Morality of Missiles

It is the paradox of war: crime becomes punishment. It is the spectacular statement of a primitive instinct: to kill and die for another good day. The war is on, the second instalment of the American Rage Against the Evil, and the paradox is crying out from placards and parliaments, from op-ed pages and drawing rooms: the Empire terrorises, and the terror is larger than Iraq's. Every missile that falls on Baghdad seems to have a verbal equivalent elsewhere, away from the theatre of war, in the cosy realm of protest, in the sovereign republic of conscience-keeping. This war has not won the global popularity test; it has only the mandate of fear.

So what?

The engineer of fear is the last cause of the orphans of history.

Both genetically and culturally, it is a different war, and the force of it is a new morality-no matter how unconvincingly it is articulated by the Warrior in Chief in Washington. What matters is, after all, there is somebody-no matter how imperfect he is in his avatar as the leader, the only one, of the free world-to stand up, to call the brute's bluff. It is so easy, and morally comforting, to take refuge in the old stereotype: the selective morality of the cowboy, who slings the gun only for his own personal interest. Everything else, including his posture of happiness-hereafter, is a pretence. It is much more challenging and it requires the courage to defy conventional wisdom to go beyond the received wisdom of anti-Americanism-a redundant ism for all cultural purposes-and join the war, morally, yes.

Do you have any other choice in the world after September 11, 2001? That was not an American day of infamy. 9/11 was much more than America's tryst with the faceless terror of faith. It was the blazing performance of a value system, or a new, as new as the dark ages, idea of life. That idea-it may have lost the headquarters, but not the soldiers-fantasises an alternative universe where truth, the absolute truth, is written in the Book, and where eternal happiness is achieved by permanent subjugation, and where the infidel, me or you, is the enemy, the outcast, worthy of a morning ticket to inferno. In the glow of 9/11, we all looked American in our vulnerability, in our dispensability. The end of the Taliban, or Osama bin Laden's loss of his cave, has not brought in liberation or the end of war. Or the end of fear.

The engineer of fear is there in the bunker and the war is on him. Only geographically is it the second Gulf War; in its moral passions, it is the War Against Evil Part Two. Saddam Hussein, the picture perfect dictator, could not have avoided this war. He could have avoided it only by undoing himself. No dictator would do that-such an act of self-denial, the very antithesis of totalitarian temptations. The thug from Tikrit, the architect of what an exiled Iraqi writer calls the Republic of Fear, could not have done it any way. Dictators seek legitimacy in manufactured martyrdom and in stage-managed nationalism. The war against him, Saddam would like to believe, would make every war authored by him, within and without, acts of community service. He gassed his own people, built the biggest Arab gulag, pursued a secret weapons programme, invaded the tiny neighbour, defied the UN resolutions ... A world Saddamised was not fiction. It was an immediate possibility. This war is a moral rejoinder and let it not be from America alone.

It should not be in this world where the future clashes are going to be between the idealism of the threatened and the fantasy of the nihilist. This idealism has to become a national statement, a declaration of faith, the counter-faith of the civilised. To the fools on the left side of history, this may look like the barbarism of the postmodern empire. For them the Mesopotamian sadomasochist is the last hero, the last slogan, the last cause. Any way, they are known for mistaking the psychopaths of revolution for liberators. They have lost Pol Pot and gained Saddam and they protest on his behalf-the last protest of the orphans of history.

They have nothing at stake except the placard. It is not the case with people who live on the frontline of terror-or within terror, like Saddam's own subjects, his cannon fodder, the Iraqis. The nation that cares for itself cannot afford to wait for the despot's action to react. Pre-emption is the only way forward. And that is the first-and the last-resort of the morally responsible. In the just war, punishment is a necessary crime and it will have the mandate of history.

— with Anil Padmanabhan in New York