Why Are We at War? (3 page)

So, Saddam had managed to survive seven years of inspection from 1991 to 1998. He had made deals—most of them under the counter—with the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Jordanians; the list is long. He also knew how to play on the sympathies of the third world. He convinced many a good heart. The continuing cruelty of America was starving the Iraqi children. The Iraqi children were, in large part, seriously malnourished by the embargo Saddam had brought upon himself, but indeed, if they had been healthy, he would have kept a score of six-year-olds starving long enough to dispatch a proper photograph around the globe. He was no good and he could prove it. He did so well at the games he played that he succeeded in declaring the inspections at an end by 1998.

There had been talk before, and there was certainly
talk then in the White House, that we had to send troops into Iraq as our reply to such flouting of the agreement. Unfortunately, Clinton’s adventure with Monica Lewinsky had left him a paralyzed warrior. In the midst of his public scandal, he could not afford to shed one drop of American blood. The proof was in Kosovo, where no American infantry went in with NATO and our bombers never dropped their product from any height within range of Serbian anti-aircraft. We did it all from fifteen thousand feet up. So Iraq was out of the question. Al Gore was a hawk at the time, ready, doubtless, to improve his future campaign image and rise thereby from wonk to stud—a necessary qualification for the presidency—but Clinton’s vulnerability stifled all that.

So in 1998, Saddam Hussein got away with it. There had been no inspections since. Colin Powell’s speech was full of righteous indignation at the barefaced and heinous bravado of Saddam the Evil, but Powell was, of course, too intelligent a man to be surprised by these discoveries of malfeasance. The speech was an attempt to heat up America’s readiness
to go to war. By the measure of our polls, half of the citizenry were unready. And this part of his speech certainly succeeded. The proof was that a good many Democratic senators who had been on the fence declared that they were in on the venture now; yes, they too were ready for war, God bless us.

The major weakness in Powell’s presentation of the evidence was, however, the evidential link of Iraq to al Qaeda. It was, given the powerful auspices of the occasion, more than a bit on the sparse side. With the exception of Britain, the states with veto power in the Security Council, the French, the Chinese, and the Russians, were obviously not eager to satisfy the Bush passion to go to war as soon as possible. They wanted time to intensify inspections. They looked to containment as a solution.

Not a week later, al Jazeera offered a recorded broadcast by bin Laden which gave a few hints that he and Saddam were now ready, conceivably, to enter into direct contact, even though he called the
“socialists” in Baghdad “infidels.” But this last statement was in immediate contradiction to what he had just finished saying a moment earlier: “It does no hurt under these conditions [of attack by the West] that the interests of Muslims [will ultimately] contradict the interest of the socialists in the fight against the Crusaders.”

Bin Laden may have chosen to be ambiguous and two-sided in his remarks, but the suggestion of a common interest, despite all, between al Qaeda and Saddam was also there. Was it finally happening? Had the enemy of Saddam’s enemy now become Saddam’s friend? If so, that could prove a disaster. We might vanquish Iraq and still suffer from the catastrophe we claimed to be going to war to avert. Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction could yet belong to bin Laden.

Without those weapons, al Qaeda would have to scrape and scratch. But if Saddam were to make transfer of even a sizable fraction of his biowarfare and chemical stores, bin Laden would be considerably more dangerous. The inner diktat of George W.
Bush to go to war with Iraq as rapidly as possible now had to face the possibility that Saddam had come up with an exceptional countermove. Was he saying, in effect, “Allow me to string along the inspections, and you are still relatively safe. You may be certain I will not rush to give my very best stuff to Osama bin Laden so long as we can keep playing this inspection game back and forth, back and forth. Go to war with me, however, and Osama will smile. I may go down in flames, but he and his people will be happy. Be certain, he wants you to go to war with me.”

Since the sequence of these kinds of moves was present from the beginning, it could be asked, as indeed more than a few Americans were now asking: How did we allow such choices in the first place—these hellish Hobson’s choices?

Meanwhile, the world was reacting in horror to the Bush agenda for war. The European edition of
Time
magazine had been conducting a poll on its website: “Which country poses a greater danger to world peace in 2003?” With 318,000 votes cast, the responses were: North Korea, 7 percent; Iraq, 8 percent; the United States, 84 percent …

As John le Carré had put it to
The Times
of London: “America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember.”

Harold Pinter no longer chose to be subtle in language:

… The American administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary. Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture of their government, but seem to be helpless.
    Unless Europe finds the solidarity, intelligence, courage and will to challenge and resist American power, Europe itself will deserve Alexander Herzen’s declaration “We are not the doctors. We are the disease.”

According to Reuters, on February 15, more than 4 million people “from Bangkok to Brussels, from Canberra to Calcutta … took to the streets to pillory Bush as a bloodthirsty warmonger.”

A quick review of the two years since George W. Bush took office may offer some light on why we are where we are. He came into office with the possibility of a recession, plus all the unhappy odor of his investiture through an election that could best be described as legitimate/illegitimate. America had learned all over again that Republicans had fine skills for dirty legal fighting. They were able to call, after all, on a powerful gene stream. The Republicans who led the campaign to seize Florida in the year 2000 are descended from 125 years of lawyers and bankers with the cold nerve and fired-up greed to foreclose on many a widow’s home or farm. Nor did these lawyers and bankers walk about suffused with guilt. They had the moral equivalent of Teflon on their souls. Church on Sunday, foreclose on Monday. Of
course their descendants won in Florida. The Democrats still believed there were cherished rules to the game. They did not understand that rules no longer apply when the stakes are immense.

If Bush’s legitimacy was in question then from the start, his performance as President was arousing scorn. When he spoke extempore, he sounded simple. When more articulate subordinates wrote his speeches, he had trouble fitting himself to the words.

Then September 11 altered everything. It was as if our TV sets had come alive. For years we had been watching maelstrom extravaganzas on the tube, and enjoying them. We were insulated. A hundredth part of ourselves could step into the box and live with the fear. Now, an invasion from the Beyond! An Appearance! Gods and demons were invading the United States, coming in right off the TV screen. This may account in part for the odd, unaccountable guilt so many felt after September 11. It was as if untold divine forces were erupting in fury.

And, of course, we were not in shape to feel free
of guilt about September 11. The manic money-grab excitement of the Nineties had never been altogether separated from our pervasive American guilt. We were happy to be prosperous, but we still felt guilty. We are a Christian nation. The
Judeo
in
Judeo-Christian
is a grace note. We are a Christian nation. The supposition of a great many good Christians in America is that you were not meant to be all that rich. God didn’t necessarily want it. For certain, Jesus did not. You weren’t supposed to pile up a mountain of moolah. You were obligated to spend your life in altruistic acts. That was still one half of the good Christian psyche. The other half, pure American, was, as always: Beat everybody. One can offer a cruel but conceivably accurate remark: To be a mainstream American is to live as an oxymoron. You are a good Christian, but you strain to remain dynamically competitive. Of course, Jesus and Evel Knievel don’t consort too well in one psyche. Human rage and guilt do take on their uniquely American forms.

Even before September 11, many matters grew worse. America’s spiritual architecture had been buttressed since World War II by our near-mythical institutions of security, of which the FBI and the Catholic Church were most prominent, equal in special if intangible stature to the Constitution and the Supreme Court.

Now, all that was taking its terrible whack. Old and new scandals of the FBI were brought into high focus by the Hanssen case, which broke in February 2001. An ultra-devout Catholic, Robert Hanssen had been a Soviet mole for fifteen years. No one in the FBI could believe it. He had seemed the purest of the pure anti-Communists. Then after September 11 came the pedophile lawsuits against the Catholic Church, and that opened a grieving abyss of a wound in many a good Catholic home. It certainly wounded the priesthood grievously. How could a young or middle-aged man wearing the collar walk down the street now without suffering from the
averted eyes and false greetings of the parishioners he met along the way?

Then there was the stock market. It kept sinking. Slowly, steadily, unemployment rose. The CEO scandals of the corporations became more prominent.

America had been putting up with the ongoing expansion of the corporation into American life since the end of World War II. It had been the money cow to the United States. But it had also been a filthy cow that gave off foul gases of mendacity and manipulation by an extreme emphasis on advertising. Put less into the product but kowtow to its marketing. Marketing was a beast and a force that succeeded in taking America away from most of us. It succeeded in making the world an uglier place to live in since the Second World War. One has only to cite fifty-story high-rise architecture as inspired in form as a Kleenex box with balconies, shopping malls encircled by low-level condominiums, superhighways with their vistas into the void, and, beneath it all, the pall of plastic, ubiquitous plastic, there to numb an infant’s tactile
senses, plastic, front-runner in the competition to see which new substance could make the world more disagreeable. To the degree that we have distributed this crud all over the globe, we were already wielding a species of world hegemony. We were exporting the all-pervasive aesthetic emptiness of the most powerful American corporations. There were no new cathedrals being built for the poor—only sixteen-story urban-renewal housing projects that sat on the soul like jail.