The Tissue-Industrial Complex

An old friend, Rebecca Skloot, has the (fascinating) cover story in today’s New York Times Magazine, Taking the Least of You.

Last week journalist Seymour M. Hersh caused a stir in a New Yorker article in which he said the Bush administration was drawing up targeting plans for air strikes on Iran’s nuclear plants and other strategic targets. Hersh said U.S. Special Forces were already operating covertly in Iran, and that the administration refused to take a nuclear “bunker buster” strike off the table. I learned about the New Yorker piece from fantasy writer Jeff Ford (14theditch), who had an interesting post about it in LiveJournal.

(And by the way, if you’re not familiar with Jeff’s work, I highly recommend you stop reading this drivel immediately and go buy a copy of The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant and Other Stories. His new book, The Empire of Ice Cream, is just out this month.)

In any case, I believe Hersh: he was right about the non-existent WMDs in Iraq; about the administration’s push for war there; and about the abuses at Abu Ghraib. But there’s nothing surprising about Hersh’s article—many nations, including the U.S., maintain war plans for even the most remote contingencies. Thousands of American, Russian and Chinese ICBMs are targeted on major cities and strategic targets. That’s in peacetime. Our government would be remiss in not having plans, even military plans, to deal with an emerging Iranian nuclear weapons capability. In the hands of any other administration, such war plans would still be cause for grave concern, but not terrifying. Deterrence works only if other nations can’t be sure whether the U.S. will use nuclear weapons in response to an attack with WMDs. (And that is terrifying, but it’s not a logic unique to the Bush administration.) “Messianic” and “legacy” are the words Hersh reports hearing most frequently in connection with the president’s military adventures in Iraq and Iran.

Of the many things about the Hersh article that worries me, exhibit one is the current administration’s incompetence in Iraq and Afghanistan. The latter, though less in the public eye than Iraq, is rapidly devolving back to a medieval theocracy, over which the Taliban and various warlords are fighting for control. The government under Hamid Karzai is only a nominal impediment to the ambitions of these warring factions. As bad as Afghanistan is, Iraq is worse. The U.S. military controls only the ground it stands on, and barely that. Outside the U.S. circle of power—most of the populated areas of the country—the lives of ordinary Iraqis are becoming more nasty, brutish, and short each day. And this, don’t forget, is the administration’s signature effort.

Iran’s population is more than two-and-a-half times larger than Iraq’s; its area almost four times that of Iraq’s, and has an economy almost six times as large. If an invasion of Iraq was a debacle, given this administration’s track record, an attack on Iran would be global catastrophe.

It’s hard to know how seriously to take Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s bellicose rhetoric, but it seems obvious that if the U.S. attacks, even with “surgical” airstrikes, Iran will have little incentive not to launch attacks against the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States.

The question becomes what do we do then? More air strikes? Do we bomb Tehran into rubble? I don’t think the administration would launch a nuclear attack in response to terrorist attacks by Iran, even on U.S. soil, but with 125,000 troops in Iraq, we don’t have a lot of other options. For that matter, even with a fresh army and no commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, an Iranian ground war would be a terrible gamble. I don’t know if it could generate a world war, but a U.S. attack on Iran would certainly further inflame Muslim sentiment against us. How many people would we have to kill or subjugate to “win”?

Perhaps worst of all, there may be no good response to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Not every problem has a solution. What’s truly terrifying is that this administration is demonstrably unequipped, intellectually and morally, to make these high-stakes decisions. The president and his allies in Congress have bungled every major initiative they’ve launched.

As I said in Jeff’s blog, it wouldn’t surprise me if Hersh is right, if the president’s finger is on the trigger, and the military is already sending teams into Iran. Such a posture is entirely consistent with the administration’s reflexive reliance on military force, completely unhitched from any concern for the consequences. Even some of the neocons are caviling at this fight, and when your recklessness can scare that cadre of ideological stoners, you know you’ve achieved a perfect level of irrationality.

Perhaps the most troubling thing about the way this administration conducts foreign policy is that it has taken most Americans (neocon operatives and right-wing barking heads included), so long to be troubled by it, and that more than 30 percent of the public still supports the president’s war in Iraq. (I find the Thomas Friedman hawks most repellent of all: their cry is “We wanted a war, but GOSH! not this war!”)

Decent, honorable people can contemplate, and carry out, horrible acts in the service of what they hope is a higher good. Roosevelt and his generals ordered an unprecedented slaughter of civilians in bomber campaigns against German and Japanese cities, in the belief they were doing so for a greater good. It’s a horrible burden for the decision makers and the warriors to live with. George McGovern was a bomber pilot the 8th Air Force, flying 35 combat missions over Europe in World War II. He was disgusted by the violence and carnage, though convinced of its necessity at the time, and ran his failed presidential campaign largely in opposition to the Vietnam War. In several conversations about war and its practitioners, Rick Bowes and I have noted that the most reflexively bellicose individuals are often the ones who’ve never heard a shot fired in anger, or had to live with the guilt of having killed another human being.

(Richard Bowes, by the way, is another fantasy writer with whom you should be acquainted: his book Minions of the Moon, is transcendent.)

And that lack of awareness, finally, is the most damning indictment of the Bush administration. Aside from the president’s cosmetic turn as a Texas Air National Guard pilot, none of the top officials in his administration have ever served in uniform, and the president himself only did so to obtain a safe perch on which to avoid the Vietnam war. That’s not to say that only former combatants can make informed, humane decisions about war, but administration officials’ scrupulous avoidance of combat certainly casts a long shadow over their decision to send thousands of Americans to die, and to cause the deaths of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis—the vast majority of whom are non-combatants.

The President of the United States is an elephant in a roomful of mice, some of whom he’s sworn to protect; others he’d like to protect if he could; and some he’d kill immediately, given the chance. But the position carries so much power that every move the president makes, not just military decisions, kills some mice. Institute a minor rule change at the Department of Health and Human Services, and its a statistical certainty that someone will die as a result. Announce an economic program to boost development in Louisiana, and it’s a given that someone, somewhere will suffer from unintended consequences. Launch a war against a foreign country, and no matter how just the cause, you can be sure thousands of innocents will die, and tens of thousands more plunged into chaos and misery.

You would think that five years of bearing such inhuman responsibility would sober any person, but not the president, apparently, nor his top advisors. Having made the gravest possible choice in Iraq with catastrophic results, the administration appears poised to repeat its mistakes in Iran. As the president thunders around the room in search of his legacy, all the mice can do is try to scamper out of the way.

My novelette, “From Wayfield, From Malagasy,” has been accepted by Analog Science Fiction & Fact, publication date to be determined. This novelette is an honest-to-god spaceship on an alien planet story—a little outside the soft-science/hard-fantasy reservation I generally roam. Here’s a snippet:

Wayfield stood in the torrential rain, trying to wall off his feelings of despondency behind a professionally somber expression. He didn’t think he was making a very good job of it. One of his officers read the traditional verse for the departed souls of Greene, Durban and Mansourian, committing them forever to deep space. Though the ship had grounded, the verse was fitting, since the crewmembers’ bones would be forever entombed in the lethally radioactive hull of the Malagasy.