Nearest to God

 Since our country seems to be drawing ever closer to the brink of another war in the Middle East—a war that bears an uncanny resemblance to our last great misadventure in the region (save one letter in the country's name)—I thought it would be a good time to take down a short book that has sat on my shelf unread for years: Norman Mailer's Why Are We At War?—a brief collection of reflections and interviews he wrote on the eve of the 2003 U.S. Invasion of Iraq. 

Mailer—along with Harold Pinter (whom he quotes in the volume)—has the distinction of being one of the few literary intellectuals who called the Iraq War right from the outset. He wasn't beguiled by the strange fairy lights of a worldwide Jacobin revolution or neo-Trotskyite transformation that seduced so many people on the Left. He saw Bush's war for what it was: a great, big, murderous, atrocious, hubristic, imperialistic boondoggle. (And criminal war of aggression to boot.)

Now, more than twenty years later, we are being called to take up arms against Iran with the same bogus arguments: the principle of nonaggression shouldn't apply, we are told, because the Iranian regime is a bad actor; or because they pose a future threat. They said the same things about Saddam Hussein in 2003. And, then as now, they weren't wrong. Both Saddam and the Iranian theocrats are bad; both are dangerous. But that shouldn't be enough to overcome the prohibition on aggression. 

Mailer is more restrained in his rhetoric than Pinter was at the time—but fundamentally, he agrees with him in his assessment of the 2003 war. Both wrote at the time of the danger implicit in the religious, quasi-divine sanction that Bush claimed for his actions. Pinter portrayed the American war machine as taking the Lord's name in vain to justify its bombings. Mailer, meanwhile, quotes from Bush's famous interview in which he credited his presidency to the "power of prayer." 

"That is a dangerous remark," writes Mailer. "As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil." 

Reading that passage in 2025, I couldn't help but think about our current president—who is now flirting with another war of aggression in the Middle East, much like Bush's—and who, of course, has been even less reluctant than Bush to claim divine sanction for his every deed. Trump has said repeatedly that it must have been divine intervention that saved him from an assassin's bullet last summer. Providence must have been preserving him to fulfill a great mission. 

But—Mailer's word of caution could not be more warranted: for was not Faust promised thirty years of wealth and power in exchange for his soul? 

"We can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come." What one White House holder calls a guardian angel could well be Mephistopheles. 

We've seen already that J.D. Vance and Pete Hegseth are not opposed to taking the Lord's name in vain to justify war. (Robert Burns's words come to mind: "Ye hypocrites, are these your pranks / To murder men and give God thanks?"). Coupled with a president who believes he is specially chosen by God to fulfill a divine purpose—and indeed, as a recent Politico article suggested—who may increasingly literally believe he is God Himself—we find a very dangerous combination. 

And in the face of it, all we can say—on behalf of the people of Iran but also of the whole human race—is—to quote Louis MacNeice—"O hear me, / Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God / come near me."