LUDIC LOG

"This is not about oil. That was very clear. This is not about his father, or an attempt to show his manhood where his daddy didn't, or any of those silly suggestions that we're hearing among pundits. This is about America." -- (Sen. Bob Bennett, R-UT)

What is this all about, anyway? The State of the Union address has come and gone, and war now seems an absolute certainty. Troops are massing, plans are being drafted, and if American soldiers are not on Iraqi soil by Valentine's Day, I will send a box of candy apology hearts to the Department of Defense. And yet there seems, despite massive protests on the one side and desperate entreaties of support on the other, to be very little clarity in the minds of many as to why, exactly, the United States is poised to launch a huge assault on the nation of Iraq.

It seems self-evident that we cannot trust the administration to tell us the real reasons for the war. Every approach they have tried has proven to be an unconvincing flop, from the blatantly absurd claim that Iraq has affiliated itself with al-Q'aeda to the dubious notion that Iraq poses a threat to the United States (or anyone, for that matter), to the undoubtedly true but nonetheless shrug-inducing fact that Saddam Hussein is a bad man who does terrible things. The weapons-of-mass-destruction claim was a non-starter from day one, as evidenced by the fact that, since the nukes and bio-bombs have stubbornly failed to appear, the White House has gone out of its way to dismiss the inspectors' findings as of marginal relevance. Besides, no one seriously believes we have a problem with oppressive, evil governments having megadeath weapons; invasions of Pakistan, China, India and Israel are not thought to be in the works. Nor do we seem to be in any hurry to apply the logic that defiance of UN rulings constitutes grounds for military action against Israel or Indonesia or North Korea (or, for that matter, the United States, who defies UN rulings the way kids eat candy). In the end, the hawks are capable of no more solid a justification for war than Sen. Bennett's nebulous "this is about America" utterance.

Nor do the paid-for talking heads of the right seem to be winning converts the world over. The party line in that camp is that September 11th was our Pearl Harbor, and those who urge patience and diplomacy in Iraq are like those who would have sent Hitler a strongly worded letter deploring the fall of France. This has convinced no one; the link between Iraq and al-Q'aeda has not been made, and what's more, was not necessary in 1941, when the planes that rained death on America clearly bore the standard of Imperial Japan. By January of 1942, the Axis had already decimated most of Europe and forcibly seized the whole of the Pacific Rim; Iraq and al-Q'aeda, connected or not, has spent the intervening time since September of 2001 starving to death and hiding. The Greatest Generation talk is a wash when placed over the template of the war on terror, it seems.

But, neither does the rhetoric of the left have much power have much weight when it comes to explaining why we're off to war. Sen. Bennett, who is almost never right about anything, is right when he characterizes the claims that this war is some sort o exercise in paternal vengeance as "silly". It's the sort of armchair psychotherapy that many in the left are enamored of, but it's every bit as stupid as the armchair strategy of the right. The idea that this is little more than a high-stakes pissing contest, while slightly more sophisticated and accurate, is still an oversimplistic bit of half-educated psychology; it attempt to place a complex and multifaceted situation into a prefabricated box far too small to hold it.

And, as was the case in the last war, it's not about oil. To be fair, it's not not about oil; as the curiously public utterances of Colin Powell over the last week have made clear, we will be all too happy to remove the burden of all that crude from the oppressed people of Iraq. We may not be ready to rain destruction on the minarets of Baghdad just for oil -- if that was the only motivation, we'd be attacking Canada, Mexico and Saudi Arabia first -- but we'll be more than happy to get it. But as before, "blood for oil" is less a statement of fact or even a shorthand for the economics of war than it is pure sloganeering. It's not the truth; it's not even a particularly good summary of the truth. It's a chant, a phrase to put on t-shirts, a banner to march beneath.

So why are we going to war? As is often the case, the real truth is a horrible, sprawling, difficult mess. It's a tangle of history, diplomacy, economy and politics that may never be sorted out. Part of it is pure power politics; there is more than a sniff of simply wanting to establish exactly who is in charge around here, and exactly who it is that will decide what does and does not get done. Part of it is simply institutional stubornness; as with in many big businesses, a decision was simply made, and that decision will be carried out to its final conclusion, no matter how unwise it appears to be along the way. Part of it is a long-term American imperialism; the war will vouchsafe this and future administrations a number of useful foreign military bases, a precedent-setting justification for intervention, and a bloated defense budget. There are other factors, from the economic (oil, of course, as well as deficit spending and a sop to Bush's friends in the defense industry) to the social (a war is forever the cure for domestic social turmoil) to the political (a wartime leader is a popular leader). But there is no one simple one, not these, not any. Probably not even the administration knows with certainty why they're sending out the troops.

And that's too bad. Because if there's anything that deserves a simple explanation, it's a war.

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