Terror and cowardice

About what?

About eliminating the Iraqi military presence. It was like a turkey shoot they said. There's something very admirable about the fact that we couldn't just wipe them out. At the same point, that failure on our part to finish the business was looked at as weakness and the end result of that weakness is that more Americans die and more Muslims die than would have died if we'd just finished it then. In other words, it takes courage not just to stand and be shot at, but to shoot.

You're saying that not only would we have removed a potential threat, but we would also have communicated something to other parties.

We would have gained the advantage of having people understand that we were willing to do what it takes to defend ourselves. It's ugly business. I'm not saying, "Rah, rah, rah! Go kill tons of Iraqis!" but at some point I feel that more people are going to wind up dying because we didn't do it. There's all kinds of unfairnesses in war. That's what it is: massive unfairness. What are you going to do, say, "We're Western. We believe in the dignity of each individual life," and as a result we're not going to do what it takes to protect ourselves? It's stark, raving mad. First we have to secure our own life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

At the time we didn't necessarily think of it as protecting ourselves. When it came to life and limb, we thought of ourselves as being pretty secure. Wasn't the falsity of that sense of security the thing the Sept. 11 attacks were meant to communicate to us?

There were a lot of people who asked at the time [of the Gulf War] what was the point of what we were doing if we're going to call it off before we finished. Unless the point was just to get that oil back.

Maybe that's all it was.

Maybe it was.

What about the argument that further military action would simply have further inflamed militant groups in the Middle East?

I think anti-American sentiment will be there no matter what. At least they would have respected us. You see, they have contempt for us.

Do you base that on examples from past conflicts that you studied while working on your courage book?

You can just draw on your day-to-day experience of when you have respect for your foe and when you basically believe your foe will never do what it takes, that you never have to fear him. We've gotten to the point where we're thought of as objects of contempt by tough, warrior-minded people -- like certain Islamic fundamentalists, for example. We're not willing for even one troop to die before we'll leave Somalia. We aren't willing to die anymore, for anything. And when they sense that, they have nothing but contempt for us and will not believe any threats we make. I take it as the decline of our virtue that we can somehow see 6,000 of our citizens blown up and start to make excuses for the people who blew us up instead of first defending ourselves, and getting them back so they don't do it again. I don't want to have too much understanding for the guy who rapes my daughter.

But there is something to be said for not lashing out unthinkingly in a way that makes the situation even worse.

I think that sometimes we have to not be so rational. Sometimes it's more important for moral purposes to punch back and not worry about whether we're making more of a mess.

You're contradicting yourself. You're saying now that sometimes for moral purposes it's right to act without considering the consequences, but when we made a moral decision not to take out the Iraqi military at the end of the Gulf War without considering the consequences, you disapprove.

So, I mix utilitarianism with my vengefulness! Actually, my utilitarianism was in service of my vengefulness in that Gulf War example.

The constant is your belief in vengeance. Which probably explains why you started out your academic career studying Icelandic sagas.

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