At War --
Commentary
Bush leads ‘peaceful people’ to war
By RAYMOND A. SCHROTH
The first suggestion that war was inevitable, it seemed to me, was
the decision made by ABC’s “Nightline” many weeks ago to take an
extra hour to produce a special program from the war college with a panel of
generals and correspondents on how they would cover the war.
The media were not going to invest that much time and money in
something that just might not take place.
Since then most of the talk has been not if but when. And soon two
of my best friends, former students, reporters at The New York Times,
were shopping lower Manhattan for flak jackets, camouflage suits and gas masks,
getting their shots and saying goodbye. Today they are “embedded”
with military units in Kuwait.
In mid-February, one, Mike Wilson, spoke to my journalism ethics
class on the qualities of a good reporter: politeness (be a “nice
guy”), hard work and courage. As this is written, those qualities are
being tested.
His first Page 1 story (March 14) was on preparing for death.
Carry your personal items in the cargo pocket of your trousers, which will be
cut open and quickly emptied if you are killed. Search dead Iraqis for military
items such as maps. No trophies. The reporters have taken their malaria pills
and expect diarrhea if they get wet in the Euphrates River or eat local food.
They have practiced pulling on their masks before taking a breath if someone
cries “Gas!” and will drape plastic ponchos over their bodies if
there’s no time to don protective suits.
The morning of March 17, CNN broadcast a simulated urban warfare
training exercise in which a platoon attacked an enemy house, firing paintball
guns -- like college kids playing “guns” in the woods -- in which
half of the participants were “killed.” If the previous Gulf War is a
guide, the American public will not be allowed to see anybody -- American or
Iraqi -- die for some time.
And what will be the effect on the coverage of
“embedding” the reporters with the troops when reporters must
maintain some emotional distance from the troops? Some press critics suggest it
is a Pentagon ploy to guarantee booster stories; the reporters will “fall
in love” with the enthusiastic, beautiful young men and women and censor
themselves if the war goes badly. Others suggest that the writers’
affection for their subjects will turn to just anger against the Bush
administration, which has needlessly turned these young people into killers or
marched them to their deaths.
* * *
In late February and early March, the Pentagon softened up Iraq
with an intensified bombing campaign, knocking out not just antiaircraft sites
but military headquarters and field artillery within range of our advance
routes.
They softened up the American public with a media blitz embedding
a “paintball” image of the war in the national psyche before it
happened. Time and Newsweek have bombarded readers with foldout
maps, high-tech battle gear (M-4 carbine rifle with daytime telescopic sight,
laser sight, two 20-round magazines, flashlight, and old-fashioned bayonet).
The strategy is to pound Baghdad for 48 hours with 3,000 precision-guided bombs
and missiles, more bombs and missiles than used in the whole last Gulf War, as
ground forces sweep across the desert and surround the capital.
* * *
The last time, we killed outright an estimated 3,500 civilians.
This time we could kill many more. Two Washington lawyers from the
Reagan and first Bush administrations, David Rivkin and Lee Casey (The
Washington Post, March 6) argue that attempts by Amnesty International
and the Red Cross to make war more humane through “international
humanitarian law” prohibiting cluster bombs and armor-piercing uranium
ammo will only weaken us in our fight against terrorism. After all, war is
supposed to be war.
But their views represent a coarsening of the national conscience
in which the deaths of dark-skinned foreigners are no more real to us than the
deaths of cartoon figures in video games or those who die in car pile-ups in
movie chase scenes.
* * *
Meanwhile the administration seems able to simply commandeer the
Sunday morning TV news shows to trumpet its agenda. March 16 Invisible Man Dick
Cheney came out of hiding for the whole hour of “Meet the Press,”
repeating the stale lie that this is a war against terrorism, as if Iraq were
responsible for 9/11.
In these months the small-circulation opinion media such as
America, The Nation, Commonweal, The New York Review of
Books, and recently Mark Danner in a forum on C-SPAN have spelled out how
the war is neither necessary nor just. In Foreign Policy
(January/February), John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt systematically
refute the arguments that Saddam Hussein is a serial aggressor, an irrational
madman who cannot be contained and who is likely to share chemical or nuclear
weapons with terrorists. They remind us that whatever biological materials,
such as anthrax, Iraq has, it got through the Reagan-Bush-Rumsfeld
administration in the 1980s when Iraq was our “friend.” Both Mich-ael
Walzer and the editors of Newsday have spelled out alternative policies
combining sanctions, inspections and force short of war.
* * *
But the most remarkable aspect of the discussion these weeks has
been the final willingness of writers to deal with what is going on inside the
head of the man who happens to be president.
I used to think it was good to have a president who believed in
God. Abraham Lincoln’s faith, though not theologically complex, prevented
him from identifying God with either the Union or Confederate causes. The
Presbyterian Woodrow Wilson had to be dragged into World War I. When
Episcopalian Franklin Roosevelt composed a D-Day prayer, he included the fact
that many men would not return. Their faiths made them humble and the pain of
the war ravaged their faces.
George W. Bush’s religion has hardened his certitude. Bob
Herbert (The New York Times, March 17) says Bush leads us straight
ahead, blind and deaf to all other human considerations. Bush’s running
times are down, his weightlifting up. The photos in the papers show his face
unchanged in two years. He has taken on a swagger when he walks.
Joan Didion writes (The New York Review of Books, Jan. 16),
“ ‘I made up my
mind,’ he had said in April, ‘that Saddam needs to
go.’ This is one of the many curious, almost petulant statements offered
in lieu of actually presenting a case. I’ve made up my mind, I’ve
said in speech after speech, I’ve made myself clear.” The Bush
administration is driven, she says, by one fixed idea, “the New American
Unilateralism,” “the theory that the collapse of the Soviet Union has
opened the door to the inevitability of American preeminence, a mantle of
beneficent power that all nations except rogue nations -- whatever they might
say on the subject -- were yearning for us to assume.”
In withdrawing its resolution before the U.N. Security Council,
the United States paid the price of its foreign policy arrogance when, in spite
of billions offered in bribes, only England and Spain accept its leadership. We
are in the bizarre situation of claiming to carry out a U.N. resolution against
the collective wish and wisdom of the United Nations.
The president’s odd March 7 White House press conference,
staged to present him “as a leader impervious to doubt” (The New
York Times, March 9), where he systematically called on only friendly
reporters, undermined public confidence in both the president and the press
corps who lacked the gumption to toss him anything but softballs.
The columnist to finally say what others saw was the The New
York Times’ Paul Krugman: Bush, like Captain Queeg in The Caine
Mutiny novel and film, who, in the middle of World War II is obsessed with
the ship’s strawberry supply, has become unhinged.
Like children, he and his staff deny every aspect of reality --
like North Korea, environmental catastrophe, unemployment, the deficit -- that
does not match their obsessions.
But war turns them on. Wallace Shawn, in a personal diary of this
crisis published in The Nation, puts it simply: These men are sick.
In his address March 17, Bush described us as a “peaceful
people,” as he ordered up a war against a country that has not attacked
us. He imagines himself as the sheriff of a Texas frontier town with the
largest military force in the world at his command and with the authority to
tell the “bad guy” to get out of town. Even though Baghdad is not
Bush’s town -- yet.
As historian Howard Zinn said in a discussion on “The News
Hour with Jim Lehrer” following Bush’s talk: “This is a shameful
moment in American history. ... We are going to kill a lot of innocent people.
… They will die for Bush’s ambitions.”
But we’ll make a better Iraq, Bush says. God bless America,
he says.
Tell that to the dead.
Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth is professor of humanities at St.
Peter’s College. His e-mail address is
raymondschroth@aol.com
National Catholic Reporter, March 28,
2003
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