"War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning" book review

War is brutally physical. It is the wholesale acceptance of the devastation of property, industry, life and limb by violence and might. It's a force, all right. A force that gives us meaning, says Chris Hedges, who has spent 15 years trying to extract some sense from war for those of us who aren't there, who don't know, who haven't been moved and who could use a dose of meaning.

Putting aside the strangely unmoving effect of the title (and the accompanying photo on the book's jacket which shows a group of puckered Americans holding flags and candles in front of the lower Manhattan skyline), Hedge's book is hugely affective. A relentless litany of war's physicality, "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" looks hard at the non-physical engines of conflict and war's psychological detritus.

Firstly, war is a rush, says Hedges, who has covered wars in Central America, Iraq, Israel and Yugoslavia. Why else would he and hundreds other journalists head into the fray time and again, knowing what they will see and what they will write?

"I was hooked," he says, of his first encounter with combat, and he frequently revisits the topic of war addiction. It is a jarring admission, one that raises its incongruous head from the rubble of senseless demolition and mass graves. Bravado from a war-weary journalist is often offensive, and Hedges is no less unsympathetic when he describes a day in Kosovo as one of "as usual, a perilous game of cat-and-mouse, one I had played for five years with the military in El Salvador."

Such jaded posturing is at first unsettling, because Hedges and his peers choose the game; terrorized civilians who play cat-and-mouse for five years just to bring drinking water home to their family do not. But that, in fact, is his point. War, with its depravation, solidarity, adrenaline and risk, attracts a larger contingency than the merely militant.

The war correspondent's enthusiasm is rooted in the same bloodlust that creates and nourishes war in the first place. So when he belittles the "hotel-room journalists" and thumps his chest as a reporter who heads for the front-lines, it is meant as evidence:

"For we not only believe in the myth of war and feed recklessly off the drug but also embrace the cause. We may do it with more skepticism. We certainly expose more lies and misconceptions. But we believe. We all believe. When you stop believing you stop going to war," he writes.

Stranger than his own nostalgia for conflict zones, is the wistfulness of war victims acclimating to peace. When the siege of Sarajevo is lifted, many of his acquaintances seem to transfer their mourning and bereavement to the passing of hostilities.

"I will never again be able to live such a strong, horrible, and wonderful life," he quotes one of them as saying, recalling dark days of companionship in bombed out apartments. "It is as if I see life through pieces of a mirror that lie in fragments."

The graphic artist journalist Joe Sacco recorded the same plaintive despair when peace came to Gorazde, another Bosnian town that lived for years on the brink of annihilation. People, even those who have paid the most for it, become invested in war.

Hedges — a divinity student before the insurgency in El Salvador seduced him into a life as a war correspondent — practices a refined style of journalism; it is emotive, intelligent and tinged with a spiritual curiosity. His testimonies from the displaced and dismayed are a springboard for his own self-examination, which in turn fuel scholarly analysis.

Schooled in the literature of war, his journalism is studded with allusions to classical texts. To him, nationalist rhetoric sounds like the sputtering of a wrathful Othello, "Goats and monkeys!" Shakespeare proves useful again when Hedges notes the first televised broadcasts of violence and mutilations in Yugoslavia aired simultaneously with the first pornography broadcast in the collapsed authoritarian state. "War and sex were the stimulants to divert a society that was collapsing," he writes, and then, from Troilus and Cressida, "Lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery, nothing else holds fashion."

Early in "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," we are told that historians calculate that in the whole of human history, 29 years can be considered to have been years of global peace. By the end of the book, we are surprised that we have eked out even that relatively short lull. For when war is accepted by so many as a force that brings out the best in man — valor, camaraderie, self-sacrifice, bravery — it's a sure ticket that the monster in us will follow.

War, when we confront it truthfully, exposes the darkness within all of us. This darkness shatters the illusions many of us hold not only about the human race but about ourselves. Few of us confront our own capacity for evil, but this is especially true in wartime. And even those who engage in combat are afterward given cups from the River Lethe to forget. And with each swallow they imbibe the myth of war. For the myth makes war palatable. It gives war a logic and sanctity it does not possess. It saves us from peering into the darkest recesses of our own hearts. And this is why we like it. It is why we clamor for myth. The myth is enjoyable, and the press, as is true in every nation that goes to war, is only too happy to oblige. They dish it up and we ask for more.

War as myth begins with blind patriotism, which is always thinly veiled self-glorification. We exalt ourselves, our goodness, our decency, our humanity, and in that self-exaltation we denigrate the other. The flip side of nationalism is racism--look at the jokes we tell about the French. It feels great. War as myth allows us to suspend judgment and personal morality for the contagion of the crowd. War means we do not face death alone. We face it as a group. And death is easier to bear because of this. We jettison all the moral precepts we have about the murder of innocent civilians, including children, and dismiss atrocities of war as the regrettable cost of battle. As I write this article, hundreds of thousands of innocent people, including children and the elderly, are trapped inside the city of Basra in southern Iraq--a city I know well--without clean drinking water. Many will die. But we seem, because we imbibe the myth of war, unconcerned with the suffering of others.

Yet, at the same time, we hold up our own victims. These crowds of silent dead--our soldiers who made "the supreme sacrifice" and our innocents who were killed in the crimes against humanity that took place on 9/11--are trotted out to sanctify the cause and our employment of indiscriminate violence. To question the cause is to defile the dead. Our dead count. Their dead do not. We endow our victims, like our cause, with righteousness. And this righteousness gives us the moral justification to commit murder. It is an old story.

In wartime we feel a comradeship that, for many of us, makes us feel that for the first time we belong to the nation and the group. We are fooled into thinking that in wartime social inequalities have been obliterated. We are fooled into feeling that, because of the threat, we care about others and others care about us in new and powerful waves of emotion. We are giddy. We mistake this for friendship. It is not. Comradeship, the kind that comes to us in wartime, is about the suppression of self-awareness, self-possession. All is laid at the feet of the god of war. And the cost of this comradeship, certainly for soldiers, is self-sacrifice, self-annihilation. In wartime we become necrophiliacs.

As it happens, I've just finished reading Mr. Hedges' memoir, War is a Force that Gives us Meaning, and it's very much of a piece with this, which is to say heartfelt, but overstated, particularly as regards his own country. Mr. Hedges spent fifteen years as a foreign correspondent, covering every war and genocide you can name, and many that few of us can. As just a reminder of these conflicts and of the victims thereof, it is worth reading. However, when he tries to draw broader conclusions he, perhaps understandably, overreacts. The truths that he speaks of above are not the only truths that war exposes, nor are they necessarily the primary truths. It's a truism that war is terrible, but it is just not the case, as even he ultimately must concede, that it is the most terrible thing.

It would be dishonest to argue that myth is not an important part of patriotism and the will to war, but consider how much here is not myth. The dead of 9-11 were in fact innocent victims. They went to work one fine morning in September and because of that they were murdered. No amount of scab-picking about past American policy in the Middle East can ever make it so that they deserved to die, can it? Likewise, those who perpetrated that heinous act, al Qaeda, and those who aided them, the Taliban, can not escape moral culpability, no matter what their grievances against the United States. It is an objective truth that at least these victims of ours were innocent and at least those enemies are not.

A somewhat better case can be made that the people of Iraq are innocent victims. However, they were victims of Saddam before we liberated them--Mr. Hedges might wince at the boastfulness of a term like liberation, but there is no reason for us to--and their lives are immeasurably better today for our having acted. Who cares more for the people of Basra, those content to stand idly by while Saddam oppressed them or those who've returned their freedom to them? Moreover, far from ignoring the suffering of potential innocents in this war, we took every reasonable (and some perhaps unreasonable) precaution to avoid civilian casualties. If the myths of which Mr. Hedges speaks were wholly true, it would have been simplicity itself to slaughter Iraqis indiscriminately, even to exterminate the population, yet this we did not do. Here is the inescapable problem for Mr. Hedges: give a Hitler, a Stalin, a Milosevic, a bin Laden, a whomever, nuclear weapons and there can be little doubt they'd use them to kill their enemies. Yet we have them and we do not use them (except the twice, sixty years ago). If we had truly become necrophiliac, as are our foes so often become, why would we not kill to out utmost capacity to do so? Indeed, who can look at these photos and responsibly say that we do not care about their (our) victims?

Where then the truth of the myth?

In the book, Mr. Hedges writes:

The attacks on the World Trade Center illustrate that those who oppose us, rather than coming from another moral universe, have been schooled well in modern warfare. The dramatic explosions, the fireballs, the victims plummeting to their deaths, the collapse of the towers in Manhattan, were straight out of Hollywood. Where else, but from the industrialized world, did the suicide hijackers learn that huge explosions and death above a city skyline are a peculiar and effective form of communication? They have mastered the language. They understand that the use of disproportionate violence against innocents is a way to make a statement. We leave the same calling cards. Corpses in wartime often deliver messages. The death squads in El Salvador dumped three bodies in the parking lot of the Camino Real Hotel in San Salvador, where the journalists were based, early one morning. Death threats against us were stuffed in the mouths of the bodies.

And, on a larger scale, Washington uses murder and corpses to transmit its wrath. We delivered such incendiary messages in Vietnam, Iraq, Serbia, and Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden has learned to speak the language of modern industrial warfare. [...]

Organized killing is done best by a disciplined, professional army. But war also empowers those with a predilection for murder. Petty gangsters, reviled in pre-war Sarajevo, were transformed overnight at the start of the conflict into war heroes. What they did was no different. They still pillaged, looted, tortured, raped, and killed; only then they did it to Serbs, and with an ideological veneer. Slobodan Milosevic went one further. He opened up the country's prisons and armed his criminal class to fight in Bosnia.

Once we sign on for war's crusade, once we see ourselves on the side of the angels, once we embrace a theological or ideological belief system that defines itself as the embodiment of goodness and light, it is only a matter of how we will carry out murder.

The eruption of conflict instantly reduces the headache and trivia of daily life. The communal march against an enemy generates a warm, unfamiliar bond with our neighbors, our community, our nation, wiping out unsettling undercurrents of alienation and dislocation. War, in times of malaise and desperation, is a potent distraction.

George Orwell in "1984" wrote of the necessity of constant wars against the Other to forge a false unity among the proles: "War had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war.... The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil."

Patriotism, often a thinly veiled form of collective self-worship, celebrates our goodness, our ideals, our mercy and bemoans the perfidiousness of those who hate us. [...]

War makes the world understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow before the supreme effort. We are one. Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good, for human beings seek not only happiness but also meaning. And tragically war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning.

This is positively bizarre. One might imagine us to have been at war with the Arab world throughout the '90s, and Osama bin Laden to have just been responding to our constant attacks. In fact, the truth, as the analysts tell us, is the opposite. It was precisely because America was so reticent to respond to terror in any systematic way, so loathe to leave behind the roaring '90s and go to war, that al Qaeda became emboldened. In Mr. Hedges account we woke up one day, found our lives lacked meaning, and marched to war with an Islam we suddenly decided to portray as evil. In reality, we woke one day to find the World Trade Center and Pentagon in flames, decided that our lives had a meaning worth defending after all, and set out not to fight all Islam but those who have distorted it into something hateful. When in human history has a leader gone further out of his way--many would argue too far--to limit just who the enemy is, to limit the material destruction and civilian deaths, to get aid to the newly liberated peoples, etc. Whenever else has a military bombed countries with food and humanitarian supplies? No, to accept Mr. Hedges implicit argument that there is no difference between us and al Qaeda or between Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush is to abandon even the idea of morality. It is too deny that morality exists.

Mr. Hedges himself acknowledges this, if not directly, when he disavows pacifism:

The poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of responsibility. There are times when we must take this poison--just as a person with cancer accepts chemotherapy to live. We cannot succumb to despair. Force is and I suspect always will be part of the human condition. There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that, while never moral, is perhaps less immoral.

This is sheer nonsense. A doctor administers poison to the chemotherapy patient--has he not behaved morally? A bystander or a policeman uses force to stop a rape--have they not acted morally just because they used force, which, as Mr. Hedges says, "will always be part of the human condition"? One nation intervenes with force to stop a genocide or a megalomaniacal dictator--in what sense is this not a moral act?

He closes the chapter by saying: "This is not a call for inaction. It is a call for repentance." So we should not stand by and watch as one people slaughter another, but if we use force to stop it we must repent that use of force? What kind of morality is it that holds you guilty if you act and if you don't? The answer is: not a serious one. This is mere self-flagellation and pious posturing. Mr. Hedges provides us with a harrowing glimpse of modern war and a salutary warning about how the enthusiasms of war affect all us, but he goes way too far and lapses into absurdity when he demands that we treat all uses of force as immoral.