War and Deliverance

"What the hell you want to go f--- around with that river for?" one of the unfriendly locals asks Lewis early in the movie.

"Because it's there," says Lewis.

"It's there alright. You get in and you can't get out, you gonna wish it wasn't."

One of the most disconcerting aspects of the endless war the United States is fighting now is that it started because Iraq was there: it appeared to be a made-to-order target for an easy invasion that would have great symbolic (indeed, philosophic) significance for the thinkers around Bush. After 9/11, the capture of the terrorists who plotted the attack and the destruction of the Taliban government in Afghanistan that gave them shelter just hadn't seemed a weighty enough challenge for these would-be supermen. "There's a feeling we've got to do something that counts—and bombing caves is not something that counts," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a confidante of Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, told NEWSEEK in November 2001. In fact they had tasted that great forbidden fruit of war, the sense of license that it gives, and they didn't want to give it up. In wartime they could make up their laws as they went along. On a grand scale they could reinterpret the Constitution until it became meaningless. On the ground, they would give well-connected companies fat contracts and politically compatible mercenaries like those of Blackwater a license to kill. (See the excellent profile of that company's founder, conservative true believer Erik Prince, the adventure-seeking son of a self-made billionaire, in the current NEWSWEEK.)

Now look at our man Lewis in "Deliverance." He's a rich boy from Atlanta whose main income is from inherited real estate. But he loves to flirt with extinction. To come near death, then survive—"That intensity, well, that's something special," Lewis tells Ed as they're driving up into the mountains. "I believe in survival, all kinds. Every time I come up here I believe in it more."

Normally, the role of government—of civilization—is to curb our sense of personal license when civilized society is under pressure from anger and fear. Government is supposed to put a brake on cynical, self-serving calculation, especially at times of great danger and confusion. Nobody knows that better than professional soldiers, who are trained to understand the laws of society and of war. But the core coterie around Bush and Cheney, who never were soldiers, pushed for war with Iraq at all costs and as an end to almost all constraints.