See it as the next front or see it as the next affront, but Washington has plans for Iraq, and they are not benign. Why would the United States, you ask, no sooner after conducting a war in one country, want to launch a war in yet another?
In this context, I’ll introduce you to a favorite New Yorker cartoon of mine (and who doesn’t have one?) of a book editor holding on to a manuscript and looking across his desk at a writer. From their fashion statement and long sideburns, we know they are characters from the Victorian era. The editor, somewhat exasperated, is saying: "Mr. Dickens, Mr. Dickens, it can be the best of times or the worst of times, but surely it can’t be both."
If that incident had taken place in the real world, we know that Charles Dickens must have faced down his editor about the seemingly contradictory opening sentence in his novel, "A Tale of Two Cities."
There are a lot of commentators around today, playing the role of that imaginary editor, who appear to have a similar problem with the seal of the United States of America. That seal, you will recall, is of an eagle with eyes cast toward the talons that clutch branches, symbolizing peace; the other foot clasps arrows. What these commentators in effect want is for the eagle to drop the branches and shift its gaze toward the arrows.
Time to fight. Time to go on the warpath. Time to look around, after Afghanistan, for other fronts, for the next country where American Special Forces and B52s can kick uppity Third World peoples where it really hurts. Branches and arrows don’t go together. Drop the former, and let’s go with the latter.
A long search through Nexus (part of a columnist’s crash course on the national mood today) reveals that virtually every major newspaper and magazine in the country has had commentators talking about the next target of the eagle, now that its talons no longer clutch on to any branches.
Which one? You guessed right. The next target is Iraq. And it is as if that wretched country and its equally wretched people have not suffered enough privations over the last decade.
There is no doubt, it is now clear, that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader whose continued survival has haunted three American presidents since the Gulf War, is now on the current administration’s hit list, despite repeated claims by Bush aides that the president "hasn’t decided what to do about Iraq."
Middle East experts, along with several government officials speaking to reporters off the record, however, are in agreement that the question is not if the United States is going to hit Iraq but the question is when. Media commentators and pundits, anxious to sway policy-makers, are cheering from the stands in their op-ed pages and talk shows.
The thrust of this public debate is that deterrence is no longer enough to contain Saddam and finally topple his regime. Newsweek, in a piece that appeared in the De. 31 issue, for example, opined that the "notion that a showdown with Iraq can be avoided in the year to come is inconceivable ... as President Bush has announced on several occasions, he will pick the time to deal with Saddam Hussein. But that time is drawing near."
Earlier this month, I attended a lecture at the auditorium of the Cato Institute on Mass. Av. in Washington, where James Woolsey, a former Clinton appointee, and today one of the highest profile hawks on the media circuit and the op-ed pages, gave a lecture whose main point was that not only should the US attack Iraq, but that any delay in doing so "would endanger American lives." (His lecture was predominantly somber, except for the time when he elicited much laughter by sarcastically telling he audience that the Iraqi president was "re-elected in 1995 with 99.96 percent of the popular vote". Heck, wouldn’t you have laughed too?)
The influential commentator William Buckley Jr. wrote in his nationally syndicated column last Friday that "before any military action takes place, the Iraqi president should be given an "ultimatum." In short, "the ultimatum should require Saddam to remove himself from office. To where? That’s a matter of detail." To Buckley, however, the "military action" was a given.
Victor Comras, the retired foreign service officer who coordinated the international sanctions against Serbia, wrote in the Washington Post on Dec. 31: "The Sept. 11 attacks make it clear that terrorist states’ access to weapons of mass destruction poses the greatest threat to our national security. We cannot wait another six months."
No need to go on.
What’s happening here, alas, is that the US has frightened itself to death after Sept. 11 by giving credence in the new century to mammoth metaphors about "evil doers"— a term coined for President Bush to use in his speeches by one of the White House’s less articulate speech writers — in the same manner it had frightened itself to death by "the threat of communism" in the middle of the last one. (By the way, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the US has survived in fact that threat. Honest. Look it up.)
According to the National Defense Council Foundation, a think tank based in Washington, there were 59 wars around the world last year, both grand and petty. Why start the count in 2002 by waging a war against a country whose people continue to suffer the ravages of what happened to them a decade or more ago? Conquering Iraq today, one suspects, would be to the US what conquering Mt. Everest was to Sir Edmond Hillary in 1953 — because it’s there. Because it’s still standing. And because it’s possible.
In that context, I invoke another favorite New Yorker cartoon of mine, this one of two bulldogs sitting self-confidently in overstuffed armchairs, with legs crossed, in what appears to be an exclusive, wood-paneled men’s club, puffing on cigars and sipping from snifters. One says to the other, with dismissive hauteur, "It’s not enough that dogs win, cats must lose too."
Sure, such cartoons are primarily intended to make us laugh, but ponder how they also coolly eviscerate the temper of our times
