I’ve noted several times recently how public support for the “Global War on Terror” appears to be inversely proportional to the outlandishness of its proponents claims on its behalf. A case in point came in Sunday 
morning’s Republican debate in Iowa. I think it’s actually part of John McCain’s stump speech now. But it was the first time I’d really focused in on the substantive claim amidst the claptrap.
McCain said that the fight against militant Islam is the calling or fight of our generation, or something to that effect — and of course that’s a quite subjective statement so he can say whatever he wants.
Then he says, though, that this is a fight that will be with us for the rest of this century. To quote the man, “I also firmly believe that the challenge of the 21st century is the struggle against radical Islamic extremism. It is a transcendent issue. It is hydra-headed. It will be with us for the rest of the century.”
Now, think about that. That’s ninety-three years. My old graduate school advisor Gordon Wood used to say that humans have a very hard time seeing more than fifty years into the future. Of course, even a year into the future is difficult. But more than a few decades and we haven’t the slightest idea what the world is going to look like — what the technologies will be, the great moral issues, the threats, etc. It’s something we can actually study empirically as we look at what people during, say, the Civil War thought the 1910s would be like or the Revolutionary War era folks thought the 1820s would look like.
Consider too that fascism, which was no walk in the park, was around for roughly a quarter century (I’m a ‘small fascism’ man: the copycats in South America in the latter 20th century don’t count and I don’t think even Franco’s regime in Spain does out past the 1950s). And communism, which also had a pretty good run, was around for about three-quarters of a century.
But John McCain states it as a matter of fact that the war against militant Islam will still be the defining national security threat for this country in 2099 and for years after.
I know we customarily give a rather wide berth to rhetorical excess in the theater of politics. But what on earth is McCain talking about? Not long ago it was enough to sate the historical vanity of the War on Terror mongers to dub it a ‘long war’ or ‘generational struggle’, which it may well be. But apparently even that is now insufficient. Only an entire century will do. It is almost as if as the concept in the real-world present looks more and more ill-judged and foolhardy its credentials must be buffed up by giving it more and more ridiculous lifespans ranging off into the unknowable future.
“You may think it’s stupid,” you might say, “But this baby’s lasting a hundred years at least!”
Perhaps it is the chronological equivalent of the way that President Bush salves the universal verdict of his strategic foolhardiness by imagining a future in which historians are as out of it as he is.
It makes sense that it is their final redoubt as the future is the only territory where empirical evidence or — more plainly put — reality can’t be brought up to contradict you.
