February 25, 2003

When I first purchased the astonishedhead domain and set up the site, it had been a little over five months since a million tons of skyscraper and 2,600 American citizens hit the streets three blocks from my office. I attempted to fit that event into what passed for my existing worldview. The worldview broke. I first took that attempt--an essay--to Usenet, on September 13, 2001. In that essay, I wrote of America and its various despotic client states: "It is justice that ought to be our overwhelming interest, but it is not."

Since then, I have gained a new appreciation for the difference between the Ideal and the real, between up-in-the-clouds and down-in-the-muck. I have decided to believe that in order for America to be any sort of guarantor of liberty, no matter how imperfect, it must first be defended as a state, with borders and a citizenry, as opposed to as an ideal, made up of words and arguments. While I appreciate and sympathize with the struggle of the people of the Middle East as they seek to reconcile their religion and culture with the 21st century and with the real consequences of Western colonialism, I believe that we no longer have the luxury of letting them sort it out on their own, at their own pace. The consequences of the struggle within Islam to forge its modern identity are potentially catastrophic, and are unbound by geography.

Recently, there has been a tendency among many so-called "warmongers" (whom I count myself among) to give rhetorical primacy to the notion of liberating the Iraqi people and establishing democracy. Those are very real and very noble benefits but, to me, they are ancillary. It would be disingenuous for me to claim a sudden heartfelt concern for and moral obligation to the Iraqi people when--as has been pointed out elsewhere by critics both respectable and rabid alike--the Iraqis and other populations around the world have suffered with the full knowledge of the United States at various times with nary a peep of protest. I don't intend that to be a statement about a failure of moral principle, necessarily, it's just an observation. At this point in time, the interests of the Iraqi people and the American people happen to coincide rather neatly. I don't hold very many illusions about the moral imperatives driving the current administration which is, as it should be, concerned first and foremost with American welfare.

Iraq is one battle in a larger campaign, the goal of which is to eliminate the Middle East as a region of material and ideological succor for those who think it a fine idea to kill as many Americans as possible. If I trusted the governments of our "allies" in the region to rein in the more radical elements in their nations, I would be less keen on military intervention. But for well over two decades, the jackals of radical Islam have been nipping at the edges of America and of the West, either ignored or actively assisted by the governments of nations throughout the Middle East, many of whom were in turn coddled by American administrations. Enough is enough. I am simply unwilling to support soft approaches to this problem any longer. This doubtless has much to do with where I was on September 11.

I am just barely confident that this administration is taking a similar view. I don't share unbridled admiration for this administration with Andrew Sullivan. I'd prefer that my nation did not have to risk 200,000 troops, spend 200 billion dollars, and end Iraqi lives. Given the breadth and depth of the threat, I see no other choice.

It's taken me a long time--about a year, actually--to reach the point where I can cogently set such opinions down and be confident that, should the need arise, I can successfully defend my ideas, or accept instruction and correction if a better argument presents itself. After realizing that Usenet--many newsgroups on which are Wild West frontiers of anonymous opinion, heated, uninformed debate, and outright hostility--was an unsuitable forum, I decided to create a website of my own. I searched for a name. "Astonished Head" has been my New York Times online user ID for years, and my girlfriend suggested using that. Thus, astonishedhead.com was registered and paid for.

The Head, of course, is me. The source of my wonder and amazement, I have come to understand, is you. Not necessarily you, reading these words, right now, but the "Thou" of Martin Buber's I/Thou dichotomy. The Other, the Vast Outside that exists beyond the bounds of my skull and is the potential source of insular solipsism. For me, Buber's ideal--where the surrounding "It" is entirely transformed from an object of my experience into a dynamic "You" speaking to "me"--remains just that: an ideal. There is a vulnerability that comes with such availability, and for reasons found within my own psychology and society at large, such exchange constitutes risk. Total participation is not quite an option. And yet, through the medium of words, and of electronic information exchange, I often see a faint glimmer of the ideal. And that is astonishing. I have learned a great deal about people over the past year.

Not because I have made deep and meaningful personal connections--I do not believe that such connection is truly possible via pixels and bit packets and fiber optics. Instead, I have found that this peculiar methodology of interaction--writing my own words, and reading and commenting on the words of others--has resulted in a cutting away, a paring down to what I have started to think of as the roots of discourse. So many of the arguments found in this medium--the informed debate, the skirmishes of words--are just noise. Static, composed of facts and factoids, references and counter-references, driven by ego and other human needs. I find perpetual amazement on the part of one side in an argument that the other side refuses to See The Truth, and this is because the "truth" that is being so strenuously fought over is not really the truth at all, but is instead the finely parsed end product of an individual lifetime's worth of beliefs. This is something else that I have come to understand over the course of the past year.

So, when I see select photos of anti-war marchers holding signs that say, essentially, BUSH IS EVIL, I am now less inclined to defend Bush, and more inclined to wonder just what it is that this particular sign-bearer believes about evil as a moral and metaphysical concept. I wonder about this person's friends and associates, and I wonder about just what it is that this person most wants other people to believe about him or her. People very rarely project ideas about themselves that they find humiliating or belittling: so, I am forced to conclude that to such a sign-bearer, the need to be seen as moral in a particular way has some impact upon his or her sense of identity and self-worth. And that is where the astonishment comes in.

People will engage in the most peculiar behaviors and profess the strangest beliefs in the process of creating themselves as personalities. I know that I've certainly behaved in some strange ways and clung to some odd ideas in my time, and in my experience I have found this to be true for many other people as well. But if you try to interact with a person based solely on their behavior or their professed beliefs--which are, not coincidentally, the aspects of individual personality that are most visible on the Internet--the possibility of an "I/Thou" interaction is greatly diminished. Behaviors are not people. Beliefs are not people. So mocking the incoherent doofus with the BUSH=HITLER sign doesn't really accomplish anything--except, perhaps, the fulfillment of one's own need to be perceived as clever, or right-thinking, or what-have-you. Again, I've done this sort of thing in the past and sometimes still do so, and I've observed many other people doing it as well.

So, when I find a website that seems to consist solely of one person endlessly mocking the professed beliefs and behaviors of other people, I am amazed anew by their energy and inventiveness as they strive to create the projected images of themselves that they find to be most strengthening, and most pleasing to themselves and to others. Similarly, when I find a site dedicated to the extensive, fine parsing of facts and references in an effort to debunk one single, overarching principle or set of beliefs, I am impressed by the author's focus even as I wonder about his or her motivation. And, when I find that many so-called "pro-war" sites are making ample use of the "sake of the Iraqi people" argument, I appreciate the sophisticated strategy of co-opting their opponents' human rights-centered arguments as a means of bolstering their own, while remaining unsure of the true depth of their conviction.

I have no doubt that when I wrote, "It is justice that ought to be our overwhelming interest, but it is not" over a year and a half ago, I meant what I said. It expressed my feeling that our governments have been insufficiently attentive to the ideals of our founding. More than that, it was an indicator of a now-defunct belief of mine: that a pure devotion to an ideal was a kind of mystical trump card, which could somehow overcome the hatreds of others. Were this world something more akin to the City of God, then perhaps justice could be our overwhelming interest, even above security and survival. But the people of this world do not live in that perfect City. The people of this world--the oppressed and the free, the ignorant and the educated alike--seize upon those beliefs and behaviors that emphasize their most essential positive beliefs about themselves.

So when I write today of the elimination of "the Middle East as a region of material and ideological succor for those who think it a fine idea to kill as many Americans as possible," it is with the keen awareness that this "fine idea" is not held because it is shameful or evil. It is held because it is believed to be a source of strength, and consequently a good. An individual's need for a sense of self-worth and the need to project an image of that worthiness transcends culture, religion, race, and language. There is no genuine evil done in this world that is not believed to be a good--or, in the case of mental pathology, an overwhelming necessity--by those who do it. The waving of swords in mosques and the calling for jihad happens precisely because it is empowering to individuals, because it does lend strength to them, because it helps to alleviate their shame. Just as no argument based on facts or references can truly sway the committed ideologue, no "justice" doled out by a benevolent West can possibly satisfy the needs that are fulfilled by striking a blow at the perceived oppressor. This struggle is not about justice, and never has been. It is about people who have been "It"s for generations.

That being said, as a nation about to commit itself to a display of the technological violence which we have spent many decades perfecting, we must be keenly aware of the danger: that evil will become transformed into a good by our own limited perspective as a free people. In the course of righteously protecting ourselves by toppling a tyrannical regime, we will bring suffering. Twenty-four Global Positioning Satellites, tens of billions of dollars' worth of precision-guided munitions, and our military's commitment to minimizing civilian casualties notwithstanding, we will bring death to many innocents--how many, we won't know until it's all over. Those of us who support the war have deliberately made the moral calculus that balances their lives now against our own lives in the future, and against the lives of their children, and the lives of our children. This is why I cringed when the President of my country leaned casually on his podium during a speech to the nation and the world, nodded not just with satisfaction but with self-satisfaction, and said of the al-Qaeda dead in Afghanistan, "Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies." I was immediately reminded of his cavalier attitude towards his death row responsibilities as governor of Texas, and how he mocked Carla Faye Tucker's appeals for clemency. This may be a man whose style is more down-home than we're used to seeing in the Office. But I think that he's also a man who bears close scrutiny. All of us who support the war are putting a great deal of trust in him, both as a leader and as a human being. While the interests of American defense are paramount, this conflict represents that blurred boundary between the real and the Ideal: the morality of our nation's actions will not become fully visible until after we have acted, and will not become fully determined until we administrate the peace.

So although my opinion is that the interests of the Iraqi people are not paramount in the practical argument about whether to engage in battle, they become so when the argument shifts fully into the realm of moral consequence. If we achieve military victory in Iraq, but create a situation where the only viable option for achieving individual worth remains the slaughter of Americans and personal satisfaction in that slaughter, then we have failed. If we achieve military victory in Iraq but do not pursue the further battles required to bring a sea change upon the entire Middle East, we have failed. It is only by snatching the rarified idea of America as Oppressor from the air and grinding it into the dust of the Arabian Peninsula that we can begin to solve this problem. Justice cannot be our overwhelming interest in the region; the world is too imperfect for that. But we must not pretend that we are fighting an "It." We are engaging many "Thous."

If we neglect that truth...we will fail.