The end of debate?

Christian Century, Sept 11, 2002 by William C. Placher

In the midst of tragedy and horror, there came some good. In a time that often seems bereft of heroes, it was good to have heroes. Few will soon forget those firemen heading up the stairsteps as everyone else fled down. In a world so full of ambiguity, it felt oddly good to confront something as unambiguously evil as murder by hijacked plane. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan raised more complicated issues, but it is at least good to think that many of that country's people--certainly its women--now have a shot at a better life.

But now something really wrong seems to be emerging. Our government apparently plans to invade Iraq. The worst consequences of such an action would be the deaths of great numbers of Americans and Iraqis. But there would also be isolation from our allies, disruption of oil supplies, unpredictable changes in Middle Eastern balances of power, and yet more hatred of Americans.

Our leaders seem unable to describe what "success" would mean--what sort of Iraq and Middle East they aim to create, let alone how they will do it without engaging in the "nation-building" they keep rejecting in Afghanistan.

We move toward this potentially disastrous invasion virtually without public debate, as if we were no longer a democracy at all. Many of us feel unease or worse, but the newspapers report only occasional leaks from the secret planning process, as if it all had a kind of inevitability. Somehow--is this the idea?--we are supposed to stop arguing about such things after September 11.

If part of the legacy of September 11 turns out to be that our nation moves toward a terrible mistake without ever having been able to talk about it, then tragedy will have been piled on tragedy.