Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Block Island Times.

Déjà vu

Twelve years ago, when this writer edited the Block Island Times, the entire front page of the Jan. 5 edition was devoted to the following text:

An open letter to President Bush:

A new sensibility

Dear Mr. President:

We write you in the persona of a newspaper that serves Block Island, R.I., the smallest town in the smallest state in the nation that elected you its chief executive. The articles we print rarely deal with matters beyond the perimeter of our shores, 12 miles at sea. Our editorial page consists almost entirely of letters to the editor as well as our own views on such matters as zoning, the preservation of open space, affordable housing and the make-up and behavior of our local government. If we have any global aspirations at all, they reside in the conceit that we and our insular problems represent a microcosm of the world at large. This view, incidentally, has its troubling side when measure is taken of the agony we suffer in search of local solutions and local accord toward problems that by global standards are piddling. In the midst of an interminable meeting of the Town Council or the Zoning Board, we often have asked ourselves if Block Island cannot fashion an acceptable balance between its human inhabitants and the land, what hope is there for the rest of the world? We have no answer, the perversity of our species appearing to have no bounds.

Be that as it may, there is one area in the affairs of man that we thought had been settled during our lifetime. It was one reason, we thought, besides witnessing the voyage to the moon and man's penetration into outer space, to rejoice at having been alive during the latter half of the 20th century. Put simply, this new, 20th century perception was the intuitive understanding that modern warfare was a means that not only was not justified by the end but categorically precluded the achievement of that end. World Wars I and II were military victories, but solved nothing in the long run; and then there were Korea and Vietnam. What more evidence was needed that war was obsolete, a dinosaur?

Nations, great nations like ours, have continued to maintain military forces because although the answers to those questions appeared obvious to us, or so we thought, there were others around the world who were not yet convinced. We might lay down our sword, but not yet our shield.

It was in that light that we understood, Mr. President, your rapid deployment of our troops to Saudi Arabia to block further aggression by Saddam Hussein. Now your talk of ultimatums, of deadlines and of making war leaves us perplexed — even here on Block Island, where in our isolation and relative backwardness we still watch the contrails of intercontinental aircraft stream out at dawn across our sky. We listen to the radio. We read.

We read, for instance, novelist E.L. Doctorow, who also wrote you a letter reprinted in the Jan. 7 edition of The Nation.

"War," he wrote, "is an expedient of Saddam Hussein, Mr. President, because he is of the barbarous past. You have the chance to create a future in which, on a smaller and smaller globe, technology races to rectify the damage of earlier technology, and the needs of all — air to breathe, water to drink, soil and climate to grow crops, and an unalienated, literate citizenry to advance the civilizations of a democratic planet."

This is not the stuff the Block Island Times is wont to write about. It is ordinarily enough to leave that to better minds and more eloquent pens, such as Doctorow's. But you should know, Mr. President, that at sunset on New Year's Day some 50 citizens of Block Island, men, women, children and one nanny goat, representing one-twentieth of our island population — which ration nationally would translate into 17 million people — gathered outside the Harbor Baptist Church, and carrying candles marched "for peace" to Crescent Beach. The sea was calm, the air still, the candles, thrust into the sand when the prayers for peace were over, burned a long time and appeared to gain in brilliance as the afterglow of the sunset faded.

Is it possible, Mr. President, that we here on Block Island, in our isolation have absorbed a truth that you, with all your worldly experience, your advisors, your intelligence, and your electronic surveillance have failed to grasp? That war doesn't work; that the awful immorality of initiating an action that will result in death to thousands of young Americans as well as thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians, that no matter how righteous, no matter how immediately victorious, war in 1991, to use a term that capitalists must understand, is a bankrupt institution.

Those words were addressed, of course, to W's daddy. As we know, he did not heed them. Nor do we expect his son to. Nevertheless, almost to a word they express this writer's views today, and, I believe, those of many other Block Island residents. There is very little I would change in forwarding the same letter to Bush the son, except, perhaps the last sentence, calling war a "bankrupt institution." Today we have more cogent similes from the world of business. Enron and Worldcom come to mind, institutions that have been criminally hyped by managers for their own gain — in this case, political capital and the well-being of the military industrial complex — at the expense of investors — read the American public. It is you and I, to say nothing of those on the ground in Iraq, combatants and civilians alike, who will pay the price of this administration's stubborn insistence that war is the answer to evil rather than evil itself. — Peter S. Woo