Book review - An Enduring Condition: On War Time
"war is not an exception to normal peacetime, but instead an enduring condition.”
Mary Dudziak’s new book, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences, is a crucial document. Dudziak, a legal historian at the University of Southern California, argues that we are experiencing “not a time without war, but instead a time in which war does not bother everyday Americans.” Her smooth foray into legal and political history reveals that in not just the past decade but the past century, wartime has become a more or less permanent feature of the American experience, though we fail to recognize it. She doesn’t say so explicitly, but we are experiencing a reverse Orwellian situation, in which the state, rather than elevating war to perpetuate itself, obscures war to perpetuate itself.
Dudziak assembles an intellectual Rubik’s Cube, playing with ideas of time, law, killing and politics, and arranging them into a pattern that all but eliminates the distinctions we long assumed to have existed between war and peace. “We tend to believe that there are two kinds of time, wartime and peacetime, and history consists of moving from one kind of time to the next,” she writes. “Built into the very essence of our idea of wartime is the assumption that war is temporary…. When we look at the full time line of American military conflicts, however, including the ‘small wars’ and the so-called forgotten wars, there are not many years of peacetime. This shows us that war is not an exception to normal peacetime, but instead an enduring condition.”
For a country that considers itself an enlightened force for progress, a belief invoked with particular frequency in this election season, it seems odd to suggest at this moment of post-9/11 drawdown that the nation is, as ever, a Sparta at arms with soldiers, tanks, drones, nukes, spooks, hackers and every other method and manner of combat. But early in her book, Dudziak pre-empts this response by playing a visual trump card of sorts. The Defense Department has awarded combat medals for conflicts of the twentieth century in which soldiers served. The medals were plotted in a timeline by John E. Strandberg and Roger James Bender in their book The Call of Duty (2005), and Dudziak puts them into a user-friendly chart. The big wars of the twentieth century are of course represented in the timeline - World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam and Kuwait - but so too are smaller conflicts, from Abyssinia and Bocas del Toro to Nicaragua, Mexico, Mayaguez, Grenada, Lebanon, El Salvador and Bosnia. In almost every year of the last century, American soldiers served in a conflict that qualified for a combat medal. The military criteria for wartime, Dudziak notes, “swallow much of American history.”...
World War II was a classic war in the sense of rationing, of drives for war bonds, of a draft the elite could not avoid with college deferments (here’s looking at you, Dick Cheney) and of a ceaseless drumbeat in almost every sector of society that a great conflict was being fought that required great sacrifices of everyone. Even for families spared the loss of a loved one overseas, World War II was a visible—intentionally visible—aspect of life in the homeland; the nation’s leaders made it so. It was a conflict that required total support, and the sacrifices civilians had to make could not be obscured. Life as it was before the war had to be suspended.
The blurring of the difference between wartime and peacetime truly got under way with the cold war. A crucial oddity of the chart of combat medals in Dudziak’s book is that one of the biggest wars of the century is absent from it. Although a cold war medal was proposed in Congress as recently as 2007, it has not been approved and likely never will be. Dudziak suggests a teaching moment was missed. “The Cold War’s ambiguity might have signaled that the conventional categories no longer fit—that wartime and peacetime coexisted or had merged together,” she writes. Her chapter on the cold war offers an intellectual frame for understanding our post-9/11 condition...
http://www.thenation.com/article/167805/enduring-condition-war-time
Mary Dudziak’s new book, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences, is a crucial document. Dudziak, a legal historian at the University of Southern California, argues that we are experiencing “not a time without war, but instead a time in which war does not bother everyday Americans.” Her smooth foray into legal and political history reveals that in not just the past decade but the past century, wartime has become a more or less permanent feature of the American experience, though we fail to recognize it. She doesn’t say so explicitly, but we are experiencing a reverse Orwellian situation, in which the state, rather than elevating war to perpetuate itself, obscures war to perpetuate itself.
Dudziak assembles an intellectual Rubik’s Cube, playing with ideas of time, law, killing and politics, and arranging them into a pattern that all but eliminates the distinctions we long assumed to have existed between war and peace. “We tend to believe that there are two kinds of time, wartime and peacetime, and history consists of moving from one kind of time to the next,” she writes. “Built into the very essence of our idea of wartime is the assumption that war is temporary…. When we look at the full time line of American military conflicts, however, including the ‘small wars’ and the so-called forgotten wars, there are not many years of peacetime. This shows us that war is not an exception to normal peacetime, but instead an enduring condition.”
For a country that considers itself an enlightened force for progress, a belief invoked with particular frequency in this election season, it seems odd to suggest at this moment of post-9/11 drawdown that the nation is, as ever, a Sparta at arms with soldiers, tanks, drones, nukes, spooks, hackers and every other method and manner of combat. But early in her book, Dudziak pre-empts this response by playing a visual trump card of sorts. The Defense Department has awarded combat medals for conflicts of the twentieth century in which soldiers served. The medals were plotted in a timeline by John E. Strandberg and Roger James Bender in their book The Call of Duty (2005), and Dudziak puts them into a user-friendly chart. The big wars of the twentieth century are of course represented in the timeline - World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam and Kuwait - but so too are smaller conflicts, from Abyssinia and Bocas del Toro to Nicaragua, Mexico, Mayaguez, Grenada, Lebanon, El Salvador and Bosnia. In almost every year of the last century, American soldiers served in a conflict that qualified for a combat medal. The military criteria for wartime, Dudziak notes, “swallow much of American history.”...
World War II was a classic war in the sense of rationing, of drives for war bonds, of a draft the elite could not avoid with college deferments (here’s looking at you, Dick Cheney) and of a ceaseless drumbeat in almost every sector of society that a great conflict was being fought that required great sacrifices of everyone. Even for families spared the loss of a loved one overseas, World War II was a visible—intentionally visible—aspect of life in the homeland; the nation’s leaders made it so. It was a conflict that required total support, and the sacrifices civilians had to make could not be obscured. Life as it was before the war had to be suspended.
The blurring of the difference between wartime and peacetime truly got under way with the cold war. A crucial oddity of the chart of combat medals in Dudziak’s book is that one of the biggest wars of the century is absent from it. Although a cold war medal was proposed in Congress as recently as 2007, it has not been approved and likely never will be. Dudziak suggests a teaching moment was missed. “The Cold War’s ambiguity might have signaled that the conventional categories no longer fit—that wartime and peacetime coexisted or had merged together,” she writes. Her chapter on the cold war offers an intellectual frame for understanding our post-9/11 condition...
http://www.thenation.com/article/167805/enduring-condition-war-time
