Bush's
War Against Evil
By James Carroll
Boston Globe
10 July, 2003
In the gothic splendor of
the National Cathedral, that liturgy of trauma, George W. Bush made
the most stirring - and ominous - declaration of his presidency. It
was Sept. 14, 2001. ''Just three days removed from these events,'' he
said, ''Americans do not yet have ''the distance of history.'' But our
responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks
and rid the world of evil.''
The statement fell on the ears of most Americans, perhaps, as mere rhetoric
of the high pulpit, but as the distance of history lengthens, events
show that in those few words the president redefined his raison d'etre
and that of the nation - nothing less than to ''rid the world of evil.''
The unprecedented initiatives taken from Washington in the last two
years are incomprehensible except in the context of this purpose.
President Bush, one sees
now, meant exactly what he said. Something entirely new, for Americans,
at least, is animating their government. The greatest power the earth
has ever seen is now expressly mobilized against the world's most ancient
mystery. What human beings have proven incapable of doing ever before,
George W. Bush has taken on as his personal mission, aiming to accomplish
it in one election cycle, two at most.
What the president may not
know is that the worst manifestations of evil have been the blowback
of efforts to be rid of it. If one can refer to the personification
of evil, Satan's great trick consists in turning the fierce energy of
such purification back upon itself. Across the distance of history,
the most noble ambition has invariably led to the most ignoble deeds.
This is because the certitude of nobility overrides the moral qualm
that adheres to less transcendent enterprises. The record of this deadly
paradox is written in the full range of literature, from Sophocles to
Fyodor Dostoyevski to Ursula K. LeGuin, each of whom raises the perennial
question: What is permitted to be done in the name of ''ridding the
world of evil''?
Is lying allowed? Torture?
The killing of children? Or, less drastic, the militarization of civil
society? The launching of dubious wars? But wars are never dubious at
their launchings. The recognition of complexity - moral as well as martial
- comes only with ''the distance of history,'' and it is that perspective
that has begun to press itself upon the American conscience now.
Having forthrightly set out
to rid the world of evil, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, has the
United States, willy-nilly, become an instrument of evil? Lying (weapons
of mass deception). Torture (if only by US surrogates). The killing
of children (''collaterally,'' but inevitably). The vulgarization of
patriotism (last week's orgy of bunting). The imposition of chaos (and
calling it freedom). The destruction of alliances (''First Iraq, then
France''). The invitation to other nations to behave in like fashion
(Goodbye, Chechnya). The inexorable escalation (''Bring 'em on!'').
The made-in-Washington pantheon of mythologized enemies (first Osama,
now Saddam). The transmutation of ordinary young Americans (into dead
heroes). How does all of this, or any of it, ''rid the world of evil''?
Which brings us back to that
Gothic cathedral of a question: What is evil anyway? Is it the impulse
only of tyrants? Of enemies alone? Or is it tied to the personal entitlement
onto which America, too, hangs its bunting? Is evil the thing, perhaps,
that forever inclines human beings to believe that they are themselves
untouched by it? Moral maturity, mellowed across the distance of history,
begins in the acknowledgement that evil, whatever its primal source,
resides, like a virus in its niche, in the human self. There is no ridding
the world of evil for the simple fact that, shy of history's end, there
is no ridding the self of it.
But there's the problem with
President Bush. It is not the moral immaturity of the texts he reads.
Like his callow statement in the National Cathedral, they are written
by someone else. When the president speaks, unscripted, from his own
moral center, what shows itself is a bottomless void.
To address concerns about
the savage violence engulfing ''postwar'' Iraq with a cocksure ''Bring
`em on!'' as he did last week, is to display an absence of imagination
shocking in a man of such authority. It showed a lack of capacity to
identify either with enraged Iraqis who must rise to such a taunt or
with young GIs who must now answer for it. Even in relationship to his
own soldiers, there is nothing at the core of this man but visceral
meanness.
No human being with a minimal
self-knowledge could speak of evil as he does, but there is no self-knowledge
without a self. Even this short ''distance of history'' shows George
W. Bush to be, in that sense, the selfless president, which is not a
compliment. It's a warning.
This story ran on page A19
of the Boston Globe on 7/8/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.