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Volume CCXXXVI, Number 149 November 25, 2006 

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Dispatches from the War Fronts

Our special correspondent reports from Baghdad on
the war of all against all

Editors' Note: To assess the situation on the ground in Iraq, the Spy has retained the services of a towering figure, nay, a leviathan, in the field of war correspondence, Thomas Hobbes. He spoke with the Spy by satellite telephone from Iraq.

TMS:  Give us your overall perspective on the situation on the ground.

TH:  It is a time of war, where every man is an enemy to every  man.  Men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withall.

TMS:  Not sure we caught all that, but it doesn't sound too good. What's life like for the average Iraqi?

TH:   There's no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death.  And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

TMS:  How's the economy doing?

TH:  There is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force. Also no knowledge of the face of the earth.

TMS:  Sounds pretty grim to us.  But isn't the democratically-elected Iraqi government is a step in the right direction?

TH:  The prosperity of a people ruled by an aristocratic or a democratic assembly comes not from aristocracy or democracy but from the obedience and concord of the subjects.  Take away in any state the obedience (and consequently the concord of the people) and they shall not only not flourish, but in short term be dissolved.

TMS:  Doesn't sound like the current government is getting to the root of the problem. Do you think that the plan to divide Iraq into autonomous zones for Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds offers a possible way forward?

TH:  They that go about by disobedience, to do no more than reform the Commonwealth, shall find that they thereby do destroy it, like the foolish daughters of Peleus (in the fable), which desired to renew the youth of their decrepit father, did by the counsel of Medea cut him into pieces and boil him, together with strange herbs, but made not of him a new  man.

TMS:  Yuck-o!  Why is the conflict in Iraq so vicious?

TH:  To the war of every man against every man, this also is consequent: that nothing can be unjust.  The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place.

TMS:  Did you think that the original goal of the U.S. invasion – overthrow of Saddam Hussein – was a laudable goal?

TH:  If the essential rights of sovereignty are taken away, the Commonwealth is thereby dissolved and every man returned into the condition and calamity of a war with every other man (which is the greatest evil that can happen in this life).

TMS:  We'll take that as a no.   Why do you think George Bush first invaded Iraq?

TH:  I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire for power after power, that ceases only in death. There succeeds a new desire, in some of fame from new conquest, in others of ease and sensual pleasure, in others of admiration or being flattered for excellence in some art or other ability of the mind.  

TMS:  Why do you think Bush was so confident in his judgment that the war in Iraq would be quick and easy?

TH:  Such is the nature of men that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty or more eloquent or more learned, yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves.

TMS:Tell us why George Bush still believes that victory is possible in Iraq.

TH: Ignorance of natural causes disposes a man to credulity, so as to believe many times impossibilities. And credulity, because men loved to be hearkened unto in company, disposes them to lying.

TMS: So you think he's deliberately misleading the American people about this war?

TH:  Ignorance itself is without malice, is able to make a man both to believe lies and sometimes also to invent them.