War On Our Minds

At the 2012 Academy Awards, the Oscar for best foreign film went to "A Separation." This category typically attracts some interest as it acknowledges geographic centers for filmmaking outside of Hollywood and brilliant filmmaking different from Hollywood. And because foreign films almost by definition contest the dominance of the American moviemaking machine, the category has a politics all its own. This year the winner was fraught with more politics than usual. Setting aside the controversy stirred up by the Iranian government when it trumpeted the award as a victory over Israel (film from Israel was also in the running) this moment allowed the film's director Asghar Farhadi to make a particular kind of plea.

In his acceptance speech he rejoiced with the Iranian people not merely for an award that they were proud to celebrate but also because "at the time when talk of war, intimidation and aggression is exchanged between politicians, the name of their country, Iran, is spoken here through her glorious culture. A rich and ancient culture," he concluded "that has been under heavy dust of politics. I proudly offer this honor to the people of my country, a people who respect all cultures and civilizations and despise hostility and resentment."

Talk and thought of war swirled around this moment. For at least three years now, Iran's nuclear program has come under increasingly intense scrutiny from Israel, the United States, and the IAEA. In a recent interview with the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, President Obama stated yet again, though perhaps more emphatically than before, that the United States has a clear position on the fate of Iran's nuclear ambitions: "I think both the Iranian and the Israeli governments recognize that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say," the President demanded.

What the American position will mean in practical terms of action is yet to be determined. Perhaps we could be thankful for that. For the element that often (at least to me) gets overwhelmed by the diplomacy and power politics of such moment is what Farhadi mentioned in his brief acceptance speech. Eschewing the governments involved in this stand-off, he spoke about the people who will be caught in the crossfire. While not mentioning the Israelis who could be targets of an Iranian arsenal, his point suggested that nuclear ambitions do not properly capture the culture of the Iranian people--a culture that would be militarized by international conflict.

I don't have any great insight into the diplomatic machinations that might bring resolution to this crisis. I do have some thoughts on the issue of the people who become collateral damage of those machinations. It is relatively easy to point to moments in which American leaders have allowed themselves to dream of an age of culture rather than war. Among the most famous, I think, are John F. Kennedy's speech at American University in June 1963, in which he declared:

So, let us not be blind to our differences--but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.

In a similar vein there is Ronald Reagan's speech of January 1984, a year after his notorious "evil empire speech" and, of course, in the year of his landslide victory in the presidential election. In this speech, dubbed the "Ivan and Anya" speech, Reagan mused about two couples--one Russian, the other American--meeting by chance and chatting, not about nuclear weapons or ideology, but about hobbies, jobs, and kids. "People want to raise their children in a world without fear and without war," Reagan said, "Their common interests cross all borders."

Idealistic? Yes, though Reagan nearly made good on his idealism when he proposed eliminating nuclear weapons all together. But in the moment, Reagan's dreaming suggested people, not political machinations, dictate decisions to act violently. Is there a way to consider both people and power?

In his Nobel Peace Prize address, President Obama declared his allegiance to the idea of just war theory as a way consider might and what is right. Indeed, in theory, just war establishes a test not merely the understand a theoretical concept of war, but to protect potential victims from real war. Stanley Hauerwas argues in his latest book, "War and the American Difference," that allegiance to just war theory almost always favors the theory over genuinely considering whether war is just. The reason for such equivocation is that we live in a world that assumes war is part of it and not the exception. It is easier to nod when a leader says, as Obama did, "we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes." Fair enough, so the next step is to figure out how to act violently without seeming to give ourselves over to violence. Therein lies the unfortunate recognition that we grow comfortable with the thought of war because we cannot think of a world without it.

But then we remember that people are involved. I think that is what happened to me when Farhadi stood before an audience in Los Angeles, California and spoke of culture rather than war. It reminded me of a moment that defined the end of the Cold War for me on a personal level. I was in Tula, Russia in the winter of 1992-1993 and my father and one of my younger sisters came to visit. I took them to the circus. Tula's circus was a bit shabby, but these were the days of rapid decline in Russia, and the audience (including my family and me) didn't mind. As we sat watching the show my dad grew quiet as the scene of children around us began to sink in. With tears in his eyes he turned to my sister and me and said that for his entire life he hadn't really imagined what the Cold War was until now. This city--these families--were targets of American missiles. Tula produced armaments, presumably built to kill Americans. But now as we sat in the dreary aftermath of the Soviet empire, we looked at children.

I don't expect President Obama and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to chat about Iranian family life; nor would I imagine the Iranian leaders are letting similar considerations dictate their discussions. But the public can be different. Conversations out here can imagine different channels of discourse. And so, I suppose it was only appropriate that such imagining took place on a stage honoring the heart of America's dreamland.

Marking Time through War

Mary Dudziak's new work on war and time resonates with me. For those unfamiliar with Dudziak's argument you can read about it in her new book "War Time" and in an excellent essay in the California Law Review entitled, "Law, War, and the History of Time," (2010). In brief, Dudziak argues that while we have traditionally assumed that wartime is a time of "exception" (ala Giorgio Agamben), for at least the last ten years it seems wartime has replaced peacetime. As she writes in the law review essay: "Viewing war as an exception to normal life, however, leads us to ignore the longstanding persistence of war."

I couldn't agree more. In a book that I have just completed, entitled "God and War" (due out in July 2012), I noticed and attempted to play upon references to time in the debate over how war shaped different versions of an American civil religion. What follows is a brief review of some of the more interesting comments I found about time and war.

In my introduction, I found it important to deal briefly with Randolph Bourne's warning that war was "the health of the state" because through war the state exercised its ultimate power to command sacrifice. What Bourne probably didn't imagine was that his country would enter a period of almost perpetual war. And thus, as war became a constant presence in American society, it also became something more than the political barometer Bourne suggested. I argue that war grew from a moment to reckon with immediately following America's atomic bombing of Japan (the photo above is from Hiroshima) to, in our time, a source of almost theological inspiration for the nation. Along the way, a variety of actors also considered how the idea of war had grown increasingly commonplace.

One of interesting debate emerged immediately after the end of World War II that questioned whether America was in a period that could accurately be considered "post" war. The folks who wanted to return to civilian life certainly thought so. Within ten months of the war ending in Europe, nearly 11 million men and women left the military. Yet, unlike in the time of war itself, in the postwar era the nation had to prevent attacks and rally Americans intellectually as much as economically and militarily. In other words, the postwar era required leaders to frame rhetorically the imperative to sacrifice in order to stave off another war--the use of war as a means of understanding time had not ended. Most Americans agreed that following the next world war there would be no need to name a new time of war--for that war would be the last.

If we jump to the president that perhaps did more than any other to incorporate war into American life we see an interesting tension. Dwight Eisenhower knew war intimately and believed that in order to stave of a real war, he needed to rally Americans through a rhetorical or, as I argue and others such as Will Inboden contend, a theological war. And so Ike made clear that America was in a time of war that demanded fealty to the national cause--he said in a public campaign called "Back to God," "there are no atheists in foxholes...in a time of test and trial, we instinctively turn to God for new courage and peace of mind." For Ike, the cold war made American into one large foxhole.

I argue that the nation remained in that foxhole for the rest of the cold war. Until, that is, Reagan's near death experience. Others will contest this view, but I agree with John Diggins's assessment that it was Reagan who first articulated that the cold war was over (or would soon be over) in a way that pushed a substantially different understanding of time in the postwar era. Obviously, Reagan used the cold war to support a brutal war in Latin America, but he also believed and seemed willing to act on perhaps his most famous and notorious statement: "We have it in our power to begin the world over again." A radical notion of time if ever there was one.

While the cold war did end, the idea that war continued to shape American life continued. As an organizing force that gave meaning amidst an "age of fracture," war became too impossible to imagine doing without. For Reagan's successors, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, war defined their time in office--for both, the lack of the cold war seemingly haunted them and the persistence of real war punctuated their lackluster time in office with moments of heroic pronouncements.

But the reliance on war struck theologian Stanley Hauerwas as dangerous. During the first Gulf War and crystallizing in the second, Hauerwas developed a critique of war that got at the way it began to replace any other organizing principle in American life. Among his most searing statements to this effect was one he made in a debate with Richard John Neuhaus (founder of the journal "First Things"). Hauerwas declared: "War names the time we send the youth to kill and die (maybe) in an effort to assure ourselves the lives war lead are worthy of such sacrifices...War makes clear we must believe in something even if we are not sure what that something is, except that it has something to do with the 'American way of life.'"

Does war have something to do with the American way of life? For Hauerwas, religious support of war meant that war, rather than Christology, replaced the central way to understanding meaning in "our time." Interestingly, it was Eisenhower who in his farewell address suggested the dangers that Hauerwas pounced on. Ike ended his presidency as he began it, using prayer to convey his hopes for the nation. In his final prayer as president, he counseled Americans that they needed to become comfortable with a new understanding of time. He could not see a time that when the world would be truly postwar, nor did he believe he could hasten the postwar period by resorting to war. And so he asked for patience so that "in the goodness of time" a postwar period might be realized.

Are we beginning to imagine such a period as America draws down in Iraq and Afghanistan? And what will the absence of war do to our collective and therefore abstract understanding of the nation?

In the coming weeks, I hope to look at the theology of war in different guises and with different observers, from soldiers to professors.