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On the edge, on edge War TornBy Rick Horowitz
Because it matters, he wrestles with it: this conflict only days (or is it down to hours now?) away. He wrestles with it -- and it wrestles right back. If war comes, he won't feel good, but he'd like to feel satisfied. Satisfied that it's the right step, at the right moment, for the right reasons. He's not there yet -- he's not close to there yet -- and time, he knows, is growing short. The concept of "pre-emptive war"? He can deal with that. It's nice to think that we never make the first move, that we never strike until -- unless -- we're struck. It's an image worth preserving: slow to anger, but mighty in response. But, he wonders, can we afford to wait? In these times of terror, can we stay our hand until the first wave of horrors has been loosed upon us? Maybe we can't, he's ready to concede, not when the damage could be so enormous. And not when the threat of retaliation is no threat at all against enemies who've made clear that they're perfectly willing -- no, eager -- to die for their cause. But those are the other guys, he reminds himself: al Qaeda, bin Laden. They're the ones who are willing to die, or are hiding so deep we can't find them. They're not Iraq. They're not Hussein. Iraq and Hussein are something else again. Or are they? He hears the drumbeaters in Washington say there's no difference -- bin Laden, Hussein, al Qaeda, Iraq. They're all connected. They're all coordinated. Didn't some man once visit some place? Didn't some other man once get medical treatment some other place? And besides, don't they all hate us? Isn't that connection enough? He'd feel a lot better if the evidence were a lot stronger. So far, he hasn't seen it. So far, it sounds like a stretch. But that stronger evidence could be classified, he tells himself. The evidence could be so sensitive that for the drumbeaters to breathe even a word of it would compromise our "sources and methods," would put our national security at risk. Can he really insist that they spell it all out for him, right out in public, just to calm his pointless apprehensions? Can't he just trust them to know which secrets have to stay secret? He'd feel a lot more inclined to trust their judgment on national-security secrets if, say, they weren't fighting just as hard to keep energy-task-force secrets secret, too. Vice President Cheney, he admits, is a man of many fine qualities. Openness doesn't seem to be one of them. Perhaps, he thinks, if Cheney were the exception, if the rest of this administration were even vaguely committed to including the public in the public's business, he'd be willing to cut them some slack when they say, "This thing here? We really need to play this one close to the vest. Trust us." He'd like to trust them. It would be easier to trust them, he knows, if the timing weren't so convenient -- war talk about Iraq heating up just as the war against al Qaeda seemed to be faltering, just as Wall Street scandals and a stumbling economy threatened Republican prospects in the midterm elections. He wishes the vice president hadn't worked so recently and so prominently in the energy industry, that the president himself hadn't grown up in the oil business. He'd be a lot more willing to accept their motives at face value -- eliminating weapons of mass destruction, protecting the world -- if he weren't constantly thinking of those huge Iraqi oil fields, and who gets to control them. And he wishes the president were named "Bushnell," or "Heffernan" or "Norris" or "Smith." He'd feel a lot better, that is, if this president weren't the son of that other president, the president who left Saddam Hussein standing after the last war with Iraq and got slammed for it. If war comes, he'd rather have no doubt that it's a necessary evil, and not a family feud masquerading as a foreign policy. He's not there yet. And time is growing short. Posted 12/5/02. Get
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Rick Horowitz
