Americans, War Is the Answer

James Howard Kunstler’s frank talk on Iraq and the need for reshaping the American lifestyle.

James Howard Kunstler is a novelist and author of non-fiction books on the economic, social, psychological, and environmental consequences of suburban sprawl, including his most recent, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century (read an excerpt that appeared in Rolling Stone here). Publisher’s Weekly calls his work “slashing, fervent, practical, brilliant.”

The following is an excerpt of a speech given by Kunstler to the Peace Project in Providence, Rhode Island on December 8th, 2005.

...Is it grandiose to think that we can impose democratic government in foreign lands? Perhaps. But the other choice, now that we are there, would be to just set someone up in power picked by us – which would surely offend world opinion. Maybe we should just quit bragging and crowing about “freedom.” That would help.

Now, I really want to get down and be frank with you about this war. I think we have to be honest with ourselves and not get lost in fugues of paranoia or blaming or scapegoating.

Why did we go to Iraq? As a strategic matter – and this is terribly important because in the real world, strategic interests really do matter – we occupied Iraq in order to influence and moderate the behavior of Iraq’s immediate neighbors on both sides – Iran and Saudi Arabia – two of the most important oil producers in the world – as well as to gain direct control over the oil resources of Iraq, also a major oil producer – in short, to gain a major foothold in the region where two thirds of world’s remaining oil is so as to exercise some say over its allocation.

So, what happens now? My guess is that we will withdraw from the population centers of Iraq before much longer and maintain garrisons in the desert in order to continue our desperate project of moderating and influencing the behavior of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Anything can happen. The Saudi royal family might be overthrown. Do we then try to occupy Arabia?

Could we occupy more than one unfriendly nation at a time?

We don’t know what is going to happen. It may be that a titanic struggle over the world’s remaining oil supplies will commence and go on as far ahead as anyone can see.

We’ll find out.

But my reason for talking to you today is to give you a slightly different way of thinking about what it means to oppose this terrible prospect of war.

I don’t think you can be against the war as passionately as you are, and not also be against the way we live in this country. After all, we have more control over how we behave here than how other people behave in their nations.

It’s not enough to just be against the war. There is a lady in my town who drives a Ford Explorer with the bumper sticker that says “War is Not the Answer.” I keep telling her that war is the answer for her. If we want to keep living the easy motoring life, with the economy based on building evermore suburban sprawl, then war will be the answer – and we all ought to stop complaining about it.

We have to put more energy into opposing the suburban sprawl, car-dependent, oil-addicted life that makes these wars inevitable, and not just intellectually, but politically.

How did we let John Kerry off the hook last year for not even mentioning the restoration of the American railroad system?

Al Gore was briefed incessantly during the 1990s by the founding leaders of the New Urbanist movement about the necessity to reform land-use in America – to allow us to become less car-dependent and oil addicted – and to reform our laws to promote walkable communities and reinvestment in cities. And when Al Gore ran for president in 2000, he abandoned those ideas, to pander to the suburban homebuilders association and the masses of voters who identified themselves as suburbanites. Al Gore stepped away from leadership on these crucial issues. And progressives allowed him to do it.

Progressives have got to step up to leadership on these issues, because if we don’t start making other arrangements for daily life then reality is going negotiate it for us. We’ll be dragged into more war, and we’ll mount a foolish and futile defense of a way of life that has no future.

Leading sometimes means taking public opinion into territory it hasn’t been to before.

Where we have to get to in America is the re-localization of life and the restoration of economic communities on a scale different from the cheap oil age. It is a tremendous set of tasks, and just being against war is not enough. We have to put our shoulders to the wheel of rebuilding local community and local economy. We have to put our minds to the task, and our hearts into the effort. And if we can manage that, then we may come out of this as a land full of places worth caring about and a way of life that is worth defending.