Impunity Breeds Contempt

The arrogance of (supposed) invulnerability

If you, the leader of the nation, had ever served in a battle zone or had the misfortune of residing in one, if you'd seen comrades wounded or killed and innocents maimed or slaughtered, you might have thought twice before resorting to violence despite your “feeling” that easy victory lay within reach. Unfortunately, you, like most Americans today, are wholly ignorant of the realities of war, either for themselves or for others. The United States has been party to countless wars, but few of its citizens have felt vulnerable to the kind of death and destruction that its military is capable of inflicting.

Hence the temptation of warfare is not resisted as strongly as it ought to be. We've seen this in the past, but even though we've often been guilty of treating war (or its doppelgängers hidden behind euphemisms such as “limited police actions” or “military assistance missions”) as just another tool in the foreign-policy toolkit, we've generally insisted on maintaining, or feigning, a certain gravity whenever the subject is broached. Commanders-in-chief once professed awe before the “solemn responsibility” they bear for the death and mayhem they authorized; they begged forgiveness from the families of those whom they sent to their graves; they labored over elaborate apologia for the greater good they believed they were seeking through the most violent of means; they lavished all the hoary epithets of honor and glory on the “fallen heroes” of whose actual duties and intimate suffering they have little inkling.

The solemnity of this ritual dramatization of war had at least one virtue: it raised the commitment of forces above the quotidian din of politics and therefore served as a warning that such action was not to be undertaken lightly.

But you, in your consummate self-absorption, chose to ignore the warning. Courage, André Malraux once said, is a banal consequence of a lack of imagination. A country can suffer the misfortune of finding itself led by blithe, ignorant, careless, incautious, ignorant men. Having seen little of war and read nothing of history, they may find themselves misled by easy victories against helpless victims. It’s no great feat of arms to demolish unarmed boats with fighter jets or to abduct a minimally defended and widely despised despot in the dead of night. It costs nothing in blood or tears to permit an ostensible ally to make uninhabitable a meager strip of land occupied by two million people unable to make their protests heard.

Encouraged by such simulacra of victory, you acquire a taste for the “arbitrement of arms.” Your blithe ignorance and carelessness alleviate the once-solemn question of war of its former gravity. Your inveterate confusion of leadership with showmanship transforms the justification of war from grave duty into pyrotechnic display, juxtaposing images from video games and action movies with high-tech snuff footage. You send your spokesman, as grotesquely tattooed as a savage spearman, in front of the cameras to rant about the warrior ethos and boast about the jettisoning of all rules of engagement and laws of war once thought, in a more civilized age, to redeem interstate bloodletting from the savagery symbolized by those tattoos. To welcome the “fallen heroes” home you transform the “dignified transfer” of their remains into a photo op in which you appear in a white baseball cap from your stock of campaign merch, and you don't remove it when their bodies are paraded past. Even your own propaganda network felt compelled to edit out that moment of narcissistic contempt.

And of course you are firmly convinced that you will never be punished for this wantonness. You firmly believe that your nonpareil military will forever shield you, and us, from all retribution. You provoke right and left, north and south, without ever imagining that right might someday join with left, north with south, to deal us the kind of blow you so thoughtlessly mete out to others. Your courage is indeed a banal consequence of your lack of imagination, your want of intelligence, your erasure of history. You are a fool with a nuclear blunderbuss. Your ignorance is the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.