[Vision2020] Pride and prejudices

[Ralph Nielsen]

>
>       Pride and Prejudices
>
>       How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and 
> why
> they've had to.
>
>
>             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? 
> (Readers, please
> address hate mail to <shadowland@newsweek.com>)
>
>              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, naiveté, 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.
>
>
>              © 2003 Newsweek, Inc.