The Assassins' Gate (59 page)

September 11, 2004: Grandson Colin spent the night last night. We ate popcorn, visited Borders, watched Star Wars, and this morning took a dip in the pool (a bit cool). Life goes on, ready or not. I have to say that Kurt is never out of my thoughts. Ever. That may not be healthy but it is the way it is. I am 57 years old, George, I may never fully recover from this. And maybe I shouldn't. The idea that Kurt left to “live your life, old man” and that Garrison Keillor included in his Memorial Day Sonnet, “And may we live the good lives they would have lived.” That hasn't been defined yet. One day at a time. I have two living children and two grandchildren. I don't know what to make of it all, yet.

October 4, 2004: What is best for America and Iraq now? That is the question. A better Iraq? Is it possible? Why did we go into Iraq? What justifies our remaining? American lives have been lost, precious lives, for what? Can something be achieved that is worthy of the sacrifice? Are there things not known to anyone other than the President and his advisers? No one in the Senate or any of the “attentive” and “informed” organizations? That would justify the sacrifice? And how much more sacrifice can be justified? For us to turn Iraq over to civil war would be hard to take. I don't have the right to advocate continued involvement because of my sacrifice that would lead to more, many more. What is best for America and Iraq? What is reality on the ground in Iraq? What is possible to achieve? Can Kerry and a team of his choosing do it? It is a great leap of faith.

And most of the time none of this matters to me. I want my son. My son.

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THE HOME FRONT
of the Iraq War was not like World War II, and it was not like Vietnam. It didn't unite Americans across party lines against an existential threat (September 11 did that, but not Iraq). There were no war bonds, no collection drives, no universal call-up, no national mobilization, no dollar-a-year men. We were not all in it together. Nor did it tear the country apart. As soon as the war began, the American antiwar movement quietly folded up its tent and went home. The first and second anniversaries of the invasion saw large demonstrations in Europe and parts of the Middle East and Asia, but in this country, organized opposition was muted by the imperative to support the troops in harm's way. Candlelight vigils like the one that displayed the pictures of fallen Iowans in Des Moines strove for a tone of respectful dissent.

This doesn't mean that the war wasn't controversial; no foreign venture has been more so since Vietnam. At a certain level—that of elite opinion, amplified in the media—Iraq generated words as bitter as any event in modern American history. But most American citizens didn't turn against other American citizens with a fury, any more than they joined together in a common cause. Iraq was a strangely distant war. It was always hard to picture the place; the war didn't enter the popular imagination in songs that everyone soon knew by heart in the manner of previous wars, including the good one and the bad one. It was unlikely that a novelist would spend six months in Baghdad and come back to update
From Here to Eternity
or
Dog Soldiers.
The one slender American novel that the war has produced so far,
Checkpoint
by Nicholson Baker, a dialogue over lunch in a Washington hotel room between two old friends, one of whom is preparing to assassinate George W. Bush, was a perfect emblem of a political culture in which hysteria took the place of thought. Baker's novel had nothing to do with Iraq and everything to do with the ugliness of politics in this country. Michael Moore, the left's answer to Rush Limbaugh, made a hugely successful movie in which Saddam's Iraq was portrayed as a happy place where children flew kites. Iraq provided a blank screen on which Americans were free to project anything they wanted, and because so few Americans had anything directly at stake there, many of them never saw more than the image of their own feelings. The exceptions, of course, were the soldiers and their families, who carried almost the entire weight of the war.

This state of affairs on the home front was, in one way, the natural outgrowth of a political atmosphere that had become increasingly poisonous for a decade. The culture wars produced Clinton hatred, which led to impeachment, followed by the contested election of 2000, followed by Bush hatred, which was just as intense and crazy making as its predecessor. Iraq provided another level on the downward spiral. Whereas the street fights of the late 1960s were the consequence of Vietnam, the word fights of the early 2000s were not the consequence of Iraq—if anything, the other way around.

It was the first bloggers' war, and the characteristic features of the form—instant response, ad hominem attack, remoteness from life, the echo chamber of friends and enemies—defined the quality of the debate about Iraq far better than the reasoned analyses and proposals that quickly disappeared from view in responsible newspapers and policy journals. One of the leading bloggers, Andrew Sullivan, who would later have honorable second thoughts about the Bush administration and Iraq, responded to the news of Saddam's capture in December 2003 by writing, “It was a day of joy. Nothing remains to be said right now. Joy.” He had just handed out eleven mock awards to leftists who expressed insufficient happiness or open unhappiness at the news. In response to an Iraqi blogger's declaration of heartfelt thanks to the coalition forces, Sullivan, at his computer in Washington, wrote, “You're welcome … The men and women in our armed forces did the hardest work. They deserve our immeasurable thanks. But we all played our part.” Sullivan's joy was vindictive and narcissistic glee, and he rubbed his opponents' faces in it. From the prewar period through the invasion into the occupation and insurgency, an ascendant, triumphalist right and a weakened, querulous left took more interest and pleasure in the other's defeats than in the condition of Iraq or Iraqis. In this country, Iraq was almost always about winning the argument.

This was never clearer than when I traveled from one place to the other. I would come back from Iraq with its swarm of contradictions as vivid in my mind as every individual face or voice: It was a liberation, it was an occupation; the Iraqis were hopeful, the Iraqis were furious; there was a chance for democracy, there was a reign of terror; the CPA was working hard, the CPA was getting nowhere; American soldiers were kindhearted, American soldiers were reckless. Then I would sit down to dinner with a group of progressive-minded people who all wanted to know what it was like over there, and before I could get halfway through one encounter with one Iraqi, the invective came at me with astonishing force, wind-aided by a change of subject to the sins of the Bush administration. The same was true, on the other side of the looking glass, in the columns and talk shows of right-wing commentators: Every shred of good news—the arrest of a top Baathist, the reopening of a museum—became definitive evidence that it was working. Everyone wanted to know whether or not it was working, and the question usually came loaded, and the answer had better be quick and simple. There were not many people in America who could stand the cognitive dissonance with which Iraqis live every day.

Actually going to Iraq didn't have to intrude on this mental self-sufficiency. Christopher Hitchens, who had just published a book titled
A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq,
flew in with the entourage of Paul Wolfowitz in the summer of 2003, spent a few days in the deputy secretary's wake, and came back to tell Fox News that the revolution from above was succeeding splendidly, with the Americans busy rebuilding the place, gathering intelligence, rolling up Baathists, and making friends with the people—none of which was appearing in press coverage. “I felt a sense of annoyance that I had to go there myself to find any of that out,” Hitchens confessed to the Fox interviewer. The following March, with the long short war showing signs of turning into a short long war, Fred Barnes, an editor of the strenuously prowar
Weekly Standard,
parachuted into the Green Zone and discovered that the only thing wrong with Operation Iraqi Freedom was Iraqis. “They need an attitude adjustment,” Barnes wrote. “Americans I talked to in 10 days here agree Iraqis are difficult to deal with. They're sullen and suspicious and conspiracy-minded.” This wasn't the prewar judgment of hawks like Barnes, but something had to explain all the bumps in the road, which would lead to a successful democracy in Iraq only after “an outbreak of gratitude for the greatest act of benevolence one country has ever done for another.” Naomi Klein, a columnist for the bitterly antiwar
Nation,
visited Baghdad at exactly the same time as Barnes and found that the insurgency was mushrooming because so many Iraqis shared her own antiglobalization views. In Iraq it was always possible to prove that you'd been right all along.

Because the Iraq War began in ideas, it always suffered from abstraction. But long after those ideas took actual shape in Kevlar and C-4 and shrapnel, the war's most conspicuous proponents and detractors continued to see it and speak of it in the French historian Marc Bloch's “large abstract terms.” The key terms in Iraq were “imperialism,” “democracy,” “unilateralism,” “internationalization,” “weapons of mass destruction,” “preemption,” “terrorism,” “totalitarianism,” “neoconservatism,” “appeasement.” One month after he survived the bombing in Baghdad, I met Ghassan Salamé, the late Sergio Vieira de Mello's political adviser, in the lobby of UN headquarters in New York. Looking a little wan, Salamé said, “Iraq needs to be liberated—liberated from big plans. Every time people mentioned it in the last few years, it was to connect it to big ideas: the war against WMDs, solving the Arab-Israeli conflict, more recently the war against terrorism and a model of democracy. That's why all these mistakes are made. They're made because Iraq is always in someone's mind the first step to something else.”

With their eyes turned to such lofty matters, few prowar ideologues allowed the bad news from Iraq to break their stride. Either they refused to credit it, blaming the media and the defeatists for hiding the truth, or they continued to take such a long view of history that a hundred Iraqis or a dozen Americans blown up in a suicide bombing hardly factored. But this was just as true on the antiwar side of the ledger. Experience taught me that the individual stories of Iraqis struggling against danger and the odds to create a better life for themselves and their country were impatiently flicked aside as soon as I tried to tell them. The retort was swift and sure: “This war is
illegal,
it's
immoral.
Nothing good can come of a lie.” In spite of the enormous stakes and the terrible alternatives, most antiwar pundits and politicians showed no interest in success. When Iraqis risked their lives to vote, Arianna Huffington dismissed the elections as a “Kodak moment.” It was Bush's war, and if it failed, it would be Bush's failure.

America in the early twenty-first century seemed politically too partisan, divided, and small to manage something as vast and difficult as Iraq. Condoleezza Rice and other leading officials were fond of comparing Iraq with postwar Germany. But there was a great gulf between the tremendous thought and effort of the best minds that had gone into defeating fascism and rebuilding Germany and Japan, and the peevish, self-serving attention paid to Iraq. One produced the Army's four-hundred-page manual on the occupation of Germany; the other produced talking points.

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WHAT MADE THIS POLITICAL CULTURE
particularly unfortunate for Iraqis was that the Bush administration, instead of forging the war into a truly national cause, conducted it from the beginning like the South Carolina primary.

In the aftermath of September 11, President Bush was granted what few presidents ever get: national unity and the goodwill of both parties. In the days that followed the terror attacks, we saw the early stages of something like a popular self-mobilization. The long lines of blood donors, the volunteers converging from around the country on Manhattan, the fumbling public efforts at understanding Islam: The response took on very personal tones. People spoke as if they wanted to change their lives. An unemployed young video producer waiting to give blood in Brooklyn said to me, “I volunteered so I could be part of something. All over the world people do something for an ideal. I've been at no point in my life when I could say something I've done has affected mankind.” The feverish outbreak of public-spiritedness couldn't have lasted, but its intensity suggested that the country had snapped out of a collective daydream. A generation legendary for its self-centeredness seemed to grasp that here was a historic chance to aim for something greater.

It was much remarked at the time that President Bush did nothing to tap this palpable desire among ordinary people to join a larger effort. Americans were told to go shopping and watch out for suspicious activity. It was Pearl Harbor, and it was a bad day on the stock exchange; nothing would ever be the same, and everything was just the same. Joseph Biden wondered, “How urgent can this be if I tell you this is a great crisis and, at the time we're marching to war, I give the single largest tax cut in the history of the United States of America?” The tax cuts didn't just leave the country fiscally unsound during wartime; their inequity was bad for morale. But the president's failure to call for shared, equal sacrifice wasn't accidental. It followed directly from the governing spirit of the modern conservative movement that his presidency brought to full power. After years of a sustained assault on the idea of collective action, there was no ideological foundation left on which Bush could have stood up and asked what Americans could do for their country. We weren't urged to study Arabic, to join the foreign service or international aid groups, to develop alternative sources of energy, to form a national civil reserve for emergencies—or even to pay off the cost of the war in our own time. Its burdens would be borne by the next generation of Americans, and by a few hundred thousand volunteer soldiers in this one.