Perfect questions, imperfect answers: A father and daughter talk about America’s wars
Dan Dudziak
Dan Dudziak (Twitter: @dandudziak) is a lifelong politics, international relations, and history junkie. He currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where he writes, plays music, parents, and tries to figure a way out of the mess we’re all currently in.
The other evening my 8-year-old daughter asked me about “The War.” And I tried to explain, like all parents try, but couldn’t get beyond thinking “which one?” I’ve lived through the changing of the guard from the greatest to the boomers generation, experienced a brief moment of hope on the eve of Obama’s first term, and have spent the last three and a half years feeling like prior talk about bends in the moral arc of the universe seem impossibly quaint now that the arc itself feels like it has been buried under a mountain of lies taller than a tacky Vegas casino hotel.
Her concern came from witnessing my reaction to the January drone strike that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, and the resulting lurch towards a wider war in the Persian Gulf region. The measured military response of Iran’s government and the lack of escalation on the part of the United States in turn have stopped more missiles flying for now, but there are no signs that the U.S. will stop its belligerence-by-proxy or that Iran will return to a diplomatic path that has any hope of containing the conflict in the future.
It struck me that she’s just a little older than I was when the 41-year-old hostilities began between Iran and the U.S., and that made me think about the exasperating differences between reading about America’s historical inability or unwillingness to learn from past mistakes versus actually living through a complete cycle of amnesia.
Young as I was in 1979 and 1980, the news of the hostage crisis was pervasive enough for me to notice, and the country’s mood was unmistakable. The mainstream narrative was that out of nowhere, a medieval villain was holding Americans hostage and we, though bristling with high-tech weaponry and righteous anger, couldn’t do a damned thing about it. President Carter authorized a military rescue, but the disaster at Desert One only deepened the national sense of impotence.
This was my first experience with the frustrating fact that the most powerful nation on the planet, the actions of which would be the most consequential by default for at least half a century, was populated by voters who were largely at pains to identify nations on a world map and whose knowledge of even their own history was vague at best. The underlying causes of this persistent ignorance are, like most things, more complex than they seem on the surface, but its effects on the ability of American policy makers to get away with executing the same old mistakes the same old way are obvious. When each conflict is presented as a fresh outline on a blank map, suspended in air with no history to ground it, no one needs to be held accountable for past actions (what past?) or expected to explain why the shooting has started again (why do they hate us?)
And so four full decades after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, I stood over the stove, stirring ground beef with one hand and scrolling through Twitter with the other, exclaiming to my wife across the house that we might soon be adding a regional war to the list of outrages and incompetencies the country and the world had endured since the U.S. presidential election of 2016. My daughter’s quick ears picked up on the conversations that followed, and she started asking questions the next day.
There’s a conflict at the juncture of wanting to simultaneously protect, comfort, be truthful and give hope to your child. Three of these goals are relatively easy, if you eliminate ‘be truthful’ from the mix. Parents variously turn up or turn down the truth, often for wise reasons, but past a certain age and on particular topics, this becomes more difficult. Ours is a home where politics and daily news stories are discussed frequently and loudly. We’re only at the very beginning of answering questions like the one my daughter posed to me, and soon enough my son will follow.
A perfect answer doesn’t exist any more than does a perfect resolution to any of the ongoing conflicts currently involving U.S. military personnel. I could lean on the simpler themes, pushing the truth to the margins the way our government tends to do when presenting justifications for our forever wars. This would have the benefit outlined by Hannah Arendt in her 1971 New York Review of Books essay on the meaning of the Pentagon Papers:
…lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear.
My daughter expects a tale of good versus evil, and an assurance that the good guys are winning. There are evil individuals and ideologies in the world that need to be challenged, but I don’t have it in me to present to her a cartoon version of current events.
Lies and fantasies might be easier to convey, but these won’t empower her or help her along in beginning to come to grips with the world. Instead, as an attempt at an answer, we talked a little bit about how war is a terrible thing and that it should always be the last rather than the first way to resolve a conflict. I’ve dragged my kid to military museums on two continents, and she got to see the remains of the airfield in the United Kingdom that her great-grandfather’s B-17 flew from in 1944 to 1945 in World War Two, so she has a small sense at least of the awful scale of armed conflict. Each night before bed, we spend time with the world map in her room. The cultures and history of each nation are the fun topics, but I get a grim satisfaction in knowing that she won’t be ignorant of the places with upcoming crises.
Most importantly, I told her that we are a week and a half away from voting in the Super Tuesday primary in California. We’re lucky enough to be only a short walk from our polling place, and she hasn’t missed an election with me yet. Democracy in the United States has never felt more brittle, but 2018’s midterms proved that voting is still the most effective way of influencing the course of the country. If she understands and values the tools available to make her opinions matter, maybe she won’t find herself in 40 years flipping through news on a futuristic hand-held while stirring plant-based meat substitute on the stove and lamenting aloud to her partner about the latest escalation in U.S.-Iranian tensions.
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