Home >  Lifestyle >  Columnists

Wednesday, March 19, 2003

Welcome to March Madness, Bush style.

War really must be inevitable, if not as the product of this current insanity, then as an indelible part of some psychic human genome. War is written about as far back as the Book of Exodus, and farther back still. There are at least 25 centuries of war correspondence, all depicting a largely unprecedented atrocity that surely ended with serious people thinking, "Certainly we've learned to avoid this kind of thing ever again."

But for all man's education and sophistication, all his mastery of natural resources, all his painfully acquired understanding of the factors that drive desperate international politics, there is something about us that trumps all that.

Shakespeare saw it clearly: By the twitching of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.

Often enough, war happens just because someone wants it to happen. Tonight or on some night soon, when we start bombing Iraqi children because we are afraid and haven't been able to dispel the notion that we cannot protect ourselves from unspeakable violence (Guess what? We can't.), it will be war for war's sake.

It was in 1996, about halfway between the first Gulf War and the second, that the British writer Matthew Parris summarized the difficulty of recognizing such a reality in a piece for The Spectator.

"Unwilling to abandon our commitment to democracy," Parris wrote, "we are obliged to insist that any settled decision to do something horrid could not have been a real choice. It is therefore classified as a pseudo-choice. Jesus claimed that if people had not seen God, their decisions would be unknowing -- not in the full sense decisions. Marx claimed that the proletariat had been subliminally cowed by the class structure into acting against their own class interest. Modern liberals claim it is fear and insecurity, hunger and ignorance, sexual repression, childhood abuse, anything, anything but that dreadful nagging possibility, that thought we cannot quite banish, that individuals might as a matter of considered, unfettered choice, decide to behave like idiots."

Which, of course, brings us to what is more and more called the Bush Doctrine. Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President of the Corporate United States Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld deputy Paul Wolfowitz, all retreads from the first Bush-led Gulf War, have conspired ever since to topple Saddam Hussein. They had to wait 10 years to get the prevailing winds at their backs again, but they have them now with a callow president and the primal fear of 9/11 still fresh enough.

Tragically, there are 100 times more lethally nuanced implications of this action than they ever envisioned, and as George W. Bush reportedly told Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware when Biden suggested he consider the nuances of this decision: "Joe, I don't do nuance."

Maybe someone who doesn't do nuance shouldn't be elected president. Oh, that's right, he wasn't.

But largely because he doesn't do nuance, Bush will be the first American president to be a triggerman in war history, and on what could become World War III. But there's plenty of shame to go around on this. Shame on Bush for rolling the dice on a reckless power grab in the name of "protection" when the world knows it's about everything else.

Don't destroy oil wells? Well, no, that would defeat our whole purpose in this, wouldn't it?

This isn't about protection. A new report commissioned by the Nuclear Threat Initiative from Harvard experts John P. Holden, Anthony Wier and Matthew Bunn concludes, "It is simply not the case that the U.S. government is doing everything in its power to prevent a terrorist nuclear attack on the United States from occurring. Between occasional initiatives, the level of sustained day-to-day engagement from the highest levels has been very modest."

Shame on Saddam for reasons innumerable and obvious.

Shame on Congress for sitting around like furniture while the administration put 250,000 young Americans into a theater of chemical and biological weapons. Do you know how many sons and daughters of members of Congress and top Bush lieutenants will be among those 250,000? The last figure I saw was 3. Not 3 percent. Three.

Shame on Jacques Chirac for so outrageously overplaying his diplomatic hand that he effectively cut the last live wire of diplomacy.

Shame on Gerhard Schroeder for letting an idle campaign issue turn into an instrument for dismantling the European Union, NATO and decades of trans-Atlantic cooperation.

Shame on Vladimir Putin for putting Russia's position as one of Iraq's primary creditors ahead of the more measured demands of urgent diplomacy.

Shame on Tony Blair for joining himself at the hip to an American president who now proceeds without a second U.N. resolution.

Shame on the United Nations for not insisting the weapons inspectors complete their mission.

Shame on Colin Powell for cowering before the Bush hawks.

And shame on us all, the people of the world, not only for getting the leadership we deserve, but also for standing at the front edge of millions of years of human history, still unable to get out of our own way.