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“ARE WE AT WAR?”
These were the words with which the wife of a friend greeted me when they picked me up at the airport as I returned to California shortly after the attacks on September 11, 2001. I had been traveling on the East Coast, and it was only days after 9/11 when we met and she collapsed in my arms. Her voice trembled as she repeated the question.
“Are we at war?
Behind her fear was a profound sentiment. The implication was that an attack of the magnitude of 9/11 must be part of something on a more impressive scale than a rogue band of militant Muslims with a cleverly lethal scheme to perpetrate a dramatic symbolic attack.
Yet, in truth, what happened on 9/11 was basically that. The jihadi activists associated with Al-Qaeda were just a small gang of several hundred at most.1 It was not a huge international army poised to challenge America’s military power. September 11 was commonly likened to the attack on Pearl Harbor, but that is an oddly inappropriate parallel. They were both sudden, dramatic, and unexpected assaults, but the organizations behind them were vastly different: the military might of Japan was buttressed by an enormous army and the stature of an empire, while Al-Qaeda and its allies constituted a tiny network of perverse activists spread throughout the world, plotting their destructive designs by email. And Al-Qaeda had virtually no state support, aside from Osama bin Laden’s Taliban hosts in Afghanistan.
The general public found it hard to fathom that such heinous acts as the attacks of September 11 could be accomplished by a small and relatively insignificant group. This misapprehension was magnified by the language of the media and by official pronouncements that spoke of the enemy in grand terms. The words signified that the hateful acts of bin Laden’s small band of outlaws must signal something bigger than random terrorism. It is understandable, then, that my friend’s wife instinctively thought it must be war.
Responding to Chaos
What does it take to make us think of war? In the case of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, would my friend’s wife have thought we were at war if things had played out differently—if the buildings were struck, for instance, but the Twin Towers did not fall? Would it have been war if the buildings collapsed, but it happened at night, when few people were killed and no cameras were there to record the event? What made this event, in the minds of many who witnessed it vicariously through televised images, so certainly an act of war?
I put these questions to a classroom of students when I returned to California shortly after 9/11. The discussion was lively, and at first there was little agreement.
“It was the magnitude of the event,” one fellow intoned. He cited the importance of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as public institutions, and the numbers of people who were killed. I pointed out that the buildings had been targeted before, in the 1993 attack by a jihadi group related to Al-Qaeda, and that event merited scarcely a shrug from the American populace. If the explosives were greater in magnitude and had been placed differently, both buildings would have collapsed immediately. The devastation would have been enormous. It would have killed far more than perished in 2001. Like a tree falling in the forest, the first tower would have toppled against the second, and both would have obliterated all of the other buildings in their shadow for blocks around. I calculated that as many as 200,000 people would have died.
“That would really have been war,” the student responded. He went on to explain, however, that the relative lack of damage from what actually happened at the World Trade Center in 1993 disqualified it from being an act of war. September 11, 2001, was different, he said. The number of casualties and the dramatic visual impact of the event were good reasons for thinking of it as the onset of warfare.
Other students resisted the conclusion that it was simply the size of the event that made the difference. They noted that a natural disaster, such as a gas line explosion, or even the lone act of a crazy individual could have killed as many people but would not have signaled a state of war. It had to be an act that was rationally calculated, conducted by a significant force, and deliberately aimed at us. The students noted the complexity of the attacks and the fact that four airplanes were involved. All of this must have taken an enormous amount of planning and coordination.
I pointed out that many of Al-Qaeda’s previous activities were similarly orchestrated. The bombing of American embassies almost simultaneously in two different African countries in 1998, for example, reflected a very sophisticated organizational scheme. So was the Bojinka plot, the plan created by the Al-Qaeda operative Ramzi Yousef to bomb a dozen US commercial airliners as they flew over the Pacific on one fateful day in the early 1990s. Fortunately the plot was discovered before it could be carried out. But it showed that Al-Qaeda had targeted America for some ten years and yet the American public did not see itself at war.
“But September 11 was different,” the students argued, “because it worked.” “And,” one added, “because it was here.”
For a moment there was silence, as if the students themselves were not quite convinced by their own arguments. The points they made were all good ones, but somehow none by itself seemed to have sufficient weight to make a whole society think immediately and instinctively in terms of war.
“Besides,” one of the women said, breaking the silence, “it was such a crazy thing, those towers falling. It had to be war.”
Now, it seemed to me, we were getting closer to the underlying issues. The craziness of it all, the enormity of the impact on the public consciousness, the overwhelming sense of vulnerability and humiliation that was the shared experience of most Americans at that time could only be explained by something as fundamental and fearsome as war.
But war requires two sides, I said. Who was the enemy? September 11 was greatly different from Pearl Harbor; the Japanese attack that drew the United States into World War II involved a vast army commanded by the authority of a nation-state in concert with its international allies. War needs enemies. In this case it needed one of significant force to be a worthy opponent of the largest superpower on earth.
I asked the students, “What if it turned out that the perpetrators of the act were simply a ratty band of terrorists living in caves and connected to a few comrades via email in different parts of the world? What if the enemy in this case wasn’t a significant force but a small but clever and very determined network of anti-American antiglobalization religious activists? Would this still be war?”
The students appeared confused. I was describing a situation that they knew was at least to some extent true. If the enemy was only a tawdry band of miscreants, 9/11 would seem to be just a mindless act of terrorism and not a compelling case for war.
“Ah, but what about all their supporters?” a bright student asked, suddenly thinking of what might have been different about this case. “There’s more to this than just Al-Qaeda,” another said. And then yet another asked the definitive question: “Wasn’t this really the first salvo in the war with the radical Muslim world?”
It was a chilling observation. It took the lid off a nasty little secret, that much of the American public blamed either the Middle East as a whole or the religion of Islam or both for implicitly supporting such acts of terrorism. This widely held but seldom expressed view was all the more disturbing in that it had the potential to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. In fact, soon after that classroom discussion, the United States was indeed at war with first one Muslim country, Afghanistan, and then another, Iraq, military actions that were justified in the minds of many by the war on terrorism but were widely perceived throughout the Muslim world as a war on Islam, to which many Muslims responded in kind.
The classroom discussion showed me that the idea of war is a powerful thing, based on one of the most potent of human emotions: the fear of uncertainty. It became clear to me that whatever else was behind the idea of war, it always began with a profound sense of public disorder. In the case of September 11, war was a response to an anomaly—a significant event that signaled a threat to our sense of order and public stability.
On the day of the attacks, however, the startled nation did not immediately think of war. A survey of the headlines that appeared in the afternoon editions of newspapers on September 11, 2001, shows that none of them described the attacks as acts of war. “U.S. Attacked,” was the headline in the New York Times. “Terrorists Attack,” said the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. “Infamy,” and “A Day of Devastation,” proclaimed others. Still other newspapers simply displayed a full-page picture of the burning towers with a phrase, such as “Terror Attacks” and “Who Did This?” The San Francisco Examiner printed a huge single word above the horrifying image of the burning towers: “Bastards.”
Within the inner circle of the White House, there was apparently also uncertainty about how to describe the events. Secretary of State Colin Powell was in South America at the time. Though distraught over the attacks, his first reaction was to think of the terrorist networks that might be responsible for such a thing and how international intelligence agencies could be marshaled to locate them and bring them to justice. His boss, however, saw things in a different light. According to Bob Woodward’s account, President Bush thought in terms of war.2 Woodward described it as an immediate, almost visceral response.
That afternoon, when Bush appeared on television to comfort an anguished nation, he declared that the acts were committed not by a few misguided souls but by forces that three times in the short statement he described as “evil.” It was also in this initial statement that he described America’s response as “a war on terrorism.” On the following day his assessment was raised a notch higher: the attacks were “more than acts of terrorism,” the president said, “they were acts of war.” Later that day the word “war” was used in conjunction with the attacks for the first time in the headlines of US newspapers, but it appeared in quotation marks, as the “act of war” described by Bush. That afternoon, on the Fox News Channel and other television outlets, Bush’s phrase “the war on terrorism” was incorporated into the standard logo for news reports related to the attack and the US government’s response, a logo that would be used for months and years following September 11 as one militant confrontation followed another. Often, though, the phrase was simplified to “the war on terror,” indicating that it was not just a struggle against specific enemies but against the emotional response that their acts created in the minds of the public that was victimized by such attacks.
The way the event was framed, the way it was interpreted and understood as an act of war, was provided to the American public by its president. It is conceivable that if Colin Powell or Al Gore or someone else had been president, the event might have been described differently. It might have been portrayed as an awful but idiosyncratic act by a small group of misguided revolutionaries—an act that should be taken seriously but not considered war. Interpreting the events this way might have prevented the American public from quickly seeing the matter in terms that were grand, intractable, and absolute. But then again, it might not have. A calamity of such proportions as the collapse of the Twin Towers cried out for a large frame of reference to make it make sense. War provided that grand picture.
My hunch is that the woman who collapsed in my arms at the Santa Barbara airport and asked if we were at war was not just parroting the president. She was trying to make sense of things, and war provided a clarifying view. It gave an explanatory framework that made sense out of such a horrifying event as the massive destruction of public buildings. It might seem paradoxical given that war legitimizes killing and death, but the idea of war makes people feel more secure. Without war such a destructive event in the midst of ordinary life would leave individuals baffled and confused. Without war one’s sense of vulnerability would be vastly increased—since one would be left without an understanding of why chaotic events happen and what can be done about them. The world is a dangerous place indeed if not just a major power but any little group with a grievance can do such things. In such a world, public order is highly unstable. The idea of war provides a potentially controllable view of the world. If the attacks were the orchestrated acts of a known and powerful foe, one would know how to deal with them. It is possible for people to imagine what caused the assault: an enemy with whom one is at war.
Imagining War
What I found striking about the response I met with at the airport after 9/11, and interesting about the American response in general, was how oddly similar it was to the worldview of the people behind the attacks. Like the Americans, the jihadi activists associated with the Al-Qaeda network felt under siege, victims of a great war that they could not see or understand. It took some mental gymnastics to imagine who the enemy was, and though initially not all agreed, many came around to bin Laden’s perspective that it was the “far enemy” that was behind their loss of public morality and social meaning. It was America, and it was war.
I felt certain that this was the point of view of the jihadi activists because I had talked with one of them. Some years before 9/11, I had managed to worm my way into the prison precincts of Lompoc Federal Penitentiary and interview Mahmud Abouhalima, who had been convicted of conspiracy in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. His network was intimately connected with the global jihadi movement, and in fact one of the masterminds of the operation was Ramzi Yousef, the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the activist identified in the official 9/11 Commission Report of the US government as being the main figure behind the 9/11 attacks. Both nephew and uncle were in prison, as was Abouhalima, whom Time magazine had featured on its cover as the main organizer of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
It took some effort to break into prison. I had to get the permission of the warden and Abouhalima himself. Though Abouhalima was eager to talk, his attorneys were hesitant, since they were still trying to get him a retrial and didn’t want him to say anything that might implicate him. Eventually Abouhalima persuaded them that he would be cautious in his comments. My congressman at the time, Walter Capps, interceded on my behalf, persuading the warden to undertake the security measures necessary for me to visit, which I did on two occasions. After going through the lengthy security proceedings on my initial visit, I was placed in a cafeteria that had been emptied for the occasion. Guards stood nervously around the table where we were to meet, stationed there for my security, the warden told me, so that the prisoner would not try to grab me and take me hostage.
When Abouhalima appeared, he seemed less of a threat than one might have anticipated. I don’t know exactly what people think a terrorist is supposed to look and act like, but whatever image of menace that might conjure, Abouhalima was not like that. He was tall and red-haired, unusual for an Egyptian, and he was also affable, eager to talk. There was nothing pious about him. He used mild profanities from time to time, “damn” this and “shit” that, and when I said that I was planning a trip to Sweden soon after our talk, he expressed interest in blond Scandinavian women.
In fact he portrayed nothing out of the ordinary until the conversation came to the topic of religion and politics. Then his face darkened and his eyes narrowed. He leaned over and spoke in an audible whisper.
“There’s a war going on, Mr. Mark,” he told me, his voice quiet but intense, his head lowered so that the guards who were standing nearby would not hear, adding, “and your government is the enemy.”
He went on to say, “Someone should grab you by the shoulders, Mr. Mark.” He let that sink in before repeating the point: “You need to be shaken awake.” He sat back to see if I understood what he was saying.
Clearly this message was important to him. He was implying that I, and by extension most Americans, were blissfully unaware of a reality that seemed painfully obvious to him.
“You people are like sheep,” Abouhalima continued, again repeating that we needed to be “shaken awake,” jolted into awareness in order to understand what was really going on in the world.
It began to dawn on me what he was talking about. “Is this why people bomb buildings?” I asked.
He didn’t answer directly, but he leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Well, now you know,” he said. And after 9/11 all of us knew. We knew that they thought that the world was in a state of war.
Some years later I came to a similar conclusion after Anders Breivik had committed a hideous act of terrorism in Norway. On the night of June 22, 2011, I received an urgent message from colleagues in Oslo. They wanted my help to make sense of a curious manuscript that seemed related to a bombing in the downtown business district and a savage assault on a youth camp run by a liberal political party that advocated multiculturalism. Scores of young people had been shot at point-blank range; others died as they tried to swim to safety. It was one of those acts too horrible to imagine.
Why would anyone do such a thing? The manuscript my friends sent provided some answers. Breivik’s 1,500-page rambling manifesto was all about war. He had given it the title 2083: A European Declaration of Independence. The date is a reference to the four-hundredth anniversary of the battle at the gates of Vienna that kept the Ottoman army from turning central Europe into Muslim territory. The pictures that Breivik offered of himself dressed in military uniform as if a member of the Knights Templar evoked a period of warfare in which the Crusaders, the warriors of Christendom, were pitted against Muslim forces. Breivik imagined himself a modern-day incarnation of those Christian soldiers.
Though regarded as a lone-wolf killer, Breivik became the role model for other Christian terrorists, including Brenton Tarrant, who gunned down fifty-one Muslim worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019. Tarrant’s manifesto credited Breivik as his inspiration. On August 3, 2019, Patrick Wood Crusius drove ten hours to El Paso, Texas, to attack Hispanic people he regarded as unwelcome immigrants. His manifesto showed admiration for the Christchurch shootings, and like Tarrant and Breivik, he thought of himself as a warrior in a great battle for white supremacy.
Once again I was confronted with a central question: Why war? What were the circumstances that led the participants to see their predicament in the guise of warfare? And why was war the common reflexive perspective for activists related to every religious tradition—not only Muslims like Abouhalima and Christians like Breivik and Tarrant, but Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and Sikhs. Why did they all think of war, and what did religion have to do with it?
This question was on my mind when I went to Baghdad some months after the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. By then a Muslim resistance movement had sprung up. It was more than a protest against occupation; it involved organized militia attacks. The American authorities seemed surprised when large segments of the population, especially Sunni Muslims in western Iraq, failed to show their appreciation for being liberated from Saddam Hussein and instead attacked the occupying US forces with a vengeance.
Our hosts in Baghdad arranged a meeting with one of the leaders of the Association of Muslim Clergy from Al Anbar province, which was at the center of the armed resistance. I was joined by my colleague, Professor Mary Kaldor of the London School of Economics, who had arranged the trip.
We met at a mosque that had been one of Saddam’s favorites and was now occupied by the Al Anbar Sunni clerical association. It was called the Mother of All Battles Mosque, named in honor of Saddam’s claimed great victory in the Gulf War against the Americans and their allies after his invasion of neighboring Kuwait. Appropriately enough, the mosque named to honor Saddam’s battle against the Americans would now be occupied by clergy who were supporters of new battles against Americans.
“Why Americans?” I asked the leader of the Association of Muslim Clergy from Al Anbar province. “Why are they under attack?”
“This is war,” the cleric said, as if stating something obvious.3 He seemed to think that the question needed no more response than that, and he went on to cite many of the grievances of the Sunni Arabs with respect to the military occupation. It struck me as odd that these grievances, as understandable as they were, did not amount to the life-and-death confrontation of war.
But later the Muslim leader talked about the social disruption at the time of the American military invasion. He said that initially there was a wait-and-see attitude. The Iraqis did not know what to expect, and they were used to authoritarian rule. They had survived Saddam and tolerated the British, so they could abide the American regime if they thought it was just. But almost immediately they saw images of massive looting and public disorder as Saddam’s dictatorial regime disintegrated into chaos. As much as they abhorred Saddam, the chaos was worse. It was war.
It is a remarkable idea, the idea of war. It came over Iraq like a cloud that poisoned the process of peaceful transition to a democratic state. It descended into the thinking and attitudes of Iraqis months and years after the end of the initial assault—after the battles of the invasion were over and after Americans had congratulated themselves on “a job well done.” Gradually the idea insinuated itself into the minds of many average Iraqis, who began to see the American-led coalition forces as more than just an irritating occupying presence. They became enemies in a global war.
In an interesting way, this image of warfare was the mirror response to the war on terror, the patriotic militancy after 9/11 that brought US troops to Iraq in the first place. Many of the young American men and women who volunteered to fight did so in a mood of revenge, of wanting to retaliate against those who had attacked the World Trade Center and brought such startled grief to their country. No matter that Saddam had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda or 9/11. In their minds they were repaying the Middle East for the suffering it had brought to America. They were replicating the thinking of those Muslim militants who plotted the terrorist attack, who were attempting to repay the United States for the suffering they imagined it had brought to those who lived in the Middle East. War begat war.
The wheel of warfare had come full circle. The simmering resentment over American power and influence in the Muslim world had crystallized into a sense of warfare. A decade of sporadic jihadi terrorist attacks finally struck home on September 11, 2001—or rather September 12, when the US president announced that he had adopted the jihadis’ worldview and, like them, saw the world at war. This led to real war in the US military action in Afghanistan weeks later. The American public’s gnawing fear of a vague international threat of global jihadi war would become a major element in the popular support for the invasion of Iraq. This invasion and the bungling American occupation that followed added fuel to the fires of Muslim extremism throughout the Middle East. It facilitated the rise of ISIS, which became the impetus for another US military action to destroy the vicious regime of the Islamic State. This opened a new theater of conflict that culminated in the 2018 destruction of the cities of Mosul and Raqqa and gave rise to ISIS-inspired terrorist attacks from Manhattan to Paris, from Mindanao to Sri Lanka. Again, war begat war.
How did this come to pass? Why did this way of thinking about the world—a world embroiled in war—seem on both sides to be so natural, so inevitable, so appealing? What is the odd attraction of war?
The Ubiquity of War
Trying to discern why war is so appealing, I turned to the cultural images of war. They are ubiquitous. Truly war is everywhere, in our art and stories, legends and myths, sports and games. This is not just a response to specific enemies but in some deep way a response to the human condition. It is as common as the movies that populate the neighborhood Cineplex and the video games that mesmerize teenage boys. These images are compelling not just to incipient terrorists but to everyone who is fascinated by and engaged with them, which is virtually everyone, from the kid next door to families in front of the evening television shows, readers of fiction, and devout parishioners in their weekly worship services. What is war doing everywhere?
Humans are social animals, and our main activities are aimed at creating societies that are peaceful, orderly, and just. Differences are negotiated or brought to arbitration or subject to the rule of law. Ordinarily we strive to get along with one another, so why should the idea of war be even remotely attractive? Since the orderly adjudication of differences is the hallmark of civil society, why would we want to imagine a situation in which humans are objects and those who differ from us are aliens to be destroyed? Yet it is precisely this alternative to normal life—not just a little bit different but completely different, in fact its very opposite—that images of war provide.
Though many video games, such as Minecraft and Tetris, are creative and nonviolent, the ones that capture the attention of many boys and young men in particular are all about war. These include Grand Theft Auto, which is about urban gang warfare, Counter-Strike, League of Legends, and World of Warcraft, each of which has garnered sales in the tens of millions. One of the newest—and the hottest selling item of 2018—is Fortnite, which, as of mid-2019, had been purchased by 250 million players around the world. By the time you read this, the number will likely be even higher. Counter-Strike, launched in 2000, has sold millions of copies. The latest iteration of the game is Counter-Strike: Global Offensive; in mid-2018 its website claimed that over ten million players were actively engaged with the game each month.4
Fortnite and Counter-Strike are online games, meaning that they can be played on any computer linked to the internet rather than on the consoles that are found in video arcades and on personal game stations. (The makers of Counter-Strike also produce a console version of the game, which is less successful.) They are role-playing games, which are vastly more popular than those that, rather like chess, are primarily about calculating an effective military strategy. In role-playing games, players enter into the action and become fighters engaged in combat. They are required to choose roles—in the case of Counter-Strike they may be either terrorists or counterterrorists—and wage war against each other. The premise of Fortnite is that zombies have taken over the world; the player cannot choose to join them but rather must take a role and strategize to help destroy them. In both games the enemies have no humanity or personality but are simply objects to be destroyed. Since the enemies in Fortnite are zombies and therefore subhuman, or even counterhuman, one need not feel any moral guilt about annihilating them.
To understand the vast appeal of these games, I interviewed a small group of high school boys from various locations in California who attended a precollege summer event at my university. They affirmed what already seemed obvious: that the audience for these games tend to be middle-class males like themselves who often became hooked on video games during junior high school and found it an enormously time-consuming activity well into their college years. Though Fortnite is making an effort to lure female players by presenting images of strong and competent female figures in the games, the audience for war games is still mostly male. My informants said that some of their friends played these or similar games for at least six hours a day, every day of the week.
What did they like about them? I asked. Predictably, they said, “It’s fun.” Pressed to explain why young men like themselves would choose to spend a vast amount of solitary time playing war games to the exclusion of social interaction with family and friends, they said that it presented a clearly defined world, with sudden and unpredictable dangers that they could navigate and control. There were good guys and bad guys, and with luck the good guys won. And if not, there was always another game.
When I tried to probe into why the violent aspect of the games was appealing, the young men insisted that they didn’t think of the enemy as a person but as an object to be destroyed. Would the game be just as compelling if objects or abstract symbols replaced the images of people? No, they confessed, it would not. They “wanted to see blood.” Grudgingly they accepted the fact that part of the fun was vicarious violence. During the time that they were playing the game, all of the complexities of civility were removed. So was the patina of propriety. The game presented a social order of fearful chaos and suspenseful danger in which there were enemies and friends, and only by skill and close attention could they survive.
In a curious way, they felt, the world of these video games was a deeper and more honest presentation of social reality than they experienced in the niceties of orderly life. While playing the games they could act on their instincts, unchecked by civility, and be rewarded for their cunning. At their age, I recalled, the world of a high school student seemed precarious, with lots of unknowns and meaningless restraints. In the games they could navigate such a world with dexterity and freedom. And if it didn’t work out—well then, there was always another game.
Portrayals of warfare are also ubiquitous in literature and sometimes as adventurous and thrilling as in Fortnite, Counter-Strike, and Grand Theft Auto. But often not. The search for the truth about war is the main point of one of the most successful novels about warfare, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. The protagonist, Robert Jordan, is lured into joining the international cadre fighting the Fascist regime in the Spanish Civil War. At first it was like “taking part in a crusade,” Jordan recalls. Later he thinks his romantic enthusiasm for warfare to be “as difficult and embarrassing to speak about as a religious experience,” but he also insists that his involvement in it was indeed “authentic.” Much of the allure of warfare is being immersed in a total experience. “It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely,” Jordan recalls. It is a way of accepting the world and one’s role in it totally and without compromise, and it also offers a new community, a band of brothers that replaces the kinship network of family. In war, Jordan recalls, “you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it.”5
My interviews with former soldiers revealed thinking that was strikingly similar to Jordan’s in Hemingway’s fictional story. A former student who served several tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq told me that he cringed every time someone said to him, “Thank you for your service.” He explained, “We were only trying to survive, to protect each other.” He was an Army Ranger often placed in difficult battle situations manning a bazooka missile and at other times required to kick in doors and take villagers off for interrogation. Though he came to question the motives of the US military presence in the region, and later joined the movement of Veterans Against the War, he felt strangely attracted to the camaraderie of military life and admitted to me that if he had to do it over again—despite his feelings about US policy in the region—he would. He told me he never felt more alive than in war.
The hero in Hemingway’s novel experiences the same kind of fascination with war. Throughout the novel Jordan continually questions and reevaluates his understanding of war, and with this comes a loss of innocence. For Hemingway, war is a metaphor for the rough, beating heart of life, a terrible but honest appraisal of existence that always lies beneath the superficialities of the normal social order. To think about war is to think about the battle for survival, the meaninglessness of high-minded virtues, the withering barrage of assaults on the self—both physical and emotional––and the futility of struggle in the face of the ultimate victor, death. Jordan goes to war to fight for what he believes is a morally just cause—“a crusade”—but as the novel continues, his conception of a just cause is eroded. For much of the novel he is confused. He attempts to reconcile his romantic image of warfare with the gritty reality. Even the idea of an enemy seems pointless; he is faced with opponents who seem in many ways like himself, motivated ultimately not by a grand purpose but, like my former student who fought in Iraq, by the simple human will to survive.
The classic Hindu epic the Mahabharata also finds in the images of warfare insights about human existence. The Mahabharata has existed in the form that most people in India know it today for about two millennia. The other classic epic, the Ramayana, dates from about the same time. These great stories about Krishna and Rama, the two main avatars of the god Vishnu, are the mainstay of popular Hindu religiosity. Television series based on the epics have been among the most popular ever viewed in India; when the series were first aired, all traffic and commerce ceased during the Sunday evening hour when they were on. Even though the graphics were primitive and the acting melodramatic, the ancient stories were mesmerizing, showing the persistence of their narrative power.
Both of the epics are about warfare, grand warfare, often vividly portrayed in calendar art featuring the goriest of battles. Paintings in brilliant primary colors show arrows filling the air, blood spurting from wounded bodies, and severed limbs lying mangled on the ground. The god-heroes are spotless and gleaming, carried in golden chariots through the fray.
In the battles of the Mahabharata the combatants are divided into the good guys and the bad guys, as battles always are. Yet the struggle is not simply a Manichaean cosmic conflict between good and evil. The motif that runs through these mythic scenes of warfare is the theme of us versus them, the known versus the unknown. In the Bible and in the Ramayana, the enemies are often foreigners from the shady edges of known civilization, places like Canaan and Philistia in the Bible, and Lanka in the Ramayana. These foes often embody the conceptual murkiness of their origins; they represent what is chaotic and uncertain in the world, including those things that defy categorization altogether.
In the Mahabharata, however, war is waged between sets of cousins, though one set is portrayed as more honorable than the other. The idea of chaos is embodied not so much by an inhuman evil foe as by the battle itself. It is the wickedness of warfare that the battle depicts, as the mythic figure Arjuna observes at the outset of his encounter with Lord Krishna on the battlefield.6 To fight in such a circumstance is to assent to the disorder of this world, although the contestants know that in a grander sense this disorder is corrected by a cosmic order that is beyond killing and being killed.
Such is the message of Lord Krishna in his address to Arjuna at a critical moment of battle. Arjuna wonders aloud why he is going to war with his cousins. He knows that the outcome of the battle will be either his killing them or their killing him. Either way, it is a messy business. He wonders what the point of this could possibly be. As luck would have it, Arjuna’s chariot driver just happens to be Lord Krishna in disguise. He hears Arjuna’s plaintive questioning and gives an extensive reply—which we know as the Hindu scripture called “The Song of the Auspicious One,” the Bhagavad Gita.7
Krishna provides several answers to Arjuna’s question “Why war?” One is that there are roles in life for every kind of activity, and this lot has fallen to him. Another answer is that the soul survives even though the physical body may be destroyed, so death is not to be feared. The most interesting answer is one of the last: that in this life warfare is inevitable. One cannot avoid or escape it, as the ascetics in their mountain caves foolishly believe. Rather, to be in life is to be involved in the messiness of life’s struggles.
The Bhagavad Gita, From Whom the Bell Tolls, and popular games like Fortnite and Counter-Strike show that war gives clarity to situations of madness. They all portray life’s chaos, yet the depiction of this mortal messiness as battle gives it structure and meaning.
There may be no more eloquent statement of the terror and energy of warfare than Pablo Picasso’s mural depicting an episode in the Spanish Civil War that took place in the town of Guernica. What the painting Guernica says about war—in its silent screams, its broken daggers, its contorted horses, and its terrible illumination of light—is that war is indeed a kind of hell. It is everything that civil society is not. Where normal society offers understanding and accommodation of differences, war provides absolute enemies and either-or dichotomies. Where ordinary communities go to great lengths to protect life, blood in a time of war is cheap and readily spilled. Where civil order respects law and the familiarity of routine, the theaters of war are madhouses of confusion and desperate efforts to survive in the midst of massacre. War is the very antithesis of civilization. And yet Picasso’s riveting portrayal of this anti-order is itself a kind of order, a statement about the nature of this awful aspect of social reality.
Living with Chaos
The English word “war” comes from the Old English werra, which means “confusion” or “chaos” and is probably related to the old Saxon word werran, “to bring into confusion.” It is the basis of the French word for war, guerre. A related Old German word, wers, “mixture,” is behind the English word for extreme disorder, “worst.” Amusingly, it is also the basis for the German word for sausage, wurst, savory tubes that contain a mixed-up assortment of meats and other ingredients. War, like sausage, encompasses a mixed-up state of things.
It is interesting that the Germans themselves did not evolve a word for war based on werre. Instead, the Germans use krieg, based on another early word, one that means “striving,” a word with the same meaning as the Arabic jihad. The old Latin word for war, bellum, did not survive in common European usage probably because it sounds like the Italian word bella, “beautiful,” and there is very little beauty in war. The word bellum may have originated in an earlier word for bravery and may have been related more to a situation of battle than to a state of war. The various words for war reflect our diverse feelings about it. On the one hand it signals bravery and striving; on the other it portrays not just military actions but also the state of confusion that the word werra denotes.
One way of thinking about war is to see it as a way of imagining and struggling with chaos. War helps to make sense of chaos. This means that war is first and foremost an idea. It is war in the mind long before it is war in the finger on the trigger of a gun. Though war implies the threat of violence and justifies the use of it, war does not require violence. A society can be gripped with the mindset of war even when no military action is undertaken. One can have a warring attitude without ever firing a shot.
War—or rather the process of thinking in terms of warfare—begins with chaos, with the dark fear of uncertainty and confusion. The shocking images of the attack on the World Trade Center created such fear, but so did the slowly growing conviction that society was unraveling and no one was in control, as the Sunni Arabs observed in Iraq after the US invasion of their country. It starts with an attempt to make sense out of a senseless situation, something that deeply threatens one’s sense of order. By “deeply threatening,” I mean something capable of destroying meaning itself. War is the response to the perception of imminent danger, not just personal physical danger but an existential threat—the sense that even if one is not killed, an essential sense of identity and meaning will be lost.
In an interesting moment in my prison interviews with Mahmood Abouhalima, he recalled that he had turned to a jihadi perspective at a moment in his life when he felt that his “world was falling apart.” What he had in mind was not just what he regarded as the political oppression of the Mubarak regime in his native Egypt—a dictatorship that Abouhalima saw as propped up by the economic and military power of the United States—but also something more personal. After leaving Egypt and joining the Muslim resistance movement in Soviet-controlled Afghanistan and then living in the West—first in Germany and then in Brooklyn and Jersey City in the United States—he succumbed to the easy temptations of sex, alcohol, and drugs, he said, and adopted the superficial lifestyle that he imagined all Europeans and Americans inhabited. But then he renewed his faith in Islam. He told a parable popular in the Middle East to describe this return to religion. A lion that had been adopted by sheep did not realize that he wasn’t actually a lamb until one day at the water hole he saw his image reflected on the surface of the water and realized what he really was. “And that, Mr. Mark,” Abouhalima told me, “is what Islam showed me: that I’m not a lamb but a lion.”
It was not just Islam that Abouhalima had accepted, but the jihadi version of it. To be true to the faith meant not only accepting its tenets but engaging in the struggle with its enemies. That meant war, specifically war against the enemies of Islam, a category that included the United States. He heard this call to arms when he experienced a deep sense of fear about the loss of his own integrity and the uncertainty of the social order. It is true that individuals often have such feelings for a variety of personal reasons, but when others share this feeling that the social order is in danger of collapsing, it this can be the first step toward thinking that an alien enemy is behind the upheaval.
So war begins with a feeling. It is the anxiety that something is terribly wrong, not just in one’s personal life but in the wider world. It is the experience of a social anomaly—something out of place in the social order. More than that, it is a social anomaly that is personally threatening, that has the potential for total destruction on both individual and social-cultural levels. Abouhalima felt personally upset by what he perceived as political and social disarray in Egypt and the Middle East. Because the feeling that the “world was falling apart” had the potential to damage or even destroy his personal life, he experienced it as an emotional as well as a political problem. When individuals feel a rising sense of social fear, the experience is compounded by their interactions with friends and neighbors who confirm their own worst suspicions about the dangerous trends in the world around them. It is at this moment that the idea of war begins to make sense.
What happens next? Here is where the details in the notion of war began to evolve. It is one thing to feel fear, to sense that the world is going awry, and quite another to take the next step and understand the fearful chaos as part of a scenario of conflict. In the face of a hideous and deeply threatening reality, the idea of war is comforting. It comes as a moment of insight and a kind of mental relief. The image of war is the solution to a conceptual problem. It explains why terrible things are happening in the world.
Chris Hedges, a thoughtful American journalist, reflecting on his experiences as a war correspondent, writes that war is “a force that gives us meaning.”8 Hedges goes on to chronicle the horrors of the reality of war and concludes that war is seductive because it provides both intellectual and emotionally satisfying responses (however illusory) to difficult situations on both personal and social levels. As starkly different as this war world is from our own world, we recognize it in a haunted, fearful way. It is that aspect of reality that we usually do not want to confront or even admit into our consciousness. It is a world that all of us know exists only slightly out of our range of vision. But it is always there—a distant glimpse of the reality that ordinarily we would like to pretend is beyond our imagination. But imagine it we do, because we cannot deny its powerful existence. Every day reminds us of the untidy chaos that intervenes to contradict justice and law and the inevitability that our own realities will terminate in the mystery of death.
War is attractive, then, in an awful sort of way. It forces us to look at the blemished, fecal, decaying reality of life that we do not want to confront and yet do. It is appealing to think about because it presents an arresting image of a reality that we feel we must somehow try to understand, related to but ultimately different from our ordered lives. It also offers a way of domesticating those images, transferring them from horror to a reaffirmation of life; it portrays disorder in a form that confronts it, contains it, and ultimately hopes to destroy it.
This explains why images of war are fascinating and why we cannot turn away from them any more than we can avoid staring at a horrible traffic accident at the edge of the road. But it does not quite explain the appeal of actually undertaking warfare rather than simply dwelling on images of it. Why do we sometimes not only become engaged in the fantasy as individuals but actually participate in a shared social perception of war?
I would like to suggest that the process of thinking is the same. The same factors that conduce to making war appealing in one’s individual imagination are what make war collectively appealing in dealing with an intransigent social reality. In both cases the idea of war takes root in a disturbing awareness of deep disorder. War is a way of thinking about this chaos, giving it a dichotomous structured order, and imagining a way in which the confusion can be made clear and the demons of danger conquered. The only difference between symbolic war on an individual level and war embraced as a social attitude and as public policy is the level on which the angst of disorder is felt—whether it is a fear experienced in solitude or a threat shared by members of a social group. In either case, war is a way of dealing with something that profoundly challenges the foundations of our rational existence. This is why war, whether as a fantasy or as an actual military engagement, is an exercise of imagination. It is a way of thinking and living through chaos in order to break free from the fear that it will become an all-consuming fire.
Notes
1.Documents seized in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in which he was captured and killed in 2011 indicate that in 2002 there were 170 members of the movement. David Blair, “Secret Osama bin Laden Files Reveal al Qaeda Membership,” The Telegraph, May 3, 2012, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9243503/Secret-Osama-bin-Laden-files-reveal-al-Qaeda-membership.html.
2.Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002).
3.From my interview with Sheik Muhammad al-Kubaisi, deputy secretary general of the Association of Muslim Clergy, Baghdad, May 7, 2004.
4.This statement may be found on Counter-Strike (blog), http://blog.counter-strike.net/. Valve Software, a division of Sierra Software Corporation, owns the patent to Counter-Strike.
5.Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), chapter 18, 221.
6.Bhagavad Gita, chapter 1, verse 45.
7.Bhagavad Gita, chapter 2, verses 19–34.
8.Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (New York: Anchor Books, 2002).