The Boston Globe (pg. A15)
September 10, 2002

HD Op-Ed: LOOKING WAR IN THE FACE

UR http://www.precaution.org/lib/05/
looking_war_in_the_face.020910.htm

AU By James Carroll

September 11. The Heart-Wrenching Anniversary Deserves, Amid So Much
Else, An Urgent Meditation On The Subject Of War.

A nation at war, on the cusp of wider war, we are in danger of
defining ourselves by war entire -- all within the mystical aura of
this shattering date. Are we being true to what was laid bare a year
ago tomorrow? Do we rightly memorialize those who died so violently by
making them patrons of more violence?

War is not machines. War is not threats. War is not strategy, tactics,
martial music, or the proper source of a political party's advantage.
War is not a way of proving manhood. To say that war is hell, implying
a realm apart, is also wrong. Wars are fought no more in hell than
heaven. Wars are fought, alas, on earth. Those who carry its weight
are the last to know of war's transcendent meanings. They are deaf to
its music. Just war, unjust war -- all the same to them because they
are dead.

"As I look back over the five years of my service as secretary of war"
from 1940 to 1945, Henry L. Stimson wrote after World War II, "I see
too many stern and heart-rending decisions to be willing to pretend
that war is anything else than what it is. The face of war is the face
of death; death is an inevitable part of every order that a wartime
leader gives."

Do our wartime leaders know this today? The cavalier belligerence with
which President Bush and Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice speak of America's
impending war against Iraq raises the key question: Do they know that
death is about to become our nation's purpose? Deaths of soldiers.
Deaths of old men, women, and children. Deaths of Arabs, Americans,
perhaps Israelis. Deaths of the many who will die in consequential
violence of legitimized "preventive war."

Tomorrow the rebuilt Pentagon will be rededicated. The marvel of its
repair in one year recalls the greater marvel of its original
construction in 16 months, a feat supervised by Henry Stimson. But the
building was the least of his achievements, all of which were reduced
in the end to a vivid sense of the actuality of war. He had overseen
the entire US campaign with unflinching resolve -- even to the ordering
of its nuclear conclusion. Yet war reversed itself in him. The atomic
bombs, he wrote, "made it wholly clear that we must never have another
war. This is the lesson men and leaders everywhere must learn."

A year ago tomorrow the face of death stared back at America. For a
few moments, endlessly replayed, the horror of war was anything but
abstract. For months afterward, the individual faces of September's
lost men and women stared out from the newspaper pages that gave us
their names and stories. We felt a fitting rage aimed at their
murderers but knew also that rage can dishonor the dead by making them
faceless victims again. Named and mourned, the September dead were our
epiphany of war's actuality. The force of such death, real death, must
lead -- Stimson's lesson -- to the reversal of what causes it.

Did the world change a year ago? Claiming it did, Bush pursues war
more energetically than ever. Yet is that the sign of true change?
Secretary Stimson was certain that the world had changed in August
1945. For sure he had changed. In his last act as secretary of war, he
made a shocking proposal to President Truman. Thinking of the bomb he
had himself built and used, Stimson urged Truman to make an immediate
diplomatic approach to the Soviet Union, to avoid "a secret armament
race of a rather desperate character." The secretary wanted a US-USSR
covenant that would stop work on atomic weapons at once, impound
existing bombs, renounce future use, and openly share atomic research
for peaceful purposes.

All of this with the notoriously unreliable Stalin? Stimson
anticipated the objection. Before his service in World War II he had
been secretary of war (1911-13) when guns were primed for World War I
and secretary of state (1929-33) when Adolf Hitler came to power. "The
chief lesson I have learned in a long life," he told Truman, "is that
the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him."

Stimson's radical proposal was rejected, he retired a week later, and
the desperate arms race ensued. But the Stimson proposal stands as a
marker both of the road not taken at that crucial juncture and of the
road that yet remains open ahead of humanity. War is unnecessary
death, period. Once a leader has seen its true face, the resolution of
conflict by other means will be that leader's undying purpose. Henry
L. Stimson haunts our choices. He made his proposal on Sept. 11, 1945.