us, our wives or husbands, brothers, sisters, parents, children, relatives, friends, those who acted for us or suffered in our place, should be remembered. This is an essential human task, almost a duty. What could be more powerful than the urge to hold onto those taken from us, especially when their deaths happen in an unexpected, untimely, and visibly unjust way (only emphasizing the deeper untimeliness and injustice of death itself). But where exactly do we remember the dead? The truth: We remember them in our hearts, which makes a memorial a living thing only so long as the dead still live within us.

  As an experiment, visit one of the old Civil War or World War I memorials that dot so many cities and towns. You might (or might not) admire the fountain, or the elaborate statue of soldiers or a general or any other set of icons chosen to stand in for the hallowed dead and their sacrifices. The Grand Army Plaza, designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and dedicated to the Union Army, that fronts on Central Park in New York City, my hometown, has always attracted me, but it is in a sense no longer a memorial. Decades ago, it turned back into a somewhat gaudy, golden decoration, a statue—as all memorials, in the end, must. Few today visit it to remember what some specific individual did or how he died. To the extent that we remember, we remember first individually in our hearts in our own lifetimes—and later, collectively, in our history books.

  And, of course, for most human beings in most places, especially those who are not the victors in wars, or simply not the victors on this planet, no matter how unfairly or horrifically or bravely or fruitlessly their loved ones might be taken from them, there is only the heart. For those dying in Kabul or Baghdad, Chechnya, Darfur, the Congo, or Uzbekistan, the emotions released may be no less strong, but there will be no statues, no reflecting pools, no sunken terraces, no walls with carefully etched names.

  There has, in American journalism, been an unspoken calculus of the value of a life and a death on this planet in terms of newsworthiness (which is also a kind of memorializing, a kind of remembering). Crudely put, it would go something like: one kidnapped and murdered blond white child in California equals three hundred Egyptians drowned in a ferry accident, three thousand Bangladeshis swept away in a monsoon flood, three hundred thousand Congolese killed in a bloodletting civil war.

  It’s also true that, as the recent World War II Memorial on the Washington Mall indicates, Americans have gained something of a taste for Roman imperial-style memorialization. (To my mind, that huge construction catches little of the modesty and stoicism of the veterans of that war who, like my father, did not come home trumpeting what they had done.)

  Reflecting Absence and the Freedom Tower go well beyond that. Their particular form of excess, in which money, elaborateness, and size stand in for memory, is intimately connected not so much with September 11, 2001, as with the days, weeks, even years after that shock.

  The Greatest Victim, Survivor, and Dominator

  To grasp this, it’s necessary to return to those now almost forgotten moments after 9/11, after the president had frozen in an elementary school classroom in Florida while reading The Pet Goat; after a panicky crew of his people had headed Air Force One in the wrong direction, away from Washington; after Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush (according to former counterterrorism tsar Richard Clarke) started rounding up the usual suspects—i.e., Saddam Hussein—on September 11 and 12; after the president insisted, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass”; after he took that bullhorn at Ground Zero on September 14, and—to chants of “USA! USA! USA!”—promised Americans that “the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon”; after his associates promptly began to formulate the plans, the “intelligence,” the lies, and the tall tales that would take us into Iraq.

  It was in that unformed but quickly forming moment that, under the shock not just of the murder of almost three thousand people, but of the apocalyptic images of those two towers crumbling, an American imperial culture of revenge and domination was briefly brought to full flower. It was a moment that reached its zenith when the president strutted across the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, and, with that Mission Accomplished banner over his shoulder, declared “major combat operations” ended in Iraq.

  The gargantuan Freedom Tower and the gargantuan sunken memorial to the dead of 9/11 are really monuments to that brief year and a half, each project now hardly less embattled in controversy, cost overruns, and ineptitude than were the war in Iraq or the post-Katrina rescue-and-reconstruction mission. Each project—as yet unbuilt—is already an increasingly controversial leftover from that extended moment when so many pundits pictured us proudly as a wounded Imperial Rome or the inheritor of the glories of the British Empire, while the administration, with its attendant neocon cheering squad in tow, all of them dazzled by our “hyperpower,” gained confidence that this was their moment, the one that would take them over the top, that would make the United States a Republican Party possession for years, if not generations; the Middle East an American gas station; the world an American military preserve; and a “unitary” commander-in-chief presidency the recipient of untrammeled powers previously reserved for kings and emperors. These were dreams of gargantuan proportions, fantasies of power and planetary rule worthy of a tower at least 1,776 feet high that would obliterate the memory of all other buildings anywhere, and of the largest, most expensive gravestone on Earth that would quite literally put the sufferings of all other victims in the shade.

  As those two enormous reflecting pools were meant to mirror the soaring “beacon” of the Freedom Tower, so the American people, under the shock of loss, experiencing a sense of violation that can only come to the victors in this world, mirrored the administration’s attitude. In a country where New York City had always been Sodom to Los Angeles’ Gomorrah, everyone suddenly donned “I ♥ New York” hats or T-shirts and became involved in a series of repetitive rites of mourning that, in arenas nationwide, on every television screen, went on not for days or weeks but months on end.

  From these ceremonies, a clear and simple message emerged. In its suffering, the United States was the greatest victim, the greatest survivor, and the greatest dominator the globe had ever seen. Implicitly, the rest of the world’s dead were, in the Pentagon’s classic phrase, “collateral damage.” In those months, in our all-American version of the global drama, we swept up and repossessed all the emotional roles available—with the sole exception of Greatest Evil One. That, then, was the phantasmagoric path to invasion, war, and disaster upon which the Bush administration, with a mighty helping hand from al-Qaeda, pulled back the curtain; that is the drama still being played out at Ground Zero in New York City.

  But those 2,752 dead can no longer stand in—not even in the American mind—for all the dead everywhere, not even for the American dead in Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps it’s finally time to take a breath and approach the untimely dead—our own as well as those of others around the world—with some genuine humility.

  I know that for some, those reflecting pools will someday touch the heart, but unfortunately they will mainly memorialize a post-9/11 America that should not have been using the numbers 1776. Facing a building so tall, who would even have the need to approach a declaration so modest—of only 1,322 words—so tiny as to be able to fit on a single page, so iconic that just about no one bothers to pay attention to what it says anymore. But perhaps it’s worth quoting a few of the words those men wrote back in the year 1776 and remembering what the American dead of that time actually stood for. Here then are some passages about another George’s imperial hubris, less well remembered than the declaration’s classic beginning:The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States…. He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation…. For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury: For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences…. For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

  Looking Forward, Looking Backward

  Given the last eight years of disaster piled on catastrophe, who in our American world would want to look backward? The urge to turn the page in this country is palpable, but just for a moment let’s not.

  Admittedly, we’re a people who don’t really believe in history—so messy, so discomforting, so old. Even the recent past is regularly wiped away as the media plunge us repeatedly into various overblown crises of the moment, a 24/7 cornucopia of news, non-news, rumor, punditry, gossip, and plain old blabbing. In turn, any sense of the larger picture surrounding each flap is, soon enough, dismantled by a media focus on a fairly limited set of questions: Was Congress adequately informed? Should the president have suppressed those photos?

  The flaps, in other words, never add up to a single Imax Flap-o-rama of a spectacle. We seldom see the full scope of the legacy that we—not just the Obama administration—have inherited. Though we all know that terrible things happened in recent years, the fact is that, these days, they are seldom to be found in a single place, no less the same paragraph. Connecting the dots, or even simply putting everything in the same vicinity, just hasn’t been part of the definitional role of the media in our era. So let me give it a little shot.