On Sept. 11 it was as if someone had gone down into the cellar, retrieved an
old war movie, and said, "Attention everybody. Now we're gonna watch this."
Pundits noted how George W. Bush was so presidential. Well, he was. He knew what
to do.
So did the conservatives. I still shake my head at how the conservatives
— not the stupid ones, but the smart ones — joined the parade at the
first flag unfurling. They had no doubts about a War on Terror. A police action
against al Qaeda I could understand. But a War on Terror? A war on militant
Islam? A war to politically reconstruct the Middle East? What the hell?
The conservatives marched away. Their radio talk shows, to which I tuned
regularly, are now war, war, war, all the time, and a disgusting mockery of the
French as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys."
The left is saying what I am saying if you stop at the first slogan, "No Iraq
War." I have one of those signs in my window. But I am not one of them. Never
have been.
I focus in and out of the news in a dispirited way. It is daily minutiae of a
dull game — votes in the Security Council, what the French said, whether
Saddam has violated U.N. resolution something-or-other, what Hans Blix said, blah
blah blah. Everything the inspectors find is a reason for war and everything they
don't find is a reason for war. There is no focus on essential questions.
Recently I saw a story about the missiles that Iraq had not given up. The TV
showed several of these white-finned cylinders, perhaps two feet in diameter,
stacked on the back of a truck. No mention of the range. Three newspaper accounts
later, I found their suspected range, 93 miles.
Iraq has missiles that go 93 miles. Well.
Then there is all the talk of "weapons of mass destruction." The announcers no
longer say what sort of weapons those are, but I remember they are chemical,
biological, and nuclear, and I am cynical about why such radically dissimilar
things are put in a common category, and given that particular name. I am
skeptical of whether any of them is a threat to me.
I listen to my president and he says he must disarm Iraq to protect the United
States. I don't believe him. I didn't believe everything my government said
before, but I did, in fact, believe many things it said. Now I find that some of
the things Saddam Hussein's government says actually make more sense, and that is
not a comforting thought.
I see American troops, young and robust, eating their pouches of hot
jambalaya. They are my country's soldiers. I don't want them killed. And yet I
don't yearn for their triumphal entry into Baghdad because I don't want them to
be in Baghdad. I think of the taking of Seoul by the Marines in 1950, half a
century ago, and that American troops are still in Korea, and that their being
there is part of a whole other problem that I might be thinking about.
I think of a cold beer.
