Books
What is it good for?
BY Jeff Parker May 07, 2008 16:05
Editor Stephen Elliott’s slim political pamphlet Where to Invade Next (McSweeney’s, 96 pages, $16) begins with a quote by General Wesley Clark describing US government plans from 2001 to “take out seven countries in five years.”
Where to Invade Next is essentially an imagined recreation of that document, a bullet-pointed satirical romp through the case for why the US must get its war on and get its war on right now with Iran, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Syria, Sudan and North Korea.
Written by authors Jason Roberts, Eric Martin and Andrew Altschul, plus a team of 20 researchers, the book’s chapters are broken into sections labelled Introduction, Threat Overview, Possible Measures and Conclusion with abstracts at the beginning that lay out each case in a few simple declarations.
What’s most striking about the book is its rhetorical design, which is compelling in its subtlety. For example, the conclusion to the North Korea chapter: “Kim Jong-il is the most dangerous man living today, erratic and without remorse. The safety of the United States and its friends across the globe requires that his life be taken.”
It’s in-depth enough to tackle some of the real nuance of geopolitical relationships while being digestible enough for a quick brush-up on pro-war propaganda on the way out the door to a macrobiotic dinner party with peacenik friends.
The book starts as a straight-faced parody, but halfway through, when it becomes clear it’s meant to be a fictional representation of governmental policy in the most dutiful sense, I was hard-pressed not to skim the rest of the way with the conflicted regard one has for a laborious textbook on a subject of great personal interest.
It makes the point that while the justifications and rationalizations for war are often tidy and neat and supported by popular narratives of the time (such as the biological weapons programs in Iraq circa 2003), war itself in no way follows a tidy storyline. So, the book appears to argue, we must treat the justifications and rationalizations for it as just that.
Nonetheless, the decision to stick close to the objectives of its source material may ultimately have dulled the point. I wonder if the authors could have written as persuasive an argument to invade, say, Canada or the Commonwealth of the Bahamas as they have to support an attack on Syria. But a studied rationale evidencing an easy mark is as scary today as it was five years ago.
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