Nietzsche and the Second Iraq War (Part I)

“Nowadays, when suffering is invariably quoted as the chief argument against existence, it might be well to recall the days when matters were judged from the opposite point of view; when people would not have missed for anything the pleasure of inflicting suffering, in which they saw a powerful agent, the principal inducement to living. By way of comfort to the milksops, I would also venture the suggestion that in those days pain did not hurt as much as it does today…. (It appears, in fact, that the curve of human susceptibility to pain drops abruptly the moment we go below the top layer of culture comprising ten thousand or ten million individuals. For my part, I am convinced that, compared with one night’s pain endured by a hysterical bluestocking, all the suffering of all the animals that have been used to date for scientific experiments is as nothing.)”

- Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Genealogy of Morals”

Does a nation feel pain in the same manner as a human being? We may as well shrug at the question, since none of us are nations and, as such, have no clue as to the nature and feeling of a nation’s subjectivity, assuming it has any in the first place. Strictly speaking, we don’t even know how another person’s pain feels. Yet we can plausibly infer, from certain outward signs—a bead of sweat, a whimper—that someone else is in pain. Perhaps we can infer the same regarding a nation by means of a two-fold comparison: on the one hand, between pain-inducing stimuli at the human level and distressing world events at the level of nations; and on the other hand, between the corresponding reactions of human beings and nations to these misfortunes. For us empiricists, whose sense of duty compels us to bear the twin chimeras of sobriety and prudence, the harvest of such an analogy will seem paltry—speculation, not knowledge; not even true belief. But for good or ill, speculation becomes our primary source of intellectual nourishment in times of pessimism and bad faith.

When we too-human creatures act in a way that brings us harm, we inevitably suffer a failure of nerve and shrink from the act in question when the pain we feel crosses a certain threshold. We might call this limit the “threshold of cowardice,” and define it more precisely as the point at which pain causes us to break the promise of success we have made to ourselves whenever we embark on a course of action. To the extent that a nation balks at an enterprise to which it has previously committed, let us say that such a nation is in pain and reacting to it in the same sensible fashion as other organisms committed to preserving themselves. In the case of the United States and the current war in Iraq, our government has not yet reneged in the face of pain; like a marathon runner who takes stride after quixotic stride despite the hysterical petitions for mercy flowing into his brain from every nerve cell in his body, the Bush administration “stays the course” in Iraq and gives no hint it will do otherwise. Yet American voters and taxpayers, the nerve cells of our own body politic, are firing off negative signals and demands for relief at the prospect of more American deaths, continuing international disapproval of American power, and the free-floating danger of Islamofascist terrorism. In a recent Gallup poll, only 38 percent of Americans thought the Iraq war was going well, with 60 percent believing that it was going poorly.

If we compare these numbers with the results of a March 2003 New York Times/CBS News poll, in which 55 percent of Americans supported invading Iraq with or without UN approval, we can see an astonishing dissipation in the will of the American public. There are, by all means, plenty of reasons to lose faith in the U.S.’s mission in Iraq: from sectarian violence to torture perpetrated by U.S. troops to the flight of Iraqi professionals to the campaign’s enormous price tag, the war has certainly brought the pain. But the icy fact is that, when it comes to the figure that matters most to the public as a measure of a war’s cost—namely, the number of troops killed—the Iraq war has taken a miniscule toll on the American populace compared to that wreaked by World War II and Vietnam. An article by Tim Heffernan in the March 19^th Village Voice lays out the numbers: during World War II, 16 million Americans served in the Armed Forces, 13 percent of the U.S. population at the time; 300,000 died in combat. During Vietnam, 9 million served, 4.5 percent of the population; 43,000 lost their lives. What are the figures for Iraq so far? 1 million Americans have served in the Armed Forces, a grand total of 0.4 percent of the population; of those, 2,322 and counting have died.

(to be continued)