Short Century (9 page)

I would have preferred an invasion of
REDACTED
to an invasion of Iraq, but it would have seemed churlish to complain.

Was I nervous about going to the Chappine? Not at all. Whatever ghosts there were would have grown tired of waiting for me and moved on. Besides, the war was too important for me to be thinking about myself. I was thinking about the Iraqis, about the people in Saudi Arabia and throughout the region, and I was thinking about Emily. Surely, Emily, if she was still alive, must have read my articles, and she must have supported the war. She must have seen that I was fighting for the rights of women. She must have been reading the newspapers every day for the previous eighteen months, cheering as women in Afghanistan took off their burqas. Maybe she was an aid worker in Kandahar, having moved there after the fall of the Taliban. Maybe she was somehow in Iraq and she was one of the women whom the American military would save from rape. In any case, she must have seen that I was fighting for the right of women not to be raped by the sons of a dictator, for the right of women not to cover their faces, for the right of women not to be beaten by their husbands. Emily couldn't help but see my involvement in all of this as a righting of what she and I had done. Even if everything that happened between us had gone as we had hoped, only she and I would have been made free. What was happening now would make many people free. She must have supported the war. On my way to the debate I thought that there was even the possibility that she would be in the audience at the Chappine, there to smile at me from the audience, even if she perhaps covered her face with a scarf or something, not ready to see me yet—and for all I know she may have been there.

The debate had been scheduled to coincide with the Saturday of the massive worldwide protests against the war, so I wound up spending much of the subway ride listening to two college students, a boy and a girl on their way to the New York protest. The girl, whose eyes were strikingly similar to Miranda's, was holding a placard that said, in purple marker and glitter, ARTHUR HUNT IS A WAR CRIMINAL. I was wearing a Panama hat and they did not seem to have noticed me. They would have loved to have known that I had been up late into the night on the phone with a friend at the Pentagon, even though he and I had spoken only very briefly and in very broad terms about military strategy before settling into a conversation about whether Solzhenitsyn or Orwell was of greater world-historical import.

I didn't want to listen to these kids. I wanted to see Emily in the audience.

“Why do you care about Arthur Hunt?” the boy asked his girlfriend, putting his hand on her lower back. “Nobody really listens to him. There are plenty of other guys who betrayed their sixties principles.”

Oh, the betrayal of principles! What very few people understood was that my support for the war on Islamofascism, of which the Iraq War would be merely a part, was not at all a slinking to the center or the right as it is frequently caricatured, but a hardening of revolutionary principles, of a refusal to accept that you should do nothing to prevent Arab women from being raped or hanged simply because of the accident that you were not born an Arab. To support the war was to believe that Arab women were your sisters, or closer than your sisters, because the affinity was free of the cumbersomely genetic.

“I hate Arthur Hunt because of
why
he supports the war,” said the girl with Miranda's eyes.

“Every war has journalists who say that it's for freedom. Doesn't mean anything.”

“I think some of them mean it. I think Hunt definitely means it. Hunt actually believes that this war will bring freedom to the Iraqis. That's what makes him so bad.” Her movements, too, reminded me of Miranda, especially the way her free hand was fluttering. “It's one thing to be honest and say that you want to burn the flesh of Arabs because you think that the smell will reassure you that you are safe and secure, like the smell of a fireplace in winter. But the liberals seem to think that kindling is what benefits from a fire.”

For all the rhetorical energy of this speech, it sounded very much like something she had rehearsed several times. It sounded willed rather than willing. There was none of what had made Miranda so exhilarating to listen to: her expectation of success. Still, it was gratifying that a girl this young was paying attention to my arguments at all. I imagined lying naked with her in a hotel bed, maybe kissing the butterfly tattoo on her neck, proving to her the errors in her logic and the moral necessity of invading Iraq. She was smart, so it wouldn't take more than an hour to correct her, and then we would make love again. I chastised myself; the girl was much too young for me. But I felt so young just then, and she seemed so defeated and old. Maybe, spiritually speaking, she was even too old for me.

“It doesn't feel very good,” said the girl, “to be protesting getting rid of Saddam Hussein. It feels kind of awful, actually. It would be so great for so many people if he were no longer in power. The war might be necessary. Maybe what's important right now is to have a lot of doubt about everything.”

This was too much for me, this luxuriating in caution and doubt. Not making up your mind provides the illicit thrill of complying at once with the most rigorous standards of morality and with none at all. “It seems awful,” I wrote in an article at the time, “either to support the war, which is to add one more signature to a death order for what admittedly could be thousands of civilians, or to oppose the war, which would be to consent to the continued rape and torture of those same civilians. But to understand this, to look clearly at the awfulness of either option, to keep your mind clean of every evasion and euphemism and thus see things in all their terrible contours, this is condemnably satisfying. For all the famously perilous pleasures of certainty, doubt has its own heady, priggish joys.”

I pulled my Panama hat down so it obscured my eyes as I leaned toward the kids.

“Have you heard the rumor,” I asked, “that Arthur Hunt likes to eat Iraqi babies? Dipped in oil, of course, and a pinch of salt, though he abstains from butter for reasons of health. You're right that he's a monster.”

“Let's get off at the next stop,” her boyfriend said, edging between her and me.

“We have a couple more stops to go,” she said. There is a particular type of young girl who can never resist engaging with apparently lunatic people she happens to meet. She turned back to me. “I'm not saying that Arthur Hunt is a monster. I'm saying he's a war criminal.”

“What's the difference?”

“Monsters are sympathetic once you understand them.”

“Hasn't Hunt written that he's concerned that the Bush Administration has unnecessarily alienated our allies and that we're not going in with enough troops?” I asked.

“Sure, but he still insists that any American who criticizes the war has been duped into loving Saddam Hussein.”

“Just the sort of atrocious behavior I'd expect from a baby-eater. That story is true, you know. He'll do any disgusting thing that pops into his head, whether it's supporting the war or eating babies. Killing Iraqis to make them free is something he enjoys doing only on a full stomach of babies. Everything is fair game for Arthur Hunt. Especially eating babies.”

About halfway through this, the girl recognized me and said so, but I ignored her.

“Why do you think we have the right to get involved in things that are none of our business?” asked her boyfriend. “The war isn't in our interests.”

“Why are you interested in our interests?” I asked. “Steadying the stilts of a dictator does not strike me as a revolutionary activity.” I turned to the girl. “Your beautiful green eyes remind me of a girl I used to know. I don't think she would have liked you very much. You remind me of a different girl I knew, too, but it's more painful for me to think of her. I hate Bush and I would do anything for this war to be fought by someone else. Do you know how awful it is to be supporting that man? I'm sorry I've been yelling at you. Won't you slow down so we can talk for a minute?”

By the time I got to the end of this, the doors had opened, the boyfriend had shepherded the girl off the subway, and I was following, shouting against a crush of people getting on. I had almost caught up with them before I realized I had no idea why I was following them, so I slowed down to let them get far ahead and disappear into the crowd.

My desire to debate had rather definitively gone. I couldn't stand another round of Munich-Vietnam pingpong in which I would say “Munich” and they would say “Vietnam,” and then we would repeat until it was time for refreshments. But the cold air reminded me of my purpose. That particular day of protests has acquired some prestige in retrospect, as well as some of the energetic, offhand beauty of girls raising their brightly colored mittens to their mouths to amplify their demands that there be no war for oil. But at the time most of the energy seemed to be little more than the exhaust fumes of backward-looking vanity. All these people pretending not to know that, if the Islamofascists have their way (as they still might), the twenty-first century will be a short one.

For me, it was the war itself that felt like a second flowering of youth, a third coming of 1968 and 1989. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be very nearly old was very nearly heaven. A new society was possible, if not for us then for the Iraqis. Iraqi society as it horrifically was would be incinerated, and out of it would grow something else. All across the region the sexual revolution would arrive by tank.

Of course my euphoria was shadowed by the thought of Jason Rothstein, by then in basic training.

My way to the hotel was only very minimally obstructed by the overstuffed but undernourished protest. I stopped by a group of girls in matching turquoise knit caps. They were talking in terms that were more or less blatantly anti-Semitic about how Jews had “hijacked U.S. foreign policy” on behalf of Israel. This has always struck me as a strange argument. Second- or third-generation Americans wholeheartedly supporting a war fought for American ideals was, far from of an act of sedition, a form of immigrant striving.

“Do you think Arthur Hunt is a war criminal?” I asked the girls.

“Who's Arthur Hunt?” one of them asked. None of the others had heard of me either.

“He's a journalist who supports the war,” I said. “You haven't heard the rumor that he was involved in the assassination of Augusto Sanchez? The labor leader in Mexico?” There was no such person.

“I think I remember reading that somewhere,” one of them said. “How was he supposed to be involved again?”

“He scheduled an interview with Sanchez,” I said, “and the CIA assassinated him at the meeting place. Did you read the article in the
New Neo-Marxist Review
?” There was no such magazine. Or there may have been, but I hadn't heard of it.

“Just before he was murdered,” I said, “Sanchez gave a speech saying that America was a cannibal. America feeds on the flesh of the world. But why shouldn't it? Not to feed on the flesh of world wouldn't just be weak—it would be arrogant. The only possible reason for the greatest power the world has ever known not to use its power would be haughtiness. And Arthur Hunt is so haughty that he believes American power should be used for the freedom of others, which is just to squander it. The machinery of the military itself is not haughty and wants only, beautifully, to destroy.”

They were already beginning to argue with me as I turned away from them and approached the hotel. The entire façade had been redone recently; the old stone gargoyles had been replaced with new, sleeker gargoyles made with what looked like shale but probably wasn't. By any standard this was far uglier, though this was not quite enough to recommend it.

If only I could be the Arthur Hunt who collaborated in killing Augusto Sanchez. An Arthur Hunt who would do whatever his government asked of him, and so would never have any confusion about his motives, never have to wonder about Bush's true motives, never have to construct complicated Rube-Goldberg justifications for the use of American power. What a beautiful thing it would be to love your own nation and to hate all the others—openly and simply and, therefore, beautifully. A politics that needed no explanation. Why would I want to use American power? Because I was an American.

Before I made it into the building a giant puppet head of Bush, painted a rotting eggplant blackish purple, bobbed and swayed down the street. The mouth was twisted into the anguished knot of a mask of tragedy. Whoever was holding the mask was obscured, and the head looked as though it were commanding the marchers, as though it were in the midst of a speech so powerful that it needed no words at all. From time to time it jolted upward as though to stir the crowd. Only with the dreary aid of context could you see that the mouth was supposed to be twisted into agony rather than into Bush's dazzled, triumphant smirk. Just like me, everyone here was submitting to George Bush because there was no other option.

It occurred to me—as of course it had already occurred to me—that Paul, if he had lived, would have supported this war. But he would have supported it for the wrong reasons.

I walked past the Chappine and missed the debate.

f

The morning after I
slept with Miranda, she took the bus back to Smith and I took the bus to New York. The windshield wipers pushed away the rain, both the wipers and the rain slow and heavy, as though each possessed the stolid determination extolled at prep school. My father would not let me have a car; inexplicably, he deemed it extravagant. This was typical of my father, who denied things to me apparently at random. I knew I had no cause to complain, but still it was a curious despotism. As I sat on the bus I was gripped by a feeling that was beyond happiness or unhappiness, that in fact made the concepts of happiness and unhappiness seem feeble and perverse, as feeble and perverse as stolid determination.