From Essays After Montaigne
Now to returne to my purpose I finde (as farre as I have beene informed) there is nothing in that nation that is either barbarous or savage, unless men call that barbarisme which is not common to them. As indeed, we have no other ayme of truth and reason, than the example and Idea of the opinions and customes of the countrie we live in. There is ever perfect religion, perfect policie, perfect and compleat use of all things. They are even savage, as we call those fruits wilde which nature of her selfe a nd of her ordinarie progresse hath produced: whereas indeed, they are those which our selves have altered by our artificiall devices, and diverted from their common order, we should rather terme savage. In those are the true and most profitable vertues, and naturall properties most lively and vigorous, which in these we have bastardized, applying them to the pleasure of our corrupted taste.
Wee get many advantages of our enemies, that are but borrowed and not ours: It is the qualitie of porterly-rascall, and not of vertue, to have stronger armes and sturdier legs: Disposition is a dead and corporall qualitie. It is a tricke of fortune to make our enemie stoope, and to bleare his eies with the Sunnes-light: It is a pranke of skill and knowledge to be cunning in the art of fencing, and which may happen unto a base and worthelesse man. The reputation and worth of a man consisteth in his heart and will: therein consists true honour: Constancie is valour, not of armes and legs but of minde and courage; it consisteth not of the spirit and courage of our horse, nor of our armes, but in ours... He that in danger of imminent death is no whit danted in his assurednesse; he that in yeelding up his ghost beholding his enemie with a scornefull and fierce looke, he is vanquished, not by us, but by fortune: he is slaine, but not conquered. The most valiant are often the most unfortunate. So are there triumphant losses in envie of victories.
Have you defeated someone if he won't admit defeat? Once upon a time in schoolyards, bullies defeated their victims by making them say "Uncle." It was the universal admission of defeat which was itself defeat. But the child that refused to say "Uncle," regardless of the beatings he received, would in some sense defeat the bully. It's in that sense that Saddam Hussein is absolutely right when he claims that Iraq was not defeated in 1991. Were he actually defeated, he would be unable to even make that claim. Defeat cannot be defined and imposed by the victor, it must be defined and admitted by the defeated.
As it happens, the United States has a long history of winning (or not) conflicts on its own terms, without managing to convince its enemies of their defeat--from the Ayatollah Khomeini to Muammar Qaddafi to Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden. The U.S. hasn't managed to extract an "Uncle" from any nation or group more imposing than Grenada. We did expel Iraq from Kuwait, kill tens of thousands fleeing Iraqi soldiers, and starve tens or even hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and we did remove the Taliban leadership from control of Afghanistan and kill who knows how many Afghanis of various descriptions, but I'm not convinced that any of this translates into any enemy's defeat. I certainly don't feel any safer. So it makes sense for the Bush Administration to choose the ouster of Hussein's regime as its goal for a war in Iraq--only then would Hussein be unable to claim that he had not been defeated. But that leaves us to wonder why the same people (Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and others) didn't realize this back in 1991.
But will defeating this particular enemy actually translate into victory for the U.S.? My understanding of the extremists who threaten us is that they're aggrieved but not defeated by whatever victories we manage in the Arab world. All that they seek to achieve is to have us either leave the region or suffer. And there are far too many people in that region who feel that way for us to ever hope to hear "Uncle" from all of them. Given our government's view of its role as the world's enforcer of values (at least rhetorically), to withdraw would be to admit defeat. But at the same time, a significant portion of our population sees our suffering, or at least the ongoing threat of violence and suffering, as a defeat--not because of cowardice, but because we see the violence committed by us and against us as the defeat of humanity.
A just war is violence committed to prevent future violence. Our proposed adventure in Iraq is unlikely to fit that definition. The violence committed against Iraq is likely to far outweigh any violence that would have been committed by Iraq, and it will draw all sorts of violent responses, just as the responses to the last attack on Iraq included an attack on and then the destruction of the World Trade Center. I know that our leaders' response to this kind of thinking would be that I am giving in to terrorists, but I don't see feeding a spiral of violence against innocent victims (whether they're Afghani or Iraqi citizens or citizens of New York) as a viable alternative. None of our leaders will be in Times Square when it is attacked (just as Saddam Hussein is unlikely to be the victim of our proposed campaign of "shock and awe"), but my wife and I will be.
Perhaps it is giving in to terror to feel defeated, but I cannot convince myself to feel otherwise. I don't feel defeated by terrorists. I've never given a thought to leaving New York or changing my life in any way out of fear of terrorism. I feel defeated by my government. Millions of British and American citizens, by all accounts representing the mainstream of both of those societies, have marched against a unilateral preemptive attack on Iraq, and our leaders have simply told us that we're wrong. We find ourselves in a situation where either our government or our populace will be defeated by the other. We must recognize our predicament and find more creative responses if we're to have any hope of avoiding defeat.
7:57:35 AM 
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