Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: Why We Got to Be So Hated

Gore Vidal

New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002; Pages: 160

It is painful when one of my favorite authors makes an ass of himself. Vidal's many and varied writings have been an endless source of fascination for me but this little gem should make Chomsky weep with envy and any reasonable thinking person throw it away in disgust. It is not that the author does not make a host of valid points about unreasonable expansion of the American state, invasion of privacy, intrusion on rights and liberties. Even though he is not first, or even best of those who have continually exposed many of these abuses of power and trust, Vidal's observations are usually on the mark and deserve readership.

The problem with the book is that Vidal tries to explain both home-grown terrorism (McVeigh) and its international variety (Bin Laden) by (a) claiming that they have the same source, and (b) this source is the evil American government which has (c) betrayed its own citizens, and (d) went and screwed up every region of the world it could lay its dirty imperialist hands on. He is wrong.

Before I continue, I recommend two books that should help quite a bit with both sides of the story. First, Joey Dyer's "Harvest of Rage" is an excellent account of the rise of domestic fringe groups and the potential for terrorism along with a scathing review of the idiocy frequently perpetrated by various agencies such as the perennially incompetent FBI. Vidal himself approvingly quotes time and again from this book. Dyer argues that the hotbed for militia anti-government activity is rural America (mostly farmers) who have undergone a terrible economic predicament. The result of increasing corporatist invasion and the disenfranchisement of the populous farming communities is powerlessnes and anger among these groups who end up resorting to right-wing extremism. It is a fine analysis but Vidal misses the point that it is driven by economic forces and not by an evil government that seeks to marginalize its own citizens. While it is true that the corporate lobby can buy Capitol Hill, similar problems with consolidation of agriculture abound everywhere (e.g.France) and are due to market imperatives that one can curb only at the risk of socialism. Although not necessarily a bad thing, hardly any US government, including the self-styled patriots, would countenance such a thing without something like a big war (remember the New Deal?).

The other book I want to recommend is Max Boot's "The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power," in which the author quite convincingly contends that the United States has a long tradition of foreign intervention, most of it remarkably successful, and that in almost all cases of failure the problem was not enough intervention, not too much of it. The book is a laundry list of the small wars from the country's inception until the Second World War. The scant attention paid to more recent developments is due to the largely botched policies followed by Washington in its paralysis of the Vietnam syndrome. Boot insists that the Powell Doctrine (no casualties, only overwhleming force, etc.) is wrong and a recipe for inaction. When one looks at the balance sheet of American small wars, the good outweighs the bad by a wide margin. To top it off, Boot also shows that much of the intervention was not because of pressure from Wall Street (the eternally evil capitalist imperialists) but a healthy combination of genuinely humanitarian and geo-strategic reasons. Vidal is perhaps unaware of this book but he should have known better than dump a list of American interventions implying that this is some sort of old imperialism.

Vidal's grasp of history is usually good, and so the almost complete lack of it in this book must be accounted for by its extremely politicized objective. The author, quite reprehensively, seems to suggest that the Americans who died in Oklahoma and New York City deserved to die because they have elected the incompetent, corrupt, arrogant, crimial bastards who run the US government. This is a naïve and idiotic logic to begin with. Vidal has little understanding of democracy if he thinks that it is a system of government designed to produce perfect solutions that everyone will like. In fact, aside from procedural legitimacy, democracy's only claim to fame is that it abuses its citizens less than other regimes. Thus, Vidal first proposes a chimeric unreal idea of democracy that can never be achieved, then blames America for failing to get it.

Vidal also heaps abuse on the "Pentagon junta" which wages the perpetual war. But this is simply not so. The Pentagon is so timid for its size and so handicapped by the wrongheaded doctrines that require no US casualties in any involvement that it can actually do very little with the many toys it has. Many of failures (remember Somalia?) can be attributed to this perverse mentality that, while making sense to civilians, requires the army to fight with computers. This works for someone as stupidly obliging as Saddam Hussein but will not work in the streets of Palestine, the mountains of the Philippines, or the jungles of Central America. The failures then, contra Vidal, are not evidence that US is throwing its weight around (thereby justifying the actions of the likes of Bin Laden) but that the administration and the Pentagon have to rethink their operational procedures if they want these interventions to succeed.

America bad? Yes, but not because it intervenes too much but because it does not intervene enough. Teddy Roosevelt remarked that after the duty to its citizens, a great power must assume its duty to the world, which the US, as the sole remaining superpower, must now do and embrace its role as world policeman. It should have intervened early in Bosnia... it could have saved many of the 200,000 people that perished there. It should have stayed in Somalia, it should have stayed in Haiti. Without the US, the Arab-Israeli conflict will never end.

Thus, Vidal's book is just an exercise in inflammatory polemic, or a case of studied cretinism on a high intellectual level. Everything in it is plausible, but that does not make it any less wrong. A huge disappointment.

June 10, 2002. BLS

@BOOK{vidal,
    TITLE     = {Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace},
    AUTHOR    = {Gore Vidal},
    YEAR      = {2002},
    PUBLISHER = {Thunder's Mouth Press},
    ADDRESS   = {New York},
    ISBN      = {1-56025-405-X},
    NOTE      = {Pp. 160}
}