Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated

by Gore Vidal

Overview

The United States has been engaged in what the great historian Charles A. Beard called "perpetual war for perpetual peace." The Federation of American Scientists has cataloged nearly 200 military incursions since 1945 in which the United States has been the aggressor. In a series of penetrating and alarming essays, whose centerpiece is a commentary on the events of September 11, 2001 (deemed too controversial to publish in this country until now) Gore Vidal challenges the comforting consensus following September 11th and goes back and draws connections to Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. He asks were these simply the acts of "evil-doers?"

"Gore Vidal is the master essayist of our age." -- Washington Post

"Our greatest living man of letters." -- Boston Globe

"Vidal's imagination of American politics is so powerful as to compel awe." -- Harold Bloom, The New York Review of Books

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781560254058
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	04/10/2002
Series:	Nation Books
Pages:	174
Sales rank:	366,482
Product dimensions:	7.68(w) x 10.88(h) x 0.49(d)
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

Gore Vidal is the author of twenty-two novels, five screenplays, more than two hundred essays, and a memoir. Winner of the National Book Award for United Sates: essays 1952-92, Vidal lives in Los Angeles.

Hometown:

La Rondinaia, a villa in Ravello, Italy; and Los Angeles, California

Date of Birth:

October 3, 1925

Place of Birth:

West Point, New York

Education:

Attended St. Albans. Graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, 1943. No college.

Interviews

An Interview with Gore Vidal

Barnes & Noble.com: How difficult was it to get this book published?

Gore Vidal: Very easy. But it was difficult in the post-9/11 hysteria to get a newspaper to publish a piece suggesting that both Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden (if either did what we have said he did) might have had what they considered, rightly or wrongly, good reasons for what they did. What kept my "Black Tuesday" piece from publication in the U.S. or U.K. press was the list that I give of several hundred unilateral military strikes we had made at Second and Third World countries in the last 50 years. As a result, we are widely hated both abroad and at home (by the so-called "patriot movement"). The sort of public domain information that I was releasing was like a clove of garlic to Dracula.

B&N.com: What's the basic message you're trying to get across?

GV: That the first law of physics has not been annulled; there is no action without reaction. You cannot attack other countries because they might one day prove hostile, or go Communist, or sell us drugs, and then not expect them to strike back. That is what a Moslem gang did on 9/11. They sent out a list of particulars as to why they did this, but our media and educational system are dedicated to never explaining to us why things happen other than "We are Good, they are Evil." This is simple-minded to the point of lunacy.

B&N.com: You criticize George W. Bush for his use of the word "evil" to categorize America's enemies. Many people would agree with that assessment, considering what they saw on 9/11. What's wrong with using that word?

GV: The Moslem response to our activities in the Middle East was indeed evil, just as our various strikes at them in a half dozen countries were also evil. Evil begets evil. What's wrong with that notion?

B&N.com: What do you think of his recent "axis of evil" comment?

GV: A mindless phrase. I was in World War II (my current critics are, for the most part, what we called "draft dodgers" back then, including "W"). Iran and Iraq are old enemies and form no axis. North Korea has nothing to do with either of them and has a good deal to do with its "enemy" South Korea (which was horrified by Bush's primitive war dance in front of Congress).

B&N.com: Do you think the American people will ever know the full story behind 9/11?

GV: Of course not. When I was in the Pacific, none of us could figure out why the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor. As I explain in my novel The Golden Age, we now know it was due to deliberate provocations by a hero (to me), FDR, in 1940. Eighty percent of the American people didn't want to fight Hitler, but FDR did -- he set in motion provocations that ended in their attack on Pearl Harbor. Our history books are silent, as always, as to why he did this. No one has yet confided to us why we were in Vietnam. The war's architect, Robert McNamara, not long ago confessed that he hadn't a clue. Why did we invade Panama and kidnap, try, and imprison Noriega? We said he was the master of all drug traffic. But the flow of drugs continues. So it goes.

B&N.com: Democrats are starting to criticize Bush on his handling of the war. How do you think a President Al Gore would have handled things?

GV: Sad to say, I don't think Prince Albert would have been much different from Bush. He might, however, have a better knowledge of what we have done to antagonize other nations and so be on his guard. He certainly would have punished the CIA and FBI for negligence in not warning us.

B&N.com: You had a correspondence with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. What was your take on him? GV: Very well read in political and constitutional history. He had gone to Waco, where the FBI was breaking every law in the book by using army weapons and methods against civilians (in defiance of the Posse Comitatus Act). This is best described in This Is Not an Assault by D. T. Hardy and Rex Kimball. McVeigh read a piece I wrote on the shredding of the Bill of Rights and started to write me. I include his letters, and my original piece, in the book.

B&N.com: Where do you think the war is headed?

GV: First, it is not a war because Bush says it is. A war can only happen between nations, and nothing is war for Americans until Congress has declared it -- which, thus far, has not happened. We should have gone after Al Queda the way that Italy went after the Mafia. Infiltration, bribes, arrests. It was never suggested that Italy bomb the city of Palermo, a Mafia center. But we bombed most of the Afghan cities, killing innocent people and harming very few of those Arabs who served Osama.

B&N.com: Do you think there will come a time when "the average American" will be more interested in a peaceful solution to the current crisis than a military one?

GV: I've never met an "average American," nor has anyone else. I do know the power of media to dis-inform and to demonize those the current government hates for reasons good or bad (wiretaps reveal that Nixon spent most of his time conspiring against his enemies and telling lies to the public). Americans, if one must generalize, believe in our minding our own business. We were against entry in WWI and WWII. Harry Truman finessed us into the Korean War, wrapped in a UN police action flag. Truman secretly backed South Vietnam. Eisenhower confessed that we could not allow the Vietnamese to hold nationwide elections because the Communists would win. Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon all kept the war fires burning, and we still don't know why it was fought. Domino effect? Thailand, a next-door neighbor, got rid of its Communists and continued happily as a Buddhist monarchy. Our attempts to wreck them were successfully resisted.

B&N.com: Will you be writing any further books on the current military crisis?

GV: If needed.

Introduction

It is a law of physics (still on the books when I last looked) that in nature there is no action without reaction. The same appears to be true in human nature ­ that is, history. In the last six years, two dates are apt to be remembered for longer than usual in the United States of Amnesia: April 19, 1995, when a much-decorated infantry soldier called Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 innocent men, women, and children. Why? McVeigh told us at eloquent length, but our rulers and their media preferred to depict him as a sadistic, crazed monster ­ not a good person like the rest of us ­ who had done it just for kicks. On September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden and his Islamic terrorist organization struck at Manhattan and the Pentagon. The Pentagon Junta in charge of our affairs programmed the president to tell us that Bin Laden was an "evildoer" who envied our goodness and wealth and freedom.

None of these explanations made much sense, but our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention, in McVeigh¹s case, our own. All we are left with are blurred covers of Time and Newsweek where monstrous figures from Hieronymous Bosch stare out at us, hellfire in their eyes, while the New York Times and its chorus of imitators spin complicated stories about mad Osama and cowardly McVeigh, thus convincing most Americans that only a couple of freaks would ever dare strike at a nation that sees itself as close to perfection as any human society can come. That our ruling junta might have seriously provoked McVeigh (a heartland American hero of the Gulf War) and Osama, a would-be Muslim Defender of the Faith, was never dealt with.

Things just happen out there in the American media, and we consumers don¹t need to be told the why of anything. Certainly those of us who are in the why-business have a difficult time getting through the corporate-sponsored American media, as I discovered when I tried to explain McVeigh in Vanity Fair, or when, since September 11, my attempts to get published have met with failure.

My own September 11 piece was subsequently published in Italian, in a book like this one. To everyone¹s astonishment it was an instant bestseller, and then translated into a dozen other languages. With both bin Laden and McVeigh, I thought it useful to describe the various provocations on our side that drove them to such terrible acts.

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
In a response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that is sure to raise eyebrows (not to mention blood pressure), novelist and historian Gore Vidal raises the little-asked question, "Did we get a taste of our own medicine?"

Vidal's position is that the U.S. has often done to other countries what Osama bin Laden is suspected of doing to us on 9/11:

…Since 1947 America has been the chief and pioneering perpetrator of "pre-emptive" state terror, exclusively in the Third World and thus widely dissembled…Washington has resorted to political assassinations, surrogate death squads, and unseemly freedom fighters (e.g. bin Laden).

As evidence for his claim that we've been doing what we claim our "evil" enemies have done to us (Vidal criticizes George W. Bush for what he calls simplistic "We are good, they are evil" statements), Vidal includes an eye-opening ten-page list of U.S. actions against what he terms the "enemy of the month club," ranging all the way from the Cold War to the recent actions in Kosovo and Bosnia.

Lest one think Vidal is merely anti-GOP, he also laces into former president Bill Clinton for signing the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which he says effectively gives the government unprecedented power to use the U.S. armed forces against the civilian population. At length, he criticizes the Branch Dividian raid in Waco by Clinton attorney general Janet Reno as government-sponsored murder of a group "living peaceably in their own compound."

A large part of the book is devoted to Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing. Vidal clearly feels that there was a rush to judgment by the government; it's his opinion that McVeigh is a scapegoat of sorts, a fall guy swiftly executed without a thorough enough investigation as to whether anyone else was involved. (Vidal corresponded with the convicted domestic terrorist for a brief period; McVeigh had written him a fan letter after reading one of his magazine pieces.)

No matter how one feels about terrorism, foreign or domestic, this is a book guaranteed to add to the noisy debate surrounding what is undoubtedly the most pressing issue of the day. (Nicholas Sinisi)

Nicholas Sinisi is the Barnes & Noble.com Current Events editor.

bn.com

In this collection of essays, noted novelist and critic Vidal turns his acerbic wit on the United States. Never shy about expressing his opinion, Vidal questions U.S. assumptions regarding the Oklahoma City and World Trade Center bombings: "That our ruling junta might have seriously provoked McVeigh and Osama was never dealt with." His critique of the coverage of September 11 is slim, mostly centering on already reported truisms about why many in the Muslim world sympathize in some way with Osama bin Laden. Some readers, however, will share his unease with the willingness on the part of the American government and the American people to put concerns for civil liberties on the back burner during the war on terrorism. Vidal's criticisms of McVeigh, with whom he struck up a correspondence and a relationship, is more detailed. In Vidal's view, it is unlikely that McVeigh was solely responsible for Oklahoma City, and he saw himself as a martyr for a libertarian cause that would rescue America. But in this book, the tone is as important as the text. Vidal gleefully skewers American capitalism and the role of the religious right in American politics at every opportunity. Critics of American policy and American life, as well as those prone to conspiracy theories, are likely to find a lot of fodder. Many will not be surprised that Vidal's views have not received a wider hearing a piece on McVeigh was rejected by Vanity Fair, another by the Nation but even at his most contrarian, Vidal's writing is powerful and graceful. (May) Forecast: Vidal's piece on September 11 appeared in a book that became a bestseller in Italy. Will it do the same here? Not likely, but the success of Noam Chomsky's 9-11 makes it clear that at least some readers are ready for an alternate view. They may also welcome A Just Response (reviewed on p. 69), a collection from the Nation. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In a piquant collection (originally published in Italy), Vidal (The Last Empire, 2001, etc.) asks readers to consider the forces that motivated Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden-and perhaps it wouldn't hurt to heed the beating the Bill of Rights has been taking recently. When President Bush ("a powerless Mikado ruled by a shogun vice president and his Pentagon warrior counselors") tells his public that the nation is embarking on a "very long war," a "secret war" against operators like bin Laden, who has been reduced to a Shakespearean motiveless malignity, warning bells should be heard. Citizens ought to wonder, Vidal suggests, how we got in such a fix. Have our actions in the Middle East been not only self-serving, but open to misinterpretation as well? Plain hypocritical? Should we give with one hand, take away with the other: support Saddam Hussein or bin Laden one day, vilify him the next? When "Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return" (Auden), is self-righteousness an option? As for McVeigh, does he bear witness to rage in the heartland? Is there a reason for the surge of militias? Has the destruction of the family farm anything to do with it? Have the trouncing of the Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments, the carte blanche given to the ATF/FBI/DEA/IRS to step on those rights, the abominations of Waco and Ruby Ridge, followed by the government's smug refusal to accept any culpability, at the very least boomeranged on their proclaimed intent? Deserves some thought by anyone with a shred of skepticism, thinks Vidal. He provides plenty of examples to sustain his shimmering abhorrence for current American politics (e.g., his contention that FBI Director Freeh was "placed" inhis job by Opus Dei). Challenging as ever, Vidal quotes Justice Brandeis: "If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for laws; it invites every man to become a law unto himself."

Kirkus Reviews