NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
Sept. 19 -� A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at
the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was
listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on
U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump
building emotional pressure
FINALLY SHE exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we
invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half
pleading. "Surely not!"
What first upset her was my suggestion that, looking back, the French
were right. They tried to stop the United States and Britain from
rushing headlong into this mess. Don't we wish they'd succeeded?
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Then she listened as another panelist and I went through the
now-familiar recitation of Washington's claims before the war, and the
too-familiar realities since: the failure to find weapons of mass
destruction and the inevitable conclusion that Saddam Hussein was not
the threat he was cracked up to be, the fantasy that this war could
be waged on the cheap rather than the $1 billion per week American
taxpayers are now spending, the claim that occupation-
called "liberation"-would be short and sweet, when in fact American
men and women continue to be shot and blown up every day with no end
in sight.
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman's problem was
not that she didn't believe us, it was that she did. She just
desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could
consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in
blood and treasure.
It's not the first time I've come across this reaction. I just spent
a month in the States and met a lot of angry people. A few claim the
press is not reporting "the good things in Iraq," although it's very
hard to see what's good for Americans there. Many more say, "Why
didn't the press warn us?" We did, of course. Many of us who cover
the region-along with the CIA and the State Department and the
uniformed military-have been warning for at least a year that
occupying Iraq would be a dirty, costly, long and dangerous job.
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the
press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The
problem is
that Americans just can't believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the
combination of cynicism, naivet�, arrogance and ignorance that
dragged us
into this quagmire, and they're in a deep state of denial about it.
������ Again and again, you hear people offering their own "real"
reasons
for invading Iraq-conspiracy theories spun not to condemn, but to
condone
the administration's actions. Thus the "real" reason for taking out
Saddam
Hussein, some say, was to eliminate this man who rewarded the
families of
suicide bombers and posed as an implacable enemy of Israel. (Yet the
bombings go on there, and surely the chaos in Iraq does nothing for
the
long-term security of the Jewish state.) Or the "real" reason for
invading
Iraq was to intimidate Syria and Iran. Yet Tehran, if anything, has
grown
more aggressive, and may actually have stepped up its nuclear weapons
program to deter the United States. (After all, that strategy worked
for
North Korea.) Or the "real" reason was to secure America's long-term
supply
of oil, but the destabilization of the region, again, may make that
more
tenuous, not less.
������ But the real problem with such "real" explanations is that
they were
not the ones cited by President George W. Bush and British Prime
Minister
Tony Blair as the compelling reasons to rush to war last March. Then,
they
talked about weapons of mass destruction, and the fight against
terrorists.
������ Which brings us to the grandest illusion of all: the link
between
Saddam Hussein and September 11. A Washington Post poll published
earlier
this month concluded that 69 percent of Americans thought it "at least
likely" that the former Iraqi leader was personally involved in the
attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. There's nothing to back
this up.
So puzzled political scientist and pollsters, with evident disdain
for the
public, suggested the connection is just the result of fuzzy
thinking: Al
Qaeda is evil, Saddam is evil, the attacks on 9/11 were evil and
folks just
draw dumb conclusions. Other analysts pointed the finger at the
administration, which spins harder and faster than Hurricane Isabel to
convince us the war in Iraq is part of the war on terror begun on
September
11, without quite explaining where it fits in.
������ Yet just this week President Bush himself (and Donald
Rumsfeld, too!)
admitted that information to substantiate this popular fantasy just
doesn't
exist. "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with
September 11," Bush said flatly, almost matter-of-factly, on
Wednesday.
������ Is the president taking a chance here? Will the public recoil
in
horror, claiming he's somehow lied to them? I don't think so.
������ Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq
war is
not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or
terror.
It's about American pride. And people-perfectly intelligent people-
have
always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face,
to
protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see
what's
right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of
political
schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he
said,
until "a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a
battlefield."
������ Well, that's what's happening right now. It's not only
American money
and lives that are being lost, it's pride. But people in the United
States
will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
������ Unfortunately for those of us who live abroad, that's much
harder to
do-and that's why the woman at the American University in Paris the
other
evening was really so angry. When I stopped her in the hall afterward
she
said she was terribly upset because even though she's lived in France
for
years, and is married to a Frenchman, the behavior of people here in
the
last few months has made her bitter.
������� I know just how she feels. The media talk about anti-
Americanism,
but what's really noxious right now is an insufferable smugness, a
pervasive
air of schadenfreude, and I fear it's a symptom of still worse to
come from
this Iraq adventure. Because the bitterest contradiction of all may
be that
this war was waged-first and foremost-to save face after the
humiliation and
suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and
Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others
insisted
it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look
weaker. And
the worst news of all it that it's not because of what was done to us
by our
enemies but because of what we've done to ourselves.
