- CHAPEL HILL, NC
-- We were in North Carolina on Tuesday, delivering the last of our children
to college. I left my wife at a Borders bookstore along the way to meet
a friend for tea, then headed for Durham. I turned on the radio and heard
that the United Nations (news - web sites)' headquarters in Baghdad had
been bombed and that Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N.'s special representative
in Iraq (news - web sites), was dead along with at least a dozen more U.N.
employees.
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- My wife's colleagues and friends. She works for the United
Nations, is director of one of their principal offices. I turned around,
went back to the bookstore and told her what had happened. "The U.N.
will stay in Iraq," she said.
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- "So will we," I thought, meaning the Americans.
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- "We," Americans, are victims of one of the
great "bait-and-switch" con jobs in recent history, taken into
harm's way by history-ignorant ideologues. We were told we were in imminent
danger, that a truly evil regime in Baghdad had the means and will to do
us immediate and mortal harm, that the fools in "Old Europe"
and the rest of the world were just cowards when they disagreed with us
or tried to warn us it would not be that simple.
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- Vice President Richard Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz, leaders of the zealots, told us how easy it would be, particularly
after the initial fighting ended. War on the cheap (they refused to talk
about costs) and then Iraqis would greet us with flowers. "Many other
countries will want to be with us when that evil regime is removed from
power," Wolfowitz said last October. "Some who now criticize
us will want to be part of that very positive opportunity to build a more
peaceful and just and representative nation in this criticially important
Arab and Muslim country. ... Unlike the Balkans, Iraq's recent history
is not one of bloody ethnic conflict but rather one of bloody repression
by the regime of all ethnic groups."
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- On the day after the U.N. bombing, The Financial Times
quoted Wolfowitz saying it was a mistake for Defense Department to assume
Iraqi troops and police would be in place to maintain law and order as
crowds cheered American leaders. The paper introduced his quote by saying,
"Wolfowitz, in an unusual moment of candor..."
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- The zealots seemed capable of saying anything to "bait"
us into war -- and they have prevailed. Their dream, essentially a unilateralist,
single-superpower dream, was of a Middle East controlled by the United
States, with the rest of the world, led by the United Nations, cleaning
up the mess and the details.
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- Americans, deceived and conned, have woken up to find
their magnificently trained, equipped and motivated young soldiers pinned
down in a hostile environment, stalked by mujihadeen from other Islamic
countries sneaking into the chaos of Iraq. It was not bad enough that terrorists
were able to find ways to get into the United States and harm us greatly;
we have now set ourselves up on their territory -- as targets.
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- So what? The odds are that President Bush (news - web
sites) and his men will tough this out, at least politically. The irony
of the moment is that the worse they do, the better off they are. On a
strategic level, they will argue that any withdrawal now will only embolden
terrorists and governments that secretly support them. That is almost certainly
true, as argued in an editorial in Newsday, the Long Island newspaper,
on Thursday:
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- "In the past, Washington has set bad examples of
its fortitude by pulling out from Beirut after the bombing of the Marine
barracks and from Somalia after the Special Forces casualties in Mogadishu.
The world must know this won't happen in Iraq, whatever it takes."
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- Bush can get away with this because -- like his coalition
junior partner, Tony Blair in England -- his opposition is too intimidated
by patriotism to argue with him. Most of the Democrats chasing the chance
to run against him next year are now criticizing the war, mildly to be
sure, but they voted for it when they had a chance to slow him down and
ask what exactly he had in mind. They know, as the president knows, that
now that our troops are in harm's way, most politicians must "support"
them, whatever that means. That's the "switch."
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