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 | | | | | Pride and Prejudices | | | How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to | |
| 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?
)
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.
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