Out of My Mind (23 page)

The phrase “weapons of mass destruction” has been used so often, detached from the details of how death to masses would occur, that the term has become a cliché without meaning.

It would seem to make sense to say we have to find a way to prevent a nuclear, biological or chemical war that could wipe out most of the people in the civilized world—and quite a few in parts of the world that aren't so civilized.

We used to be safe in America, protected by wide oceans on two sides and friendly nations on the other two sides. Those oceans are no longer wide enough and too many awful weapons capable of inflicting death don't have to travel long distances to be delivered. They can be made right here by the enemies among us. Nuclear weapons can be delivered by long-range missiles for which an ocean is no barrier.

The first nuclear or biological strike by one nation isn't going to kill everyone in the country being attacked. That country will retaliate and both nations will go down with their guns smoking.

If that seems too dramatic, too pessimistic, look at the problems we face trying to establish freedom and democracy in Iraq. The Iraqi people don't know us and we don't know them. We assume they want a democracy where the people choose their leaders. It's a shock for us to be learning that the people of Iraq may not want democracy. Since that idea is inconceivable to us, it wasn't part of the plans of retired Gen. Jay Garner, who was put in charge of making Kansas out of Iraq.

We thought our problems were going to be political and economic. We'd talk common sense to the Iraqis and as soon as we got them straightened out, we'd leave. We forgot another important factor: religion. We don't know a Shiite from a Shiksa, and the pictures of bloodied pilgrims who'd whipped themselves with chains in a holy Islamic ritual makes it apparent that talking what we think makes sense isn't going to make sense to them.

The relationship of Christians to Muslims is not like that of Baptists to Catholics, Methodists to Presbyterians, or even Jews to Episcopalians.

General Garner wasn't able to sit down and talk to Iraqis in a quiet, reasonable way about democracy. They pray to a god who's a stranger to Christians, and electing a leader doesn't interest them. They have the only leader they want in Allah.

Religion is more a matter of geography than intellect. Very few young Israelis study the world's religions and choose to be Episcopalian. Most young people in Baghdad didn't grow up and independently think out what they believe. They didn't consider the choices and become Muslim any more than the Irish kid in Boston makes a thoughtful decision to be Catholic. He comes Catholic.

Courtesy and broad-minded good manners in accepting another country's politics is possible. A socialist might listen to a capitalist's argument for free enterprise, but someone else's religion is hard for anyone to accept. Religion is our problem in Iraq—a potential weapon of mass destruction.

It isn't good for a writer to be introspective. First thing you know, he starts thinking about what he's thinking and he's in trouble. It gets so he can't put words down on paper without considering how wrong, inadequate or idiotic they are and he ends up not being able to write anything at all.

I feel that way about Iraq. I've had so many thoughts about what we did there, what we're doing there and all the complicated issues about whether we should be there at all that I stammer when I try to write about it.

Was I in on any of the meetings President Bush had with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice or Gen. Tommy Franks? No, of course I wasn't. Did I read any of the reports the President got from the
State Department, the CIA, the FBI or our spies in Iraq? Sorry, no. Did anyone show me the messages that came to the White House from Tony Blair, King Abdullah of Jordan, or Hans Blix of the UN weapons inspection team? They did not, so what business do I have having an opinion?

My problem is that having opinions is what I do for a living. If I didn't have opinions, many of them uninformed, I wouldn't have anything to write about at all, so I'm reduced to venting my anger about things as insignificant as the words of war. For example, I disliked it when government officials and military analysts used the phrase “coalition forces,” as if we had a bunch of countries fighting on our side when we didn't. We had only Great Britain and Australia. It was hardly what you could call a “coalition.”

I boiled over when reporters started using the word “troops” as a synonym for “soldiers.” “Our troops,” they'd say. One reporter said, “Seven American troops were captured.” A troop is not a soldier. A troop is a group of soldiers and several groups of soldiers were not captured.

I'm at a loss to know what to think or write now about Iraq. We have found no evidence that Saddam had the weapons we went there to eliminate. It's embarrassing. It seems likely that if we keep looking, we're going to find some barrels of toxic substances somewhere but nothing with which Saddam could have mounted a massive attack—least of all on us.

The United States is standing guard now in Iraq but why, with Saddam Hussein gone, is not clear. I remember a story about a Russian czar who was walking in his palace garden one day and wondered why there was always a soldier standing guard near one little patch of grass. He asked the guard, but the guard didn't know anything except that his captain had ordered him to stand there. The czar went to the captain and asked him, but all the captain knew was that the guard was there because there had always been a guard there.

The czar looked into the story further and found that Catherine the Great, in a previous century, had planted a rosebush where the patch of grass was and ordered a sentry stationed there to make sure no one stepped on the bush. The rosebush had died fifty years before but no
one in charge ever thought to say it didn't need to be guarded any longer.

I don't know what I think, but I know I hope we don't stand guard in Iraq after the rosebush dies.

It seems likely that if there had been a free and open election in Germany in 1940, Adolf Hitler would have been elected dictator. This is the sort of dilemma that democracies do not anticipate or know how to deal with. Right now in Baghdad, which we like to think we've freed of oppressive leadership, it's possible that given a vote, most residents would indicate their preference for a Shiite Muslim leader, who would bring back all the oppressive strictures against women, among other things, that we consider wrong.

A lot of the great things we said we were going to do for Iraq are hard to do because Iraqis are behaving differently from the way we anticipated they would. They don't necessarily want all the things we wanted for them. Many of our boastful predictions of what we were going to do were made for consumption here at home as a way of making our aggression acceptable to Americans.

One of the few good things about boasting is that subsequent to it, the boaster almost always makes a greater effort to fulfill his promises than he otherwise might.

Power is almost never innocuous; someone always gets hurt. We have the power in Iraq now but we're trying to find a way to hand it over to the Iraqis. However, it's difficult to find the right group or person to hand it to. Governments are always formed by relatively small numbers of people who want power.

Because of the faith we have in our democracy, we like to think that an inherent goodness always wells up and leads to the election of the right people—but that's just a dream we have. Most people don't want
power, so don't seek it. They'd rather be led than lead. Unfortunately, the people who do want power are not necessarily the best ones to give it to.

The selection of leaders in Baghdad today is like throwing a deck of cards in the air and letting the cards float to the ground at random. There's no order and the people best able to take over probably aren't the best people to do the job. If we decide who is best able to run Iraq, it would no longer be the democracy we promised to give them.

It is apparent that President Bush and his aides are honestly seeking a good solution to the problem. We always try to solve a problem as if there was a good answer, but it's apparent that very often, there is no good answer.

That's all I have to say on this subject now—and it seems like a good thing.

We've had forty-two Presidents. Of those, twenty-seven ran for re-election. Fifteen made it for a second term. Twelve were defeated. Lyndon Johnson said, “Gee, thanks, but I don't want to do this for four more years.”

Re-election is based partly on luck and partly on performance. Right now, President Bush must be worried that he isn't doing well in either category. For example, it must be galling for him to have to go back to the UN with his hat in his hand and ask for help after he so cavalierly proceeded without the UN's approval when he ordered the attack on Iraq.

To rationalize the war, the President always tries to associate Iraq with terrorism, but there is no evidence that, bad as he was, Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11. It is further embarrassing for the President that no weapons of mass destruction have been found.

The President's speech last Sunday night was a speechy speech that didn't sound at all like George W. Bush. When he talks, the President sounds like a regular guy, but that night he wasn't talking to us; he was speaking at us.

If it was the President's intention to set us all at ease about Iraq, newspapers the next morning didn't help him. Just about every paper put the emphasis on how much rebuilding and stabilizing Iraq is going to cost us, not what a great job the troops are doing there.

The
Washington Post
's headline was typical: “Bush to double Iraq spending.”

The
New York Times
said: “Bush seeks $87 billion and UN help.”

There simply is no doubt that we're spending more of our money and manpower on Iraq than it deserves as a problem for the American people. There are half a dozen countries with evil or inept governments that the world would be better off without but we can't take on all of them and probably shouldn't have taken on Iraq.

The original budget for the Iraq war was something like $80 billion. The $87 billion Bush is requesting for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is additional—and we're all familiar enough with our government to know that spending won't stop there. If, as seems likely, we spend $200 billion before we're through, that would amount to more than $800 for each tax-paying American. Not many of us are happy to come up with that.

President Bush also had the unpleasant job of authorizing an extension in the deployment of Reserve and National Guard troops in Iraq—possibly for up to a year. After this announcement, there were stories on television from Iraq and from the hometowns of those soldiers about how surprised and unhappy they were to hear that the Army was extending their stay. Most of these National Guard soldiers had signed up with the expectation that, in exchange for about $400 a month, they would give up one weekend a month and two weeks once a year. It was a bet they lost and one more bit of bad news that no President running for re-election wants to deliver.

He didn't mean to do it, but President Bush has made the United States the most detested nation in the world. He displays what is seen by many countries as an arrogance that transfers to all of us.

Bush won no friends at the United Nations in 2002 and we need friends.

We are not all powerful and we ought to get used to it and stop acting as if we were. It's no longer possible for us to impose our idea of how people ought to govern themselves in a Muslim country—or any country, for that matter. There aren't weapons enough on earth for us to make everyone else like us.

There was a time as recently as fifty years ago when we could dominate the world with our military power and money, but those days are lost and gone. The oceans that surround us were moats that once protected us from attack, but with ballistic missiles, supersonic airplanes, chemical and biological weapons, oceans are no more than wet spots on the globe.

Our Army with all its tanks and infantry, our Air Force with all its bombers and fighter planes, our Navy with all its battleships and submarines, are no match for one terrorist with a suitcase full of anthrax or one suicidal religious fanatic with a truckload of nitroglycerine. We are shadowboxing with an enemy we can't see or touch. Our West Point graduates are trained to fight a war there will never be.

It doesn't matter what I think, but I think like millions of Americans, and they matter. I was opposed to going into Iraq without the approval of the United Nations. When we moved so quickly into Baghdad and seemed to get rid of Saddam Hussein, I decided I'd been wrong and apologized.

Now I want to apologize again. I want to apologize for apologizing. The people who thought we should not have attacked Iraq without the sanction of the United Nations were right. It wasn't all President Bush's fault. UN delegates were sitting on their hands. The French and the Germans were against it basically because we were for it and
because they had economic interests in Iraq, but now we have to live with our mistake. We're living with it and too many of our guys are dying with it.

The UN has to be a lot smarter than it ever has been to fulfill the promise of the organization. The United Nations has been a nambypamby group and that's partly because the United States has never supported it with any enthusiasm.

It's foolish of us not to put our wholehearted support behind the UN. There simply has to be some power in the world superior to our own—for our own sake. Iraq is the world's problem, it isn't our problem. There are far too many places in the world that have more problems than we can solve.