WAR AND ANTIWAR.(Vietnam War, 1959-1975)

A few days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, President Bush, during a visit to the still smoldering Pentagon, said that what was already called the "war on terror" would be "a different type of war"--different, presumably, from the two World Wars, different from Korea and Vietnam, different from the surrogate skirmishes in the Cold War's buffer zones, different from the Cold War itself, different from his father's war to expel Saddam Hussein's marauders from Kuwait. Four years later, many of Bush's (and others') expectations about the ensuing struggle have fallen by the wayside. But that one has proved right.

It is a different type of war. It's different because of the predominantly stateless, decentralized nature of the enemy, whose only columns are fifth columns, and because of the nature of the battlefront, which shifts week by week, minute by minute, from New York and London and Madrid to Bali and Tel Aviv and Baghdad. It's different in terms of the arsenals used to fight it, with language skills, coordinated intelligence, and body armor more useful--and in shorter supply--than the stealth bombers, nuclear submarines, and anti-ballistic missiles of the high-tech military industries. It's also different in that, unlike the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam, it is being fought not by conscript armies but by a professional standing army and, increasingly, by citizen soldiers from the state militias. Finally, it's a war whose burdens have been borne pretty much exclusively by volunteers in military service and their families, and, to a lesser extent, by the erstwhile beneficiaries of the shrinking federal safety net. The war's political managers have made absolutely no effort to create even a simulacrum of equal sacrifice, and 9/11 did nothing to change what has been from the beginning, and remains, the Bush Administration's top priority, not excluding fighting terrorism: the use of the tax code to transfer wealth to the rich and, especially, the superrich. Next week, even as the national debt grows by another $11 billion and military recruiters scramble with ever-mounting desperation to fill their quotas, the Senate will reassemble to take up the proposal, already passed by the House, to permanently eliminate the estate tax, thereby shifting some $1.5 billion a week--about the same as the Iraq war--from the public treasury to the bank accounts of the heirs to the nation's twenty thousand biggest fortunes.

Yes, it's a different type of war. But a lot depends on what the meaning of "it" is. In the nineteen-forties and, Korea notwithstanding, the nineteen-fifties, "it"--"the war"--was the Second World War. By the end of the nineteen-sixties, "the war" meant Vietnam. But what does "the war" mean now? Sometimes it means what the Administration styles the Global War on Terror, a metaphor that has occasionally discomfited some of its own officials. (This summer, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld floated "Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism"--a more accurate term, and less flattering to terrorists, which was immediately shot down by the President.) Sometimes it means the war in Iraq, which is or is not part of the larger struggle, depending on how (and when) one looks at it.

This ambiguity also makes for a different type of antiwar politics. The opposition to the Vietnam War relied on the active mobilization of masses of people--first tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, finally millions--and its demand was clear: Get out. Its Iraq counterpart, so far, is more rudimentary and, unlike its predecessor, almost completely without hostility to the military or illusions about the enemy. Not quite a movement, it is more a pyramid of complaint ...