Peripheral Visions

everything else becomes unimportant. All of a sudden, the president no longer has to be concerned with the future of industry or education or human rights. Everyone can focus in on the supreme importance of victory. We have rarely had a government that did not emphasize guns, even in peacetime, which should be butter time; but in wartime, the primary emphasis is on guns. Warfare comes as a great relief to those who prefer thinking about one thing at a time. It is no coincidence that the language of warfare is so often used to focus on any urgent issue—poverty, or drugs, or the AIDS epidemic—yet the metaphor is ill chosen, for many of these wars cannot be won, any more than a homemaker can definitively win a war against mess. The world doesn’t stop while a war is taking place, either, and the victories won on the battlefield leave other problems unsolved.
    Even in warfare, there are issues of attention. Intelligence depends on the skillful use of peripheral vision. Strategy depends on recognizing change. Battles are often lost by attending too much to the lessons of previous conflicts, too little to the present. The United States went to Vietnam with fixed ideas of how to fight and was blindsided by the effectiveness of guerrilla warfare. From that debacle it drew the conclusion that wars should be fought only with narrowly drawn and highly specific goals, but such goals have the effect of narrowing attention in an unpredictable world. Focusing in 1991 on getting Iraq out of Kuwait, the generals ignored issues that we will be dealing with for years to come. The war not only left Saddam Hussein in power in Baghdad but also created a major environmental disaster in the gulf and a major human disaster for the Kurds, and it gave political legitimacy to Syria’s Hafiz al-Assad, for in warfare it is easy to ignore the bad habits of allies. Wars almost always have unintended side effects, and goals may need change along the way. Winning is never as simple as it seems.
    In warfare, domestic issues are left untended. Men have on the whole had the privilege of walking out the door and assuming that they could delegate many of life’s concerns in order to concentrate elsewhere. Whether for the period of a workday or a military campaign, someone else would take care of the children, the laundry, the elderly, tonight’s dinner, calling the plumber, getting on with the neighbors. Today women are meeting the demands of outside jobs, and some of these other concerns are beginning to be shared. It was interesting, in the criticism of the Bush administration that followed Operation Desert Storm, to notice that the electorate was increasingly feeling that it is unacceptable to ignore domestic issues during wartime, for often there are parallels between the household division of labor and the national priorities. This new insistence on the domestic may represent more than the familiar postwar spasm of isolationism.
    Building peace, like women’s work, is never done. A woman’s work is never done because, although a particular task may be completed, she is always engaged in multiple tasks, long-and short-term, cycled and recycled, and there is never a moment when she can say that no task is waiting. The first proverb arguing against focused attention that comes to my mind is from the kitchen: A watched pot never boils. The reality is that the pot will boil, but the tea tray won’t be ready. A homemaker cannot keep up with the full range of tasks by focusing on one thing at a time. In the same way, the health of a nation is always many stranded.
    I think, for instance, of a village woman in Iran, in a household with several children, probably at least one other woman, and one or two elderly people. In the course of a day’s work, she prepares food; she keeps track of the children and the old people, including looking after them if they are sick; and if she has an hour here or there she sits down at the carpet loom, which is right in the center of the household. She can be interrupted at any moment, yet after a few months she has a valuable carpet, which is a unified work of art. At the end of a given day an onlooker might say that she had achieved little, because everything she did was enfolded in these interlocking patterns. Even more easily, the onlooker might dismiss the human and social value of the constant flow of conversation and gossip through the day that keeps the system functioning smoothly, but this too is