One of the great lessons of the Vietnam War is that a nation of people opposed to a foreign war can actually constrain & eventually halt that conflict. Unfortunately, one of the other lessons of that war is that this process takes time. Between the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident on 4 August 1964 and the day when the last Huey pulled the final refugees off of the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon in April, 1975, eleven years, over 50,000 American & millions of Vietnamese lives were wasted. The current regime in Washington doesn’t know much about history books, but it does know that a “surgical strike” campaign, a war that can be measured in months or even weeks, is politically feasible.

Today was the day that Laura Bush originally set aside to invite a few poets to the White House to discuss Whitman, Hughes & Dickinson under the banner of ”Poetry and The American Voice.” This event won’t happen because one of the invited poets, Sam Hamill, turned out to be a conservative only in his aesthetics. Hamill, as concerned as any American about the impending disaster, sent out an email to some friends:

I am asking every poet to speak up for the conscience of our country and lend his or her name to our petition against this war, and to make February 12 a day of Poetry Against the War. We will compile an anthology of protest to be presented to the White House on that afternoon.

That email spread like a computer virus, replicating over & over again until virtually every poet in the country must have received it at least once. I know that I stopped counting the copies I received when it got into double digits.

Somewhere along the way, somebody – it would interesting to know just who – thought to let Ms. Bush know of this impending anthology & the event was cancelled, generating several articles in the media. As it turned out, the poet laureates of both Canada and the United States weighed in against the war. Todd Swift’s ad-hoc antiwar anthologies got some media attention that they almost certainly would not otherwise have received. Editorial writers generally took the line that “poets will be poets,” which, condescending as it certainly is, at least acknowledges the historic opposition to war & brutality that many – but by no means all – poets have shown over the years. Even less surprisingly, writers who function professionally as right wing commentators, such as Roger Kimball & J. Bottum, both invited to the cancelled soiree, weighed in to scold their peers for a lack of manners, a curious way to balance the impolite bombing of the citizens of Iraq whose only crime is to have failed to oust a brutal & murderous dictator.

Since then, there have been plenty of opportunities for second-guessing. Hamill’s website has reminded everyone of what they knew all along – he’s really a conservative as a poet, even if he does oppose the war. His “chapbook” in fact reflects an establishmentarian poetics that wants more than anything to retain its role as just that. Others have suggested that attending the event & making a scene there might have generated even more media attention to the rapid arrival of a wide-spread & popular opposition to Bush’s war. I’m a skeptic on that one myself. I think that Hamill’s email took on a life of its own precisely because there is such widespread opposition.

But what concerns me is not the usual – & ultimately petty – divisions between traditions of poetry. I am experiencing emotions that I suspect many Germans must have felt in the late 1930s: my government is about to rain death onto the world in great quantity. The legitimate safety of the nation in which I live, one ostensible reason for this, can only be damaged by any invasion of Iraq. The other reasons for an invasion – ranging from the importance of upholding UN resolutions to Iraqi connections to al Qaeda – all fall into the categories of dubious to laughable. The history of the Soviet Union has demonstrated that containment works against far stronger foes than Saddam Hussein.

Which leaves only one plausible rationale for sending troops into Iraq: the liberation of the Iraqi people. I’m certainly sympathetic to that argument & can understand why left intellectuals from Ellen Willis to Salman Rushdie could be persuaded of the need for force to oust a genuinely barbaric dictator. But I have two problems with this argument itself – first is a rather long list of other nations that would, by logic, then force us to engage. Hussein may be the worst of a bad lot, but he is hardly alone. The second is that, from an Iraqi perspective, the last nation on earth I would to become an involuntary protectorate of would be the United States.

Far from “helping to spread democracy” to other Middle-Eastern states, the Bush strategy is a recipe for long-term destabilization of an entire region, stretching from sub-Saharan Africa and extending to the western provinces of China & the Philippine  archipelago. And, as should be apparent to anyone in the post-September 11^th world, destabilization abroad can have profound consequences at home as well. Any attempt to stretch our military dominance over such a vast terrain – one that includes or touches at least four nuclear states – would require a transformation of the American economy toward a fortress America prepared for permanent conflict. It is no accident that no nation in history has been able to sustain an empire – the costs far outweigh any riches reaped.

What can be done to halt this disaster before it occurs? Short of a massive general strike in the United States, virtually nothing. The present regime has already demonstrated that it will not listen to the majority – that isn’t how it got into office, nor an impulse it has had even for one day since taking power. Further, it has subsequently consolidated power in all three branches of federal government.

Poets need to continue to speak out, to demonstrate to the world the absolute lack of consensus the actions of this regime have, to point to the hypocrisies & to call attention to all of the various new threats on democracy and justice that emanate from the axis of evil situated between Crawford, Texas, and the White House. But nobody, poets most of all, should be deluded into thinking that this by itself constitutes effective action.

The problem that poets have is one that we share with all progressives – the forces who promote this conflict have dramatically reorganized & transformed themselves since the 1960s. Progressives continue to use the same tools that took so very long to work four decades ago that millions died needlessly. Unless & until we can transform that imbalance, more to the American Voice than just poetry will continue to go unheard.