Going To War With a Vengeance: A Cultural Essay

"Exactly. There's nothing I can do to change any of it." . . .

"You want it all to make sense, don't you?" I said. "Our lives, the world. Clear reasons. Explanations. Even when you know better than most how untidy the world and all our lives are."

Jenny gets a phone call from a hospital. Her abuser Danny is on life support after being seriously beaten. In a living will, he has named her as his agent. Amazed that he found her, she signs the papers to take him off life support. Later, Jenny is with a group of homeless people she has befriended. She tells us this:

"Sometimes I think all I've learned, the single thing I know is the importance of letting people get on with their lives. However wretched those lives may be or we think them, much of the time it's only when others turn up hell-bent on change -- family, peers, people with religious, social or political agendas -- that it all goes to sh*t. We're adaptable creatures. We make do. We wear the shirts we have. " We work at making a self for most of a lifetime, only to find that the self we've created is inseparable from the struggle."

Today I watched video of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham in the Senate well saying thousands of US troops will be needed in Iraq and Syria to destroy ISIS. Then ex-Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania Ed Rendell sold the president's plan of bombing and the training of local "boots on the ground." His jowly tanned face got very emotional as he once again reminded the American public of those beheadings of two US journalists. The same day John Kerry was meeting Arab representatives in Saudi Arabia, a nation that beheaded 49 people so far this year. The Roman Empire, I learned, considered beheading much more humane than crucifixion. Where would we be if they'd beheaded Christ, George W. Bush's favorite philosopher and a key proponent of forgiveness?

For this essay, I subjected myself to an on-line beheading. First, the riot act of Sharia law was read to the poor soul on his knees. Then a man with a long, sharp knife made three firm slices into the back of the man's neck, apparently severing the spinal cord. Next, like a butcher he literally hacked the rest of the head from the shoulders. It was gruesome. But was it more gruesome and more painful than the botched 43-minute lethal injection recently reported in Oklahoma? I wouldn't know.

The current Middle East is an extremely polarized, often absurd place of ethnic and religious turmoil. In our narcissistic bubble of arrogance and exceptionalism, most Americans choose not to see the polarization and absurdity of our own culture as contributing to the madness in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. Unanticipated consequences from rash action is a certainty. Assumed loyalties can jump you one day in the dark. The family of beheaded journalist Steven Sotloff tells us a moderate militia in Syria sold Mr. Sotloff to ISIS. This is devastating information that calls into question President Obama's plans to train and use such militias as troops below our aerial bombardments. The State Department says the family is wrong. Who should we believe? The antiwar left is demoralized and knows by now taking to the streets in opposition to the war drums is a travesty involving cattle chutes, "First Amendment Zones" and, if you get too frisky, choreographed arrests. There is talk of resistance. Where this is all going to end is anyone's guess.

A Final Fiction

Roger Spiller is George C. Marshall Professor, Emeritus, of Military History at the US Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He's the author of a collection of short stories about generals throughout history called An Instinct For War: Scenes From the Battlefields of History. There's tales of generals in ancient China, in Mexico with Cortes, in the Napoleonic wars, and a soldier with shell shock after World War One.

The final story is called "The Discovery of Kansas," and we learn it's told by a US officer following a devastating apocalyptic war in the future. He has been assigned to excavate the library at what we understand was the command college at Fort Leavenworth. All the previous stories in the book, we're told, were gleaned from the information dug up in the ruins of this library. The war that demolished the library had begun in our time and had gradually gotten out of control. "At some undefined juncture in the past " warfare had quietly and without drama transcended reason. " An age-old soldier's dream had been realized: "war could theoretically sustain itself on its own violence."

These are tales told by a man who taught US military colonels and generals. He seems to have learned something quite disturbing. The final story has haunted me for years. It's the 100th anniversary of the vainglorious leadership that took the world into World War One. Is our current leadership in the declining imperial United States setting us up in the Middle East, in Southwest Asia and in Eastern Europe with another world-class debacle? Then there's lone voices like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders who harbors fears of "perpetual war and a morass in the Middle East [while] we have enormous domestic issues. There are tens of millions of Americans struggling to keep their heads above water."

The narrator of Spiller's final story says: "We were almost as dangerous to ourselves as was the enemy. The war transformed narrowness of mind into a social virtue."