Out of My Mind (24 page)

I hope we remain the strongest country in the world because we usually do what's right. It isn't a sure thing that we will remain as dominant as we are, however. We can't imagine it any other way, but Great Britain, France and Germany are not the dominant countries they used to be in the world. Japan is fading. It could happen to us—may be happening.

Something I read in college keeps coming to me and I can't remember the source. It was that ancient Greece and Rome didn't go into decline because there was anything wrong with the principles on which their civilizations were based. They went into decline because the people who believed in those principles became a minority and they were overrun by people who didn't understand those principles at all. There must have been some Greek and Roman George Bushes.

The reporting from Iraq has been pretty thin. We don't learn much about what our soldiers in Iraq are thinking or doing. There's no Ernie Pyle to tell us and, if there were, the military would make it difficult or impossible for him to let us know.

It would be interesting to have a reporter ask a group of our soldiers in Iraq to answer five questions and see the results:

Treating soldiers fighting their war as brave heroes is an old civilian trick designed to keep the soldiers at it. But you can be sure our soldiers in Iraq are not all brave heroes gladly risking their lives for us sitting comfortably back here at home.

Our soldiers in Iraq are people, young men and women, and they behave like people—sometimes good and sometimes bad, sometimes brave, sometimes cowardly. It's disingenuous of the rest of us to encourage them to fight this war by idolizing them. We pin medals on their chests to keep them going. We speak of them as if they volunteered to risk their lives to save ours but there isn't much voluntary about what most of them have done. A relatively small number are professional soldiers. During the last few years, when millions of jobs disappeared, many young people, desperate for some income, enlisted in the Army. About 40 percent of our soldiers in Iraq enlisted in the National Guard or the Army Reserve to pick up some extra money and never thought they'd be called on to fight. They want to come home.

One indication that not all soldiers in Iraq are happy warriors is the report released by the Army showing the large number of them who committed suicide there last year. We must support our soldiers in Iraq because it's our fault they're risking their lives there. However, we should not bestow the mantle of heroism on all of them for simply being where we sent them. Most are victims, not heroes.

America's intentions are honorable. I believe that and we must find a way of making the rest of the world believe it. We want to do the right thing. We care about the rest of the world. President Bush's intentions were honorable when he took us into Iraq. They were not well thought out but not dishonorable, either.

President Bush's determination to make the evidence fit the action he took, which it does not, has made things look worse. We pay lip service to the virtues of openness and honesty, but for some reason we too often act as though there was a better way of handling a bad situation than by being absolutely open and honest.

If you were going to make a list of the great times in American history, you'd start with the day in 1492 when Columbus got here.

The Revolution when we won our independence would be on the list.

Beating Hitler. The unconditional German surrender at Reims on May 8, 1945.

The day we put Americans on the moon was a special occasion.

We've had a lot of great days.

Our darkest days up until now have been things like presidential assassinations—four of them. The stock market crash in 1929, Pearl Harbor and 9/11, of course.

The day the world learned that American soldiers had tortured Iraqi prisoners should be put high on the list of our country's worst. It's a
black mark on our record that will be in the history books in a hundred languages for a hundred years. It altered the world's perception of us.

The image printed in newspapers of one bad woman with a naked man on a leash did more to damage America's reputation all over the world than all the good things we've done ever helped our reputation. Other guards put hoods over the heads of prisoners, stripped them naked, beat them and left them hanging from the bars of their prison cells by their wrists. The hoods made it difficult for them to breathe. Impossible sometimes, and some died of slow asphyxiation.

What were the secrets they were trying to get from captured Iraqis? What important information did that poor devil on the leash have that he wouldn't have given to anyone in exchange for a crust of bread or a sip of water?

One prisoner reported that a guard told him, “I'm going to make you wish you'd die and you're not going to.”

Our general in charge said our guards were “untrained.” Untrained at what? Being human beings? Should we excuse the Iraqi who chopped off Nicholas Berg's head because he was untrained?

The guards who tortured prisoners are faced with a year in prison. A year for destroying America's reputation.

I don't want them in prison anyway. Take away their right to call themselves American, that's what I'd do.

In the history of the world, several great civilizations that seemed immortal have deteriorated and died. I don't want to be dramatic, but I've lived a long while and, for the first time in my life, I have this faint, far-away fear that it could happen to us in America as it happened to the Greek and Roman civilizations. Too many Americans don't understand what we have here and how hard it is to keep it. I worry for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I want them to have what I've had . . . and I sense it could be slipping away from them.

Democracy has worked so well and lasted so long for us in the United States of America that we assume popular government is what every country should have. That probably isn't true in a lot of places, and Iraq maybe one of them.

The people of Iraq never had what we have. They don't understand democracy and there's no great demand for it from the people. The history of the region is hundreds of years of tribal war. Iraq is a disaster state. The people are largely uneducated, any government they've had has been corrupt and they produce almost nothing of any value but oil. The women weave some nice rugs but it's a cottage industry. Their oil is an accident of nature.

Most Americans are not committed to this war. They are committed to supporting our soldiers, but they don't know a Shiite from a Sunni and couldn't care less about the Kurds.

A democracy like ours, where people decide for themselves what's best for them, depends on the people who vote knowing what's going on. That's why good newspapers and responsible television news are important. Iraq has almost none of that.

I've often thought we should mount a huge advertising campaign in Iraq to convince the people that we're really nice guys just trying to help them, but I'm dreaming. How would we tell them anything? Few Iraqi homes have a television sets. Fewer than one out of every fifty people read a newspaper. It wouldn't help if they had a newspaper delivered to their door every morning because something like 50 percent of the people can't read. And, of course, you couldn't deliver a newspaper to their door anyway because a lot of Iraqis don't have a door to deliver it to.

What kind of a democracy could you have in a country like that? It's a sad state of affairs for the 25 million Iraqis because they are human beings like us, but their lives are beyond our ability to improve.

Before Vietnam, Americans used to enjoy saying we never lost a war. Well, we lost that one and we're losing this one. I don't know what promises we've made to those Iraqis who have worked with us, but I suppose they're one big reason Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush haven't said we should leave. The friends we have will be slaughtered when we leave, and we ought to devote our energies to finding a way to prevent that. Our incursion into this Middle Eastern morass isn't working. What has it done for us, for the Iraqis, or for the world?

It would be difficult now for President Bush to tell the Iraqis we're leaving after killing thousands of their people and laying waste to half a dozen of their major cities. Here at home, the families of several thousand soldiers who've been killed might never forgive him. It would otherwise be nothing more than politically embarrassing if Bush came out and admitted he was wrong.

Admitting we're wrong has become popular. Everybody is always scoring points by admitting they were wrong. President Bush has got to admit that going to war in Iraq was a serious mistake. He sent our soldiers in there without knowing what they were going to do, or how they were going to get out when they finished doing it.

I have a friend who spent time in Iraq working for the government as an architect. He says of all the Middle Eastern countries, Iraq is closest to being enlightened. It is not enlightened, he said, but it comes closest. For example, women have more rights in Iraq than in many Muslim countries, and I thought of that when I saw how many women voted in the Iraqi election. Iraqis going to vote looked like average, ordinary people and I felt bad about having distanced myself from them in my mind.

The apparent success of the elections in Iraq is a disappointment to people who dislike President Bush. They're unhappy when the news about anything is good for the President.

I know people who dislike President Bush so much they're disappointed when the market goes up even though they own a lot of stock.

No one in our country knows what the Iraqis were voting for or who won. However, it didn't really matter and most Americans were surprised by the number of Iraqis who risked their lives to vote.

The election was also a pleasant surprise because we had not thought Iraqis cared that much about the democratic process from which they had been so long separated.

Reporters and cameramen don't dare circulate among the people of Iraq because of the danger of being blown up or kidnapped and beheaded, so we haven't been seeing average Iraqi people on television. Most reporters are forced to stay in safe compounds, isolated from the Iraqi people. Some of what they said on camera was even written for them in New York. The joke in network newsrooms was that before going on the air from Iraq the reporter would call the writers in New York and ask, “What's it like over here?”

We're all enthusiastic about democracy in a general way, but there is a limit to what public opinion, as expressed by its vote, can accomplish. People are often so uninformed and dumb that it's a miracle democracy works at all. That must be as true in Iraq as it is here. “The public,” someone once said, “is a idiot.” It doesn't really know what it thinks and there's no guarantee the people it elects will do what they promise to do anyway.

We aren't talking a lot about it because it's an uncomfortable subject, but religion is as basic to our problem in Iraq, as it is in many countries we deal with where spirituality plays a dominant role. Americans know little or nothing about Islam. They are even uncertain about when to use “Islam,” when to use “Muslim,” or even whether the word is spelled “Muslim” or “Moslem.”

When I was young, Muslims were called “Mohammedans.”

It's strange for proud Americans who have never doubted the honorable intentions of their leaders to feel tentative with their support right now. That's how the administration's approval of torturing prisoners has made a lot of us feel.

There is no justification for torture. The information elicited can never be trusted. It has been well established by military people who have held enemy prisoners that torture, besides being uncivilized, is not an effective way of eliciting information.

Is there something we don't know? Has the CIA been able to get lists of names of the Iraqis who plan to blow up landmarks like the Statue of Liberty or the Sears Tower by holding prisoners under water until they're close to drowning? This is a torture technique known to the CIA as “water-boarding.” Have we been able to get the dates when their operatives plan to attack by water-boarding Iraqis? When an enemy captures American soldiers, which will inevitably happen, will Americans be subjected to water-boarding?

The
Washington Post
published an article saying that the CIA had set up secret detention centers in as many as eight countries. This made a lot of people wonder what was going on in those prisons. The CIA promptly demanded a criminal inquiry into the source of the
Post
's article. My friend Ben Bradlee, the former
Post
editor, still has a major role there and I worry about him. I don't know how Ben would stand up to torture if the CIA set out to make him reveal where the
Post
got its information.

What has our Central Intelligence Agency learned of vital importance by torturing prisoners? They should tell us about the results they've obtained from torture that make it acceptable to them. Even if they told us, I don't think most Americans would approve of torturing anyone. The prisoners we have done unspeakable things to—including killing some of them during their torture—are mostly Iraqi soldiers. They know as much about the secrets of their leaders as I knew about the day and date of D-Day when I was in the Army in England waiting
for the invasion of France in 1944. Nothing. Soldiers don't get in on planning the actions in which they are killed.