Sam Stein '04 alleges that a "Smells Like Mujahideen Spirit" marketing campaign was deceptively used by the president to sell us war in Iraq ("The Godfather," Tuesday, April 15, 2003).
It's amazing to me that someone who makes use of the word "euphemism" in an column could, in the same column, call the overthrow of a fascist dictator a "business transaction" brokered on the equity of Sept. 11.
Say it ain't so, Sam:
"Playing off American fears, terms such as 'weapons of mass destruction,' became nauseating fixtures of every media outlet and political debate."
It's tiresome to have apocalyptic scenarios drummed in day after day. But nauseous was the very least the Kurds in Halabja felt when Saddam used one of his media "fixtures" to gas them to death, all while American forces -- acting on a real "Blood For Oil" imperative from the first Bush administration -- turned a blind eye.
But we knew that already:
"The public was reminded of the chemical bombing of northern Kurdish villages 12 years ago (never mind that such genocide has occurred in Hama and Rwanda)."
Should the public not have been reminded of it? Was the injustice ever righted until last week? This argument has been trotted out before and in equally bad faith by the true ad-men of this debate who peddle statutes of limitation on human rights abuses: "You know, 12 years is a long time; why suddenly the renewed interest?" By implication then, ousting Saddam would have been justified if only he had bothered to slaughter people more recently? Rats! Never mind that he has. And never mind that the question of what to do in Rwanda in 1994 similarly fomented an anti-war crowd calling any proposed intervention "neo-colonialist." (Frankly, I'd like to see the public occasionally reminded of Madeline Albright's veto of international aid to Rwanda when she was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.) In the case of Hama, we can take minor, if inadequate, comfort in the fact that the remaining Baathist thugs who participated in the mass murder of Syrian townsfolk two decades ago have recently lost a strong contingent of comrades to the south.
While we're on this subject of policy "brand management," Stein curiously makes no mention of the prefab jingle of U.S. imperialism whistled by die-hard doves whenever the inevitable confrontation with autocracy and tribalism re-enters the international marketplace. It's an old tune, really; a sales pitch for inaction which predates the war on terror. It was heard during the crises in Bosnia and Kosovo, when isolationists on both the Left and the Right argued against deploying American troops to forcibly remove irredentist megalomaniacs whose ambitions exceeded available earth in which to bury the bodies of their victims.
History has an unfunny way of repeating its ironies when the real would-be Sun Kings of Greater Serbia and Croatia are spoken of as noble anti-imperialists by people who don't know a struggle for civilization when they see one. Luckily, owing to a previous albeit more reluctant coalition of the willing, one tyrant is presently right where he belongs: in the dock in the Netherlands. He may well have friends to play with soon enough, thanks to this newfangled Western imperialism.
Our only fault as "consumers" of these modern atrocities is not doing something about them sooner and trying to find clever ways to excuse ourselves from quarrels that would eventually become our own, anyway. There was an old poster in the late 1930s that joked, "Visit GermanyBefore Germany Visits You." Fascism is nothing if not a consistent travel agent.
If you think the same does not, or did not, apply to Iraq, there are a number of Kuwaitis, and even a few Iranians with long-term memories, who would be happy to have a word with you.
Just once I'd like to hear a peacenik utter a self-criticism. Instead the liberation of a country is met with more arch casuistry about motive, cynical claims on media coverage and predictions of future gloom and doom in Baghdad. Might the shoe-throwers and statue demolitionists at least have a moment to catch their breath? It's been a tough 23 years, you know.
And it's worth mentioning that in those 23 years Iraq was never a "stable" or containable polity for the very reason that it was -- if we are to be technical about such things -- already under an internal "occupation" by a sadistic kleptocrat with but a single expressed regret in life -- failing to procure a nuclear warhead before invading Kuwait.
So is there a long road of recovery and reconstruction ahead? Absolutely. Even Bush doesn't try to spin that.
Stein is right about one thing, though. "There was nothing personal about this war."
It wasn't waged as a heady cowboy vendetta, much to the chagrin of those who evidently think John Wayne would have bothered at all with the United Nations. (And if there's any filial axe to grind here, it must be an Oedipal one because this particular cowboy just made his half-measure daddy look quite the fool.)
Nor was the war a $20 billion wag-the-dog distraction from current domestic politics. It's still the economy, stupid, but I doubt even the oracular Paul Wolfowitz knew the 2000 bubble would burst in 1978, when he first brought the threat of Saddam Hussein to Washington's reluctant attention. (No shit! Someone in the White House has actually had it in for Saddam for that long. He even wrote it down and everything.)
The war wasn't personal because even the released Iraqi political prisoners and family members of the regime's victims are, I think, aware that beneath their undeniable lust for recompense what has just happened in their nation is larger than themselves. Nonetheless, it'll be interesting to see if the Arab Solzhenitsyns, Sakharovs and Havels who emerge from a postwar Iraq to challenge our imaginations with their grim real life horror stories are met with as much enthusiasm on the New York Times Bestsellers List as Michael Moore.
The war wasn't personal. But I wish the same could be said of so many of its opponents who stood resolute from the start, immune to whatever self-incriminating evidences Saddam himself provided, and who continue even now to call it an unjust endeavor. Unjust even as Iraqi sanctions are, as I write this, in the process of being lifted (remember that activist button?) and even as the weapons inspectors are finally, at long last, being given all the time in the world to do their job.
There's just no pleasing some people.
I do know for a fact that many who lined the streets in our cities have done so before -- and will no doubt do so again -- to denounce another long-term and far-reaching American interest: globalism. Their attentions so undividedly kept in country, is it any wonder they have trouble conceiving of individuals more reactionary than George W. Bush and John Ashcroft?
It doesn't appear so. Just yesterday I saw a fresh bit of graffiti on a familiar New York subway terminal. The scrawl hadn't been there the day before, yet I recognized it immediately. It's become a kind of signature motif among the intellectually retarded Basquiats in the "movement" who are taking the contemporary Manhattan protest world by storm. You know what it said?
"Bush"... with the "s" replaced by a swastika.
Ah well. Not in my name.
