www.csua.org/u/4ui -> www.harpers.org/RoadToBabylon.html?pg=1
I will not wait on events, while dangers gather, I assumed that he was striking at a target of rhetorical convenience. The war on terrorism was not going as well as planned Osama bin Laden still at large, Afghanistan not yet transformed into a Connecticut suburb, bombs exploding every seven or eight days on a bus in Israel, and who better than the tyrant of Baghdad to stand surrogate for all the worlds evildoers? The man was undoubtedly a villain, a brutal psychopath who murdered children and poisoned village wells, stored biological weapons in hospitals, subjected his enemies to unspeakable torture, and imprisoned his friends in the cages of perpetual fear. Who would not be glad to learn that he had retired from politics or died in a traffic accident? Bush chose to express his disapproval in what he called the language of right and wrong, who was I to deny him his demagogues right to issue harebrained threats?
When asked by worried friends and acquaintances whether the President was borrowing his geopolitical theory from the diaries of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, I assured them that the President didnt have the patience to read more than two or three pages of a Tom Clancy novel. By the second week in August I understood that my assumptions were poorly placed. The spectacle of the American government making preparations for an invasion of Iraq suggested that maybe the Bush Administration was, in fact, stupid enough to call down air strikes on the last four paragraphs of one of the Pentagons apocalyptic briefing papers. The President was hopping boldly out of golf carts in Texas and Maine to tell the traveling White House press corps that regime change was coming soon to downtown Baghdad;
Competing television networks scheduled different time slots for the Pentagons forthcoming fireworks display before and after Novembers congressional election, in early January when the weather around Baghdad improved, next April because the Air Force needed six months to replenish its inventory of precision bombs. Competing newspaper columnists advanced competing adjectives to characterize the extreme danger presented to the entire civilized world, but none of them offered evidence proving that Saddam possessed weapons likely to harm anybody who didnt happen to be living in Iraq;
A government that must hold Senate hearings to discover whether it has a reason to go to war is a government that doesnt know the meaning of war. The inanity of the circumstance accounted for the mock-heroic tone of President Bushs golf-cart communiqus I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Now watch this drive as well as for the sublime complacence of the innumerable spokesmen testifying to the certainties of Americas virtue, truth, justice, and power. Consistent with the latter set of assumptions, two of the statements presented to Senator Bidens committee invite lengthy quotation because they speak to the character of a government in the state of decadence. Thus, the heroics of Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney retired, former assistant vice chief of staff of the United States Air Force: Thank you for this special opportunity to discuss a war of liberation to remove Saddams regime from Iraq. Suffice it to say we must preempt threats such as those posed by Saddam Hussein.
All the Iraqi military forces will be told through the opposition forces in our information operations campaign that they have two choices: either help us change regime leadership and build the democracy, or be destroyed. In addition, commanders and men in weapons of mass destruction forces will be told that they will be tried as war criminals if they use their weapons against coalition forces or other nations. I can understand the general being sensitive to the question of who is, and who is not, a war criminal. Other points in the generals testimony didnt seem as nicely judged. How does it happen that the most massive precision air campaign in history leaves but a relatively small footprint in the region? Who prevents Ariel Sharon from upgrading with nuclear weapons the Israeli program of preemptive assassination, and, in the relatively sizable footprint of an oil price marked up to $50 or $70 a barrel, what happens to the economies of London, Paris, and New York? Observing that in Washington it was always easy to find excuses for inaction, Weinberger reminded the senators of the miraculous American descent on the Caribbean island of Grenada in April 1983: We went into Grenada with more troops than everybody thought we needed. Not having kept up with events on Grenada, I have no reason to doubt Weinbergers happy news, and Im sure that if Fidel Castro were to send another invisible flotilla of gunboats, the United States Navy would defend the island against another invisible horde of savage Marxists. Elsewhere in the world, the record of American diplomatic achievement over the last thirty years doesnt inspire a similar degree of confidence. Were good with slogans, but we dont have much talent for fostering the construction of exemplary democracies;
Ambassadors arrive from Sicily in late March with news of trouble and a request for military assistance. The city of Syracuse threatens to seize the Athenian colony of Segesta, and how can the heirs of noble Pericles stomach so brazen an insult to their pride? What if the Syracusans took it into their heads to attack the glory of Athens? The impetuous Alcibiades presents the case for forward deterrence and anticipatory self-defense, saying that it is in the nature of Athens to do great deeds. As certain as Lieutenant General McInerney of the citys military power, he assures the assembly that Syracuse is easy prey, weak and badly governed. One does not only defend oneself against a superior power when one is attacked;
America needs to know, he said, Ill be making up my mind based upon the latest intelligence and how best to protect our own country plus our friends and allies. Unwilling to expose the latest intelligence to the vulgar, democratic light of day, the President reserves the right to do what he, and he alone forward-looking and resolute, as brave as Alcibiades, disinclined to wait on events, while dangers gather, deems just. Taken together with the proven incompetence of the American intelligence agencies and the delusions of military grandeur cherished by the secretary of defense, the Presidents belated assurance that he would continue to consult When I say Im a patient man, I mean Im a patient man .
He had been shaking the fist of war at Iraq for two years, talking up the prospect of regime change to audiences both foreign and domestic, and how could the noble heir to the throne of Teddy Roosevelt retreat from his promise of retribution frightful to contemplate and terrible to behold? The question was framed not by the President himself but by several Washington operatives closely allied with the administration and currently serving on the Pentagons Defense Review Board. James Schlesinger, former secretary of defense, spoke for the jingoist majority: Given all we have said as a leading world power about the necessity of regime change in Iraq means that our credibility would be badly damaged if that regime change did not take place. The ancient Greeks at least had a prize in view the harbors of Sicily and the wealth of Carthage;
As a form of misgovernment that satisfies all the definitions set forth at the head of this essay in the epigraph borrowed from Barbara Tuchmans book The March of Folly, I can think of none more disastrous than the failure to distinguish fiction from fact, to substitute for the waging of war the making of war movies. Mark Twain remarked on the stupidity in 1905 during the American occupation of the Philippines. Objecting to the fraudulent piety of statesmen who dont know what theyre saying, Twain wrote a story, The War Prayer, in which an aged stranger enters a church where the congregation has been listening to an heroic sermon about the glory to be won in battle by young patriots armed with the love of God. Motioning the startled minister to stand aside, the aged stranger ...
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