RESPONSE:

Hey, Bill Moyers: We're Not in Kansas Anymore

However, Mr. Moyer's characterization of this foreign policy priority as a "war," and his inclination that rebellions against the established order--our own imposed order, in the case of Iraq--is adequately called "terrorism," is falling into the trap set by the chicken hawks at the Pentagon, and is allowing the language to be perverted through oversimplification and fuzzy logic.

It is not at all helpful in getting at the root of problems that seem oddly to have moved so far to the front stage as to blur our vision of the dark background scenery. The pot seems to be boiling with an intensity accelerated by overblown rhetoric. Even Condoleeza Rice in her testimony before the 9-11 Commission today made an elliptical reference to "root causes"; but, in her case, it is no doubt the justification for preemption and preventative wars. In other words, getting at the root just means beating the enemy to the punch.

The comparison to World War II, which Mr. Moyers remembers well (with all its attendant sacrifices--I can remember complaining about the sugar shortage ) is not the appropriate analogue to what we are doing in Iraq--it is Vietnam. We are into pacifying villages again, lord help us. And anyone who speaks out against our war will be accused of playing into the hands of the enemy. There are plenty still out there that still think we would have won in Vietnam if it weren't for Jane Fonda (a/k/a Hanoi Jane ).

It is an endless war we face now--"perpetual war for perpetual peace," as Gore Vidal so succinctly put it, and even wrote a book so titled.

In the '60's it was still the plague of the worldwide communist monolith that played the boogeyman for our nightmares; now it is Islamic jihad that bedevils our sleepless nights.

Well, worldwide communism turned out to be a myth--a convenient excuse to prolong the lucrative militarization that accompanied the Cold War of the second half of the twentieth century. Islamic jihad will serve the purpose now, presumably well into the first half of the 21st century. Meanwhile, the real villains, the non-mythological ones, are largely ignored as they stalk the earth just outside our attention span and politics of convenience. They are the demons of poverty in the midst of plenty, greed on an unprecedented scale, disease in the midst of evident cures, environmental devastation, injustices, inequalities, and prejudice--and the beat goes on.

So, with all due respect to Mr. Moyers, we are not in Kansas anymore, we are not fighting the last good war, and, anyway, there was always a wizard behind the curtain playing the game of grand illusions.

Dr. Rice said, "We will remain at war until the terrorist threat to our nation is ended." Given the Bush administration's definition of terrorism, the only way this war will ever be over is if we no longer exist as a nation.