The Scum at the Top
Commentary on the Rats in Washington
We've Been Here Before
By Anna Quindlen
Newsweek
© October 31, 2005
Page 70
What was the cause, the point, the strategy?
Suddenly many Americans started to realize that there
was no good answer.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a tapering wall of black
granite cut into the grass of Constitution Gardens. Maya
Lin envisioned a scar when she designed it, a scar on this
land, which is exactly right. Maybe someday his security
detail could drive George W. Bush over to take a look.
He'll be able to see himself in the reflective surface.
The list of names etched into the wall begins with a
soldier who died in 1959 and ends with one who died in
1975. Nearly 60,000 dead are commemorated here. It is
the most personal of war memorials. You can touch the
cold names with your warm fingers.
The president never wanted the war in Iraq to be personal.
His people forbade photographs of coffins arriving home.
They refused to keep track of how many Iraqis had been
killed and wounded. When "Nightline" devoted a show to
the faces of soldiers who had died, one conservative
broadcast outlet even pulled the program from its lineup.
The president wanted this to be about policy, not about
people. Even that did not go well. The policy became a
moving target. First there were weapons of mass destruction
that were not there and direct links to the terrorists who
attacked on September 11 that didn't exist. The removal
of Saddam Hussein was given as the greatest good; it has
been done. Then it became the amorphous goal of bringing
freedom to the Iraqi people, as though liberty were
flowers and we were FTD. The elections, the constitution,
the rubble, the dead. Once again we were destroying the
village in order to save it.
This all took an unfortunate turn for the administration
during the president's vacation in August, when Cindy
Sheehan showed up at his ranch. Say what you would about
her politics or tactics, there was no doubt that she was
a mother whose soldier son was now dead, and who wanted
to know why. What was the cause, the point, the strategy?
And suddenly many Americans started to realize that there
was no good answer.
The Vietnam Memorial stands, in part, as a monument to
blind incrementalism, to men who refused to stop, not
because of wisdom but because of ego, because of the fear
of looking weak. Not enough troops, not enough planning,
no real understanding of the people or the power of the
insurgency, dwindling public support. The war in Iraq is
a disaster in the image and likeness of its predecessor.
During each election cycle, we ponder the question of
whether character matters. Of course it does. Does anyone
doubt that the continued prosecution of this war has to do
with the personality of the commander in chief, a man who
is stubborn and calls it strength, who wears blinders and
calls it vision? When he vowed to invade Iraq, the advisers
he heeded were those who, like him, had never seen combat.
The one who had was marginalized and is now gone. The
investigation of who leaked what to whom, of what the
reporter knew and how she knew it, may be about national
security and journalistic ethics, but at its base it is
about something more important: the Nixonian lengths to
which these people will go to shore up a bankrupt policy
and destroy those who cross them on it.
The most unattractive trait of the American empire is
American arrogance, which the president embodies and which
this war elevated. It is not simply that we have a good
system. It is the system everyone else should have. It is
the best system, and we are the best people. We can mend
rivalries so ancient that they not only predate our nation
but the birth of Christ. We will install the leaders we like
in a country we scarcely understand, leaders who will either
be seen as puppets by their people or who will eventually
turn against us. We have been here before.
"In Vietnam we didn't have the lessons of Vietnam to guide
us," says David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer Prize for
his coverage of that war. "In Iraq we did have those lessons.
The tragedy is that we didn't pay attention to them." Or
maybe only our leaders did not. The polls show the American
people have turned on this war much more quickly than they
did on the war in Vietnam. Of course, they are the ones who
pay the price.
Perhaps the leaders of the Democratic Party should take
time off from their fund-raisers and visit the Vietnam Memorial,
too. They should remember one of the most powerful men the
party ever produced, Lyndon B. Johnson, and how he was
destroyed by opposition to the war in Vietnam and bested
by those brave enough to speak against it.
At least Johnson had the good sense to be heartbroken by
the body bags. Bush appears merely peevish at being
criticized. Someone with a trumpet should play taps outside
the White House for the edification of a president who has
not attended a single funeral for the Iraqi war dead. As I
am writing this, the number of American soldiers killed is
1,992. By the time you read it, it may have topped 2,000.
Will I be writing these same things when the number is 3,000,
5,000, 10,000? If we are such a great nation, why are we
utterly incapable of learning from our mistakes? America's
sons and daughters are dying to protect the egos of those
whose own children are safe at home. Again.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
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January 15, 2007