Why Even Pacifists Love "War"

I remember when I was a kid, I had hundreds and hundreds of toy soldiers. A whole ice chest full of them. Not to mention all the tanks, trucks, halftracks, artillery pieces, etc. I loved setting up elaborate battles in which these plastic figures would die again and again and again.

Why did I do this? I suppose I could say that I had always been interested in history, and this was one way of “playing” at history.

But on the other hand, I didn’t use plastic figures to recreate the Constitutional Convention or the completion of the transcontinental railroad. It was war I played at.

Always war.

Why?

There’s an answer to this question, but, in keeping with the theme of this blog, I’d like to approach it from a rhetorical point of view.

Much like my 8-year-old self, George W. Bush likes to play at war, too. He certainly likes talking about it. In Monday's statement about the Iraq “War” Supplemental spending bill, he surrounded himself with veterans and their families. He also used the word “war” 14 times in a statement about 1900 words long. If you’re scoring at home, that means that between one-half and a full one percent of the words he uttered were “war.”

Bush uses this word to refer to the situation in Iraq. Apparently, he means it literally. Or at least he wants us to take it literally.

The truth is that what’s going on in Iraq is not war, at least not one that we’re fighting. The president also loves to talk about “victory” and “defeat” (he used the latter word seven times in his statement). But any war, any military victory or defeat, happened long ago. The Iraqi army was defeated. The enemy capital was occupied.

If we waived the technicality that, legally, only Congress can declare war, we might have reason to call the invasion of Iraq a “war.” Nevertheless, the we must grant that this war ended years ago.

What we have now is an occupation. An ugly one at that. What’s loosely termed “the insurgency” (as if it is some monolithic enemy, like “The Empire”) is actually a hodgepodge of factions, tribes, and paramilitary groups fighting one another more than the U.S.

Since one of the few things these folks agree on is that America shouldn’t be occupying their country, they kill our men and women in uniform when they have a chance, but their true animosity is for one another.

But leave it to our president to condense an incredibly complex situation and the U.S. role in it into a single simple concept, no matter how distorting it might be: "war." You don’t need to admit that the situation in Iraq is a disaster to see that “war” has become a metaphor. It’s literal applicability is long gone.

And just as I ask why I spent hours and hours setting up my little plastic soldiers only to knock them down with a marble, I ask why does the president fixate on this term?

There are lots of possible answers. But the storyline I’d like to follow begins with psychoanalytic textual criticism.

Yeah, I know what you’re probably thinking: going all Freudian is just going to be talking about how cruise missiles look like phalluses and that Bush wanted to topple Hussein because it would be a symbolic way of killing Poppy, since he secretly longs to sexually possess Babs.

But that’s just a caricature of how psychoanalytic criticism works (not to say there aren’t plenty of serious-minded folks who actually use this cartoonish version of it). Psychoanalytic criticism provides us with much more nuance than this.

The particular concept I’d like to use to have a better understanding of how and why the president insists on the “war” metaphor is “condensation.”

Condensation refers to the tendency to symbolically reduce a complex series of concepts and relationships into something much simpler. This process, by necessity, obscures and distorts aspects of the reality it pretends to represent.

That is what “war” is as a symbol in Bush’s rhetoric. It’s not a term that passively represents reality, but actively shapes it by invoking a whole related mythology tied to the term itself, a mythology that might or might not be useful in the context of the Iraq situation.

What does “war” represent? Most obviously, violence, death, and destruction. But, as even pacifist psychologist/philosopher William James noted over a hundred years ago, “war” as an idea also connotes positive values of nobility and courage. He said this in the context of thinking about the romantic (and still living) memory of the Civil War, and the allure of the Spanish American War was raging at the time.

What James suggested is that we need to find a moral equivalent of war—a way of replacing actual war with something that appeals to that aspect of our social being that war—or at least the idea of it—satisfies. These values are not depraved or destructive in and of themselves; it’s our willingness to celebrate these values through killing one another that is unacceptable.

The ennobling connotations of war—the part of it as a concept that touches on virtues we rightly prize—is what makes it so appealing as a metaphor. In the context of American history, it conjures up associations with World War II—the last “declared” war in our history. The “Greatest Generation.” Toppling fascism. “Saving Private Ryan.” Good guys vs. bad guys. National unity. Storming the beaches at Normandy. Rosie the Riveter announcing “We Can Do It.” The associations are rich and oddly positive, much like the associations with the Civil War in James’s time. No one would actually wish for a repeat of WWII, but we would feel diminished without the resonances it brings.

And the reason I probably played with toy soldiers was because conflict was a way of playfully enacting values of sacrifice, bravery, loyalty, pride, and moral conviction. These are the values that “war” as an abstraction conjures up.

The problem is that the men and women in Baghdad aren’t toy soldiers, but human beings. But by referring to what they are involved in as “war,” Bush turns them into abstractions—offerings on the altar of martial values. Only then can he hope to make Americans feel comfortable with the sacrifice. By condensing the Gordian knot of Iraq into the symbolically potent term “war,” Bush tries to make us (and perhaps himself) feel okay with what’s going on. After all, only a little over 3000 soldiers have died—isn’t that so much better than the tens and hundreds of thousands who’ve died in past wars? Aren’t we in fact paying a low price for the celebration of martial values?

The only remedy to falling continually into this trap is, as James tells us, to find another way of expressing these values in a way that honors them, but doesn’t kill people. This would require leadership of considerable imagination—imagination sorely lacking at present. To give just one possible example, though, what might have happened had after 9/11 if we had a president who was able to rhetorically motivate the country strive as a nation for a “victory” over Islamic extremism by “combating” our need for foreign oil, “cutting off” the influence of the unstable nations of the Middle East on our foreign policy by “fighting” for new ways of meeting our energy needs?

“War” is a potent metaphor precisely because it conjures up values that are indeed important and valuable. But war as a reality is not necessary or desirable for these values to be enacted. And as a symbol, it condenses the reality of the situation in Iraq in ways that fundamentally distort the reality of the situation, lulling us into accepting what is unacceptable. By continuing to use the psychologically potent symbol of war, despite the inappropriateness of the term in any literal sense to our involvement in Iraq, Bush sublimates the grotesque in our national consciousness.

We shouldn’t accept that.

And that’s why none of us should acquiesce to using the term “war” in referring to either our involvement in Iraq, or our attempts to stop terrorism.

It’s not enough to be against the “war in Iraq.” We must be against “war.”