The Mother of All Battles

Right on schedule, the "Mother of All Battles" began at 7 p.m. EST on January 16th in the Persian Gulf, as I knew it would. That evening my wife and I were lost in downtown Baltimore as we circled around and around on the same one-way streets trying to get to the Peabody Court Hotel, which I saw several times in the distance as we passed it by yet again. We were to attend an awards banquet at which a friend was being honored. Around 5:30 p.m., as I was cursing the city planners and all their progeny, I had a stark premonition. I realized the war would start that evening and that someone would make an announcement during the banquet, exactly at 7 p.m. And that's precisely how it happened. The woman sitting to my left burst into tears, bubbling all over her cheeks. My wife teared too, more discreetly. The grief was instant and palatable, and someone remarked this would be a moment like President Kennedy's assassination in which we would forever remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news.

This made the 200th time in 215 years of nationhood that the United States was involved in a military conflict. Lots of tears and barges full of grief, and many moments etched in memory.

The Iraqis apparently thought this particular load of tears and grief to be special, so they christened it "The Mother Of All Battles," even renaming Baghdad Radio "The Mother Of All Battles Radio." I wonder, when the next generation of battles erupts in the Middle East will the Iraqis look back on this one as the "Grandmother of All Battles?" Probably not, it doesn't have quite the same Madison Avenue chest-beating pizzazz somehow.

It's often said that truth is the first casualty of war. Actually, that skips a step in the logical sequence. The first casualty of war is always language; and it's the distortion of the honest meanings of words which is the rust eating away at the truth. We all remember the Vietnam War's contributions to the genre: pacification meant obliteration, and the resounding classic which will endure for all time "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."

In the "Mother Of All Battles" the corrosive of choice is high tech words which seem almost gentele in their studied neutrality. We do not drop bombs on people, we conduct "air sorties," which can be precisely quantified like the results of some en vitro lab experiment, using the language of mathematics to further disinfect our thoughts. Here's another quantification which is more telling: every ten hours the Allied Forces dropped the equivalent of the Hiroshima atomic bomb on the citizens of Iraq. Isn't it amazing what difference a few words make.

When U.S Central Forces Commander, General "Stormin' Norman" Schwarzkopf, announced the first deaths of American ground troops during his regularly scheduled press conference, we almost didn't notice his casual mention of 11 KIAs amid the visual wonders of his bomb sight videos, and it almost didn't register that KIAs meant "killed in action." I did notice, almost subliminally, that the General was decked-out in standard "chocolate chip cookie" camouflage fatigues as he addressed the press from the ____Hotel in Riyadh. It wasn't clear just who or what the General needed camouflage from as he strode the air-conditioned corridors, sinking into the plush carpets of the ______'s banquet rooms. I know the 600 journalists accredited to Saudi Arabia sometimes looked like a pack of braying hounds to any normal person, but if the General's intention was to hide from the hounds, the fatigues would be a virtual advertisement among the business suits and robes and corded kaffiyehs in the lobby of the ____. But what the heck, it looked great on TV.

Our instruments of horror, terror and death are "precision surgical devices" with "pinpoint accuracy" and are even "smart." The other guy's instruments of horror, terror and death are "crude weapons of terror" of "no military value" and are even "dirty." The Iraqis are not yet as suave at this game as we are. Our missiles are "Cruise Missiles" and "Patriots" while theirs are "Scuds." Even the Iraqis' own name for their Scuds, the El Hussein and the El Abbas, betray a hayseed's concern for vanity over real propaganda savvy.

And we don't seem to be intent on killing people, we just "attack targets," we "attrit their assets", we " --------- , and on and on. Sometimes the naked truth slips out. During World War II Admiral William F. "Bull" Halsey had a large sign placed on the bow of the Navy cruiser Honolulu which read simply: "KILL JAPS. KILL JAPS. KILL MORE JAPS."

I wonder: if one of our "precision surgical devices" blows you to pieces, will the precision of this event please you somehow; does it yield an "honorable death," as contrasted with the sordid death you will suffer if a Scud missiles lands nearby? Only from some sufficiently abstract, high in the sky perspective can we make these fine distinctions. The boom and searing heat and pulverizing concussion felt down on the sand is indistinguishable, whether produced by a smart laser guided Cruise Missile or by a dumb Scud. We need to remember this from time to time, just to keep a hand in contact with reality.

Yes, the first casualty of war is always language. The next casualty is usually God. God, of course, is always on everyone's side. It's incredible how routinely we insult God with this suggestion that God is an interested combatant in every war ever fought. In the Islamic World this is even a tenant of the religious catechism, codified in the idea of the jihad, the holy war. In the West we are too cool to talk about a "holy war," preferring instead to philosophize over the criteria necessary for a "just war." In the West, the just war must meet six criteria: it must spring from a Just Cause; it must be waged by Competent Authorities; it must be propelled by Right Intentions; it must be a Last Resort; there must be a Probability of Success; and the Proportions of things must be right, which means that more good than harm results. In the East, things are simpler: if you are a believer, then your war is holy. This only causes trouble when the other guy is a believer too. It was indeed an irony of the first waters to witness the eight year war between Iran and Iraq, as one jihad battled with another. How is the believer to make sense of this? That God, some kidder, huh.

The Iraqis even went so far as to have the tricolor Iraqi flag modified by having the battle cry Allahu akbar (God Is Great) sewn into the middle of the flag. And of course, one of the first things the leaders of both countries want to do is ensure their official photographers get plenty of shots of the leaders at prayer. The cultural trappings vary, but the subconscious message is unmistakable.

The standard shot of Hussein was taken a few months before the war broke out and it shows him kneeling on a prayer rug, half-bowing toward Mecca, dressed in combat fatigues, with a 45 caliber pistol in the holster strapped to his side. That's a little too blatant for Western sensibilities. The official White House photograph of President Bush shows him praying during a church service at Camp David in the first weeks of the war. The President's head is bowed, his eyes closed, the Episcopalian hymnal on his lap. His glasses are dangling between the fingers of his left hand and his right hand rests against his chin; a modest, pensive demeanor suffuses the scene, careful Protestant piety suggested by every gesture. Just the right moment sought by the photographer who must have been hovering in the next pew.

President Bush also summoned Billy Graham to the White House for prayer and consolation on the eve of the war, and summoned the nation to a Day of Prayer during the first weekend in February. All of which is fine, although I hope the President has a more mature understanding of the nature of prayer as a spiritual instrument than is suggested by the usual "official actions."

Generally, we pray for various outcomes we desire to see. Some simple prayers are for our loved ones to be safe, or for the war to "end quickly." Less wholesome ones involve petitioning the Lord to bring us victory in battle. Although we prefer not to think it through too clearly, what "victory" really means is: "Lord, help us kill lots of the enemy real fast and easy so we break their spirit so much they are defeated." It is obscene, and blasphemous in the truest sense of the term, to pray for such things. And beyond that, it betrays a terrible muddle about the nature of prayer and its relationship to our spiritual life.

Prayer is never about producing outcomes in the world. Prayer is about changing us, about altering our interiors. We pray that we may be transformed, not that the world may be changed. Prayer is a tool for altering our inner chemistry to bring us more in harmony with the will of God, and less obsessed with channeling events according to our will. The world is transformed when we succeed in transforming ourselves, and when the radiance of our inner condition resonates in our worldly actions and inspires all those who come in contact with us.

I highly advise prayer in times of war, because war is so traumatic it will almost certainly topple our inner balance, closing our hearts, clouding our vision and blocking us from communion with God. We need prayer to help offset this tendency. But prayer is always about changing our inner condition, not about changing our outer world.

So God and our spiritual lives are almost always the second casualties of war. We need to step out of the habitual reactivity surrounding these matters and try to rise to a little more clarity from time to time, to preserve our spiritual health.