Mother of All Battles

What is it about?

In the United States, the best-known antiwar speech of the past decade is not antiwar. Barack Obama’s remarks, delivered at an antiwar rally in Chicago in October 2002, are about timing and the place of “reason” in war. At no time is war’s place questioned: because it is necessary, it is, sometimes, inevitable. Combined with the entrenchment of war attributed to Heraclitus, this sets the stage for reflection on war here and now: it is about timing, about centering, about naming, about reasoning—about the politics of the cities we build and inhabit. The pervasiveness of the assumption that war is necessary calls attention to the question that guides this essay: whether and how we might cultivate judgment that is intuitively opposed to war rather than intuitively resigned to it.

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