I am still struggling to understand what is happening with the Iraq crisis, & how to respond; I haven't come to conclusions yet. But I want to speculate & think out loud a little here tonight, in Providence, where 8 inches of snow fell this afternoon, & my wife & I shoveled the sidewalk around the Church of the Redeemer (across the street).

I'm beginning to think that perhaps what we are witnessing in government councils & at the U.N. is not the working of international relations, but something approaching, perhaps reaching, their breakdown. & I can't simply assign blame - like some of the self-righteous moralists on the left & in the peace movement do; like some of the self-righteous moralists among the fundamentalist Islamists do; like some of the self-righteous moralists in the Bush Administration & its supporters do.

Perhaps it is a breakdown impelled in part by the failure of incommensurate discourses - ways of thinking - to connect, to communicate. & perhaps one of the causes of this failure to communicate is an inability to articulate. & perhaps one of the root causes of this failure to articulate is that the parties on both sides have unacknowledged mixed motives, which result in uncontrollable mixed messages.

What are these mixed motives? On both sides - on the side of Western, secular democracy & its enforcing power, the US - as well as on the side of conservative, fundamentalist Islam, its allies, supporters, & soldiers - there is a blending of the ideal & the real. The ideal, for both, is characterized in different languages & different constellations of value, which rarely connect; the real, for both, includes a basic struggle for power, domination, prestige, victory - a rivalry, an agon between the two. Thus the US insists it is the world's peacemaker, applying "overwhelming force" to police & protect the civilized world; yet this overwhelming force is also, inevitably, convenient for the achievement of more narrow, selfish interests; and just as inevitably, the idealistic claims of the US are suspected of hypocrisy by the rest of the world. Thus the Islamic fundamentalist claims access to transcendent, absolute, divine value : which absolutism happens, conveniently, to be his most powerful weapon - because it allows him everything in the way of strategies & tactics against the infidel - there are no limits to the carnage he can inflict, there are no limits to his fantasies of the Caliphate & its dominion, because his faith is the ultimate weapon - the ultimate sanction for his will to power. On the side of the secular world of nations, the undertone is realpolitik; on the side of the religious world of Islamic fundamentalism, the overtone is - realpolitik. Yet the language of their ideals - a global Caliphate ruled by Islamic law on the one hand, a global association of free happy co-operating nations on the other - these languages are utterly different.

Is there a solution to this dilemma - which is pressing us all toward the breakdown of international relations & violence on a massive scale? I think that somehow, some of us must step back - step to one side - engage both sides from a position of analysis & mediation. Rather than instantly politicizing & aggravating the situation further by strident ideological condemnations, perhaps we need to try to analyze dispassionately - treat both sides as, in a sense, SICK rather than EVIL. We need to engage the parties as patients rather than allies or enemies. (I admit this sounds like a fantasy as well!)

Whether or not the US goes to war against Iraq, this dilemma of conflicting & incommensurate discourses & goals will remain. Police action & military force alone will never uproot Islamic fundamentalism; nor will American global military supremacy bring about the freedom & equality it claims as its ideals. By the same token, terrorism will never achieve the global Caliphate, nor will the ideals of Islamic law & tradition justify the massacre of infidels & the denial of freedom.

What might bring peace to these warring rivals is a mediating discourse which sets limits to the absolutism underlying both sides - the doctrinaire tendencies which act as a counterweight to the hidden & unacknowledged contradictions - the hypocrisies of ideologies, driven as they are by their claims both to absolute, ideal value on the one hand, & to secular power, efficacy & hegemony, on the other. This is perhaps the essence of absolutism: to claim to join ideal & real, heaven & earth - to the distinct advantage of the claimant.

This would have to be a discourse - a dialogue, a conversation - about the nature of the Good. For Americans, it would have to consider how it would be possible to achieve a world community of nations without domination, hegemony, empire, self-interested power, realpolitik, inequality, injustice, fear, & militarism. This is a very necessary conversation, because it is clear that the means & methods given priority by the current Administration - ie., overwhelming military might - are insufficient & often counter-productive to achieving this goal. For Islamists, it would have to consider how one justifies a theology & theogony which allows for absolutism, authoritarianism, rigid theocratic legalism, and the massacre of "infidels". How are these practices in any way a reflection of a divine nature or reality? Isn't a theology - or ideology - which justifies such practices merely the flimsy disguise of a ruthless hunger for power & prestige - perhaps even an envy of the power & prestige flaunted by the representative infidel nation?

What then is the Good, and how in this imperfect mortal world are we to aim for it? This is the conversation which free people need to undertake, in order to drown out the rabid absolutisms, the will to power, the disregard for human life, the narrow realpolitic of power & self-interest - all those behaviors which are all too often displayed by secular nations & religious collectives alike. By using such a term as "the Good" I don't mean to allude to any particular philosophical method or tradition; I am simply speculating, at this point, that such a term or something like it might serve as a focus for the examination I have outlined. I am thinking about an international conversation, across the borders of nations & faiths. I don't think it begins with those who are quick to condemn either the Bush administration for seeking to create peace & security through military & political dominion, or, on the other hand, those who are quick to discount the discourse of religious tradition, which seeks to restore some sense of wholeness, dignity & self-determination to a region & a culture. (This is in no way meant as a justification of authoritarian fundamentalism, terrorism, or aggressive, militaristic realpolitik; nor is it an attempt to equate, morally or in any other way, the main antagonists. It is an attempt to emphasize the incommensurability of their language & goals, and the necessity to address that disjunction with means other than force, violence & war. Nor are these speculations an attempt to pass implicit judgement on the immediate details of the crisis at hand, which, as I said at the beginning of this, I don't feel at this point I am capable of doing.)