The war has begun.
That is a sentence that will come to mean less as time goes on. We can’t really say that “the war” wasn’t going on yesterday, since the United States has been bombing Iraq at intervals ever since the “end” of the first Gulf War. And of course we are already at war in Afghanistan, a situation that is unlikely to change any time soon. We are, in fact, permanently at war as a matter of government policy. We’ll have to find a new way to distinguish days like today, from days like yesterday.
George W. Bush, firmly convinced that he has God on his side, is on a crusade to rewrite the map of the Middle East, with a new United States colony as its centerpiece. He is unconcerned that a clear majority of the UN Security Council opposes the war. As Henry David Thoreau pointed out, “Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.”
After Iraq, the permanent war will seek and find further victims, at home and abroad. This, in the bizarre parlance of the Bush administration, is “working for peace.” In the coming months we will redouble our efforts to state the obvious: that the Bush administration needs war, that capitalism needs war, and that is why we are at war.