Let me string together a few bits and pieces related to the Iraqi situation. (Trust me, I think I’m heading somewhere.)
First, in the we-wish-had-never-said-it category: Mike Klare points out to me that in 1992 then former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, asked for a comment on why the Bush Administration’s ended the Gulf War of 1991 without driving on Baghdad, observed reasonably enough: “If we’d gone to Baghdad and got rid of Saddam Hussein – assuming we could have found him – we’d have had to put a lot of forces in and run him to ground some place. He would not have been easy to capture. Then you’ve got to put a new government in his place and then you’re faced with the question of what kind of government are you going to establish in Iraq? Is it going to be a Kurdish government or a Shia government or a Sunni government? How many forces are you going to leave there to keep it propped up, how many casualties are you going to take through the course of this operation?” (Interview on BBC Radio 4, “The Desert War – A Kind of Victory,” February 16, 1992, as cited in Freedman and Karsh, The Gulf Conflict 1990-1991, p. 413.) Just for the hell of it, remind me: Exactly what’s changed in the Iraqi situation since 1992 that would contradict such a conclusion today?
Then there’s the following exchange at a recent White House press briefing between Press Secretary Ari Fleischer and Helen Thomas, once known, I think, as the “doyen” of the press corps, now a Hearst columnist, I believe, and angry indeed about this administration’s Iraq policy:
MR. FLEISCHER: Good afternoon and happy New Year to everybody. The President began his day with an intelligence briefing, followed by an FBI briefing. Then he had a series of policy briefings. And this afternoon, the President will look forward to a Cabinet meeting where the President will discuss with members of his Cabinet his agenda for the year. The President is going to focus on economic growth, making America a more compassionate country, and providing for the security of our nation abroad and on the homefront.
And with that, I’m more than happy to take your questions. Helen.
Q At the earlier briefing, Ari, you said that the President deplored the taking of innocent lives. Does that apply to all innocent lives in the world? And I have a follow-up.
MR. FLEISCHER: I refer specifically to a horrible terrorist attack on Tel Aviv that killed scores and wounded hundreds. And the President, as he said in his statement yesterday, deplores in the strongest terms the taking of those lives and the wounding of those people, innocents in Israel.
And with that, I’m more than happy to take your questions. Helen.
Q At the earlier briefing, Ari, you said that the President deplored the taking of innocent lives. Does that apply to all innocent lives in the world? And I have a follow-up.
MR. FLEISCHER: I refer specifically to a horrible terrorist attack on Tel Aviv that killed scores and wounded hundreds. And the President, as he said in his statement yesterday, deplores in the strongest terms the taking of those lives and the wounding of those people, innocents in Israel.
Q My follow-up is, why does he want to drop bombs on innocent Iraqis?
MR. FLEISCHER: Helen, the question is how to protect Americans, and our allies and friends —
Q They’re not attacking you.
MR. FLEISCHER: — from a country —
Q Have they laid the glove on you or on the United States, the Iraqis, in 11 years?
MR. FLEISCHER: I guess you have forgotten about the Americans who were killed in the first Gulf War as a result of Saddam Hussein’s aggression then.
Q Is this revenge, 11 years of revenge?
MR. FLEISCHER: Helen, I think you know very well that the President’s position is that he wants to avert war, and that the President has asked the United Nations to go into Iraq to help with the purpose of averting war.
Q Would the President attack innocent Iraqi lives?
MR. FLEISCHER: The President wants to make certain that he can defend our country, defend our interests, defend the region, and make certain that American lives are not lost.
Q And he thinks they are a threat to us?
MR. FLEISCHER: There is no question that the President thinks that Iraq is a threat to the United States.
Q The Iraqi people?
MR. FLEISCHER: The Iraqi people are represented by their government. If there was regime change, the Iraqi —
Q So they will be vulnerable?
MR. FLEISCHER: Actually, the President has made it very clear that he has not dispute with the people of Iraq. That’s why the American policy remains a policy of regime change. There is no question the people of Iraq —
Q That’s a decision for them to make, isn’t it? It’s their country.
MR. FLEISCHER: Helen, if you think that the people of Iraq are in a position to dictate who their dictator is, I don’t think that has been what history has shown.
Q I think many countries don’t have — people don’t have the decision — including us.
To see this exchange click here
Finally, we get to our President and not Iraqi innocents but a very American form of “innocence,” the kind, I’m afraid, that we thought not so long ago had largely been left to Forrest Gump. Some days back, Bush addressed the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division, four thousand young soldiers preparing to head for the Gulf. The President was, unbelievably enough, wearing a khaki military jacket in which he looked to me somehow small and lost.
According to a front page piece in the Washington Post (“Bush Tells Troops: Prepare For War” by Mike Allen, January 4, 2003),
“Bush invoked a moral imperative for an attack on Iraq after U.N. inspectors report findings Jan. 27, telling members of the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division that they ‘will be acting in the finest traditions of America, should we be forced to act.’
‘We are ready. We’re prepared,’ Bush told cheering soldiers in a gymnasium at the nation’s most populous military base. ‘Should Saddam Hussein seal his fate by refusing to disarm, by ignoring the opinion of the world, you will be fighting not to conquer anybody, but to liberate people.’
“The commander in chief, with first lady Laura Bush at his side, teared up as the troops sang: ‘The Army’s on its way. Count off the cadence loud and strong. Two! Three!’“
To read more of this Washington Post story click here
Let’s forget for a moment that, had this been Michael Dukakis in a khaki jacket tearing up at a military ceremony, he would have been laughed out of politics. (Actually, he was.) But this is our genuine Teflon president, so move on. In fact, I had another thought about this little passage, which stuck with me through much of the last week. I wrote the following in my book The End of Victory Culture back in what seems like a distant age but was only 1995:
“In returning to those decades [the fifties and sixties], I also revisited a pop-culture landscape that I sometimes find horrifying exactly because its artifacts continue to affect me so deeply. I still, in fact, possess a small assortment of my favorite toy soldiers, and on the rare occasions that I unpack them from two small boxes stored in the upper reaches of a closet, I still feel an unparalleled fondness for them. As I graze the late-night hours on cable TV, I still get a chill down my spine when, sabers drawn and bugle blowing, the cavalry charges. Tears still well up when that young second lieutenant reads the letter John Wayne (just killed by a Japanese sniper) meant for his son in The Sands of Iwo Jima, or when at any war movie’s end the enemy fall by the score and the GIs advance to the strains of some military tune…. Those [years] were for me the best of play times and, often, the worst of actual moments…” and so on.
(By the way, should you want to know something about my thoughts on or the history of American triumphalism, germane indeed at this strange, embattled, triumphalist moment, you might take a look at The End of Victory Culture.)
Believe me, boy war-play of that era went deep indeed and it’s largely unwritten about. This passage came to mind, however, the second I read of the President tearing up and I knew, as I knew myself, that my near age peer, now commander in chief of the most staggering, destructive military force in history, was still living in those movies that I know so well, dreaming of the moment when the Marines advance and the enemy falls, of that spectacle of slaughter made innocent on screen. We all teared up in the dark in those days. It was so convenient, since John Wayne and most of our fathers would hardly have approved. But it’s frightening — to me, at least — to think that a man who somehow, I suspect, never left that movie theater, or that era, is now in a position to loose our armies tearily on another people.
Here then is an appropriate piece to end on — a reflection on “Bush, the gunslinger,” making sense (or, you may say, nonsense) of the world with only that screen to light his way — and how hilarious (or is it appropriate?) that the piece appeared not here but in the Israeli paper Ha’aretz. Tom
Bush the gunslinger
By Arie Caspi
Ha’aretz
Jan. 9, 2003In the movie “Witness,” shown last week on Channel Ten, Harrison Ford plays a police detective fighting corrupt cops who want to kill him. Ford identifies the bad apples with the help of a little Amish boy who witnessed a murder they committed. The wounded detective flees with the boy and his mother to their farm in the Amish community, a pacifist Christian sect whose members avoid violence even when attacked. The corrupt cops come to the farm and try to kill Ford; unlike his hosts, who turn the other cheek when street bullies harass them, Ford fights back. As usual, might and right win.
Without violence, the movie tells us, you just can’t beat the bad guys. Its conclusion is shared by thousands of other American movies. George W. Bush was raised to believe in their simplistic values. Villains are villainous to the core.