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Our Opinion

It finally began. Just as we all expected. And yet, even its announcement, by the White House spokesman and then by President Bush himself, was Orwellian in its refusal to call the act by its name. “My fellow citizens,” the president announced on March 19, “at this hour American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” The word “war” was never mentioned. We were “disarming” Iraq, freeing its people, and, most grotesque of all, “defending the world” — that same “world,” apparently, that had officially opposed our bloodlust in the United Nations Security Council and had unofficially denounced us (and continues to do so, every day) in the streets and squares of hundreds of cities on every continent on the planet. One would have to go back to the Nixon administration for a time when deceit and moral fraud had become so innate and endemic a part of our government.

Quickly, however (very quickly), the war turned into — what else? — war. If the president and, especially, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had fantasized a triumphal march, they were soon disabused. We will be there for awhile, and it will stay a war until the end — and, by the looks of things, well beyond. The wisest voice we heard in the last couple of weeks among the clamor of incessant coverage, ubiquitous briefings, ceaseless cartography, retired and thoroughly mediated colonels, generals, and admirals, woeful “embeds,” and egregious commentators treating other people’s lives as if they were just so much ratings fodder, was that of a young sergeant, who refused to face the camera, or even to turn his head to the idiot reporter who thought he was reprising Henry V, with the (breathlessly anticipated) Battle of Baghdad standing in as a latter-day Agincourt. The young GI just looked away and kept on at what he was doing, saying quietly, without rancor and with genuinely heroic understatement: “It’s a little tougher than we thought it’d be; it’s not easy conquering a country, is it?”

Indeed, what has been truly distressing — and painful — to watch during the last couple of weeks has been the agonizing contrast between the transparent decency and stoicism of most of the young men and women (and they are obscenely young, even many of the officers) who have literally been thrown into harm’s way and the equally transparent cynicism and moral bankruptcy of all of the political leaders who have thrown them there. LBJ was at least as tragic as his war; it is clear that President Bush’s “faith” is the armor with which he repels the very concept, and consequences, of tragedy from his world. Robert McNamara agonized over every step of the Vietnam war’s escalation; Donald Rumsfeld seems to positively delight in his press conferences, which, in their bureaucratic matter-of-factness and disconnectedness have taken on an almost Kafkaesque quality.

And then there are the real dogs of war, or, more accurately, this war’s piranhas. Four days ago, the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity released a report that indicated that at least nine of the 30 current members of the Defense Policy Board — whose function is to advise the secretary of defense — have ties to corporations that have garnered over $76 billion dollars in defense contracts in the last two years, i.e., since Mr. Rumsfeld followed Mr. Bush to Washington. Not at all coincidentally, some of the members include the most zealous advocates of war against Iraq during the last few years, including former CIA director James Woolsey (he of the famous accusation some time back that the Greek government was implicated in November 17) and, of course, Richard Perle, the infamous “Prince of Darkness” (as he was known during his tenure as Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary of defense). There is much that one can say about Mr. Perle; suffice it that he is the kind of infinitely ideological policymaker who has never seen — or imagined — a confrontation that he didn’t like. Mr. Perle has been lobbying for war against Iraq for years now; indeed, the Bush administration’s subversion of the United Nations that led to the current and utterly unjustifiable invasion is seen by Mr. Perle, literally, as a divine blessing, or, as he declared to the British press last week in his inimitable fashion, “Thank God for the death of the UN.”

As it turns out, Mr. Perle’s ideological perspective is an extension of his financial portfolio. Mr. Perle was actually chairman of the Defense Policy Board until a few days ago, when he had to resign after being dogged by allegations of conflicts of interest regarding his representation of defense contractors. Nevertheless, he remains on the Board. And what exactly does the Defense Policy Board really do, by the way? The Center for Public Integrity cites Michael O’Hanlon, a military specialist at the Brookings Institution, who described it to Time magazine as “just another [public relations] shop for Rumsfeld.”

And so it goes. Some things never change. War, predictably enough, is one of them. Profiting from war, just as predictably, is another. As with so many other mass murders, the blueprint for this one is to be found somewhere between The Iliad and Mother Courage. Meanwhile, the US army’s top commander on the ground, Lieutenant General William Wallace, was reprimanded last week by his superiors — and enraged the White House — for calling a spade a spade. He said that the enemy that the US and British forces were fighting in Iraq was not “the enemy we war-gamed against,” and, when asked if the conflict might last longer than had been anticipated, his answer was simple: “It’s beginning to look that way.” It certainly is.