Out of My Mind (22 page)

And so I am ambivalent about attacking Iraq to eliminate Saddam Hussein. I don't like the thought of so many people being killed—and don't kid yourself, a lot of Americans and a lot of Iraqis are going to be killed if we go in. It's even conceivable that such an attack could provoke a retaliatory biological war by Saddam that would kill millions.

But then I turn over in bed and get thinking that those Americans who oppose an attack on Iraq are making the same mistake I made in college. It occurs to me that it's probably a good thing we have a President who can make up his mind about Iraq . . . because I can't.

You can feel it building: the all-American resistance to the idea of the United States attacking Iraq without the blessing of the United Nations. We don't want to do it. It isn't only activists who regularly march in the streets carrying placards for or against something. It's average, everyday Americans who voted for George W. Bush and still approve of him as their President.

There are a lot of things that are hard to understand about Bush's position—or maybe “swallow” would be the better word. The President has chosen to ignore the fact that the UN inspectors haven't found any major weapons in Iraq. We're saying, “We know you have them. We demand you cooperate with the UN inspection team.” But why would Saddam “cooperate” by telling inspectors where they are? The word “cooperate” doesn't make sense.

It is apparently so easy to make chemical weapons like deadly anthrax in a small laboratory that it's difficult to catch anyone doing it. They can move their operation by truck or trailer to another location in hours. The inspectors must have known this when they went in. Why did they go looking, then? It makes the inspectors look inept, or Saddam Hussein look innocent.

Hiding the facilities that might produce nuclear weapons is more difficult, and if Iraq was making nuclear weapons, the inspectors would have found them.

Even if Iraq does have major weapons, there's no evidence that Saddam would dream of using them. If Iraq attacked Israel, often mentioned as a target, it would be like inviting the end of Iraq as a nation. The United States would react as though New York had been hit. Politicians and generals wouldn't feel any inhibitions about obliterating Baghdad. They would have the support of the American people—which they don't have now.

The nagging worry now is that President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld have set in motion a military juggernaut that is hell bent for Iraq,
no matter what. Before we drop one bomb, the war has cost billions. It would be hard to stop this runaway freight train headed for Baghdad—but not impossible. It might also be cheaper to abandon the weapons and equipment we've shipped to the region than to bring them back.

No one mentions the fact that we have all the nasty weapons we accuse Iraq and North Korea of having. No one suggests we destroy our vast store of biological killers. No one is demanding that a UN inspection team be allowed to take an inventory of the weapons we have in sufficient quantity to wipe out all mankind. We assume everyone knows that, because we're the good guys, we won't ever use them.

This war we're headed for has had a negative effect on our already poor economy. Things are bad and getting worse. The price of oil dominates how much everything else costs. The most ardent haters of George W. Bush are accusing him of planning the attack on Iraq so the United States can take over the country's oil. You have to dislike President Bush more than I do to believe that.

Americans have never been friendly toward the United Nations, but some kind of organization that represents the national interests of the several hundred countries in the world is vital to civilization's survival. We single-handedly destroyed the world's first attempt to organize such a group after World War I when we refused to join the League of Nations. We're in the position now of emasculating the United Nations by attacking Iraq without its support.

There has been life on Earth for more than 3 billion years. Mankind has only been dominant on the planet for something like 100,000 years. Progress has been slow but we've made some. There's no guarantee that life on the planet will not revert to what it was before we organized it the way it is today. Destroying the United Nations by ignoring it would be a step in that direction.

No President has ever risked the history books' assessment of his years as the nation's leader as George W. Bush is risking his now. This is it. If we attack Iraq and lose thousands of American soldiers, he will go down in history as a bumbling fool who led us into a war against no one and we lost it. If the economy continues its decline after he insists on tax cuts for the rich, Americans could be in for a worse time than they had during the Depression of the 1930s. This country is not impervious to disaster.

On the other hand, if Saddam Hussein blinks and leaves Baghdad before we attack, or if he is defeated in a quick and bloodless war and the economy bounces back up to where it was when Bill Clinton was President, George W. Bush will be re-elected in a landslide. They'll start carving his visage out of the rock on Mount Rushmore before he's out of the White House.

I'm not so concerned with President Bush's place in history as I am about what we're going to do in Iraq and why. It doesn't seem as though Saddam Hussein is any imminent threat to us, his neighbors, Israel or the world. Why are we doing this?

Many of the soldiers headed for Iraq think they're avenging the Sept. 11 attack. They equate Saddam Hussein with terrorism. The fact that no one in Washington has said that Hussein had anything to do with the attack has not deterred the soldiers from thinking so. It's a curious transfer of blame that helps fire up our soldiers for war and works to the President's advantage.

Americans who are ambivalent about attacking Iraq give the President the benefit of a feeling they have that he must know something they don't. The issues don't enter into their judgment. They either like the President or they don't, and if they don't, they don't like his plans or policies.

I interviewed a class of New York City high school students about the prospects of war with Iraq and was surprised, not only at how articulate
they were on the subject, but how profound some of their thinking was. One young man who approved of an attack on Iraq said that he thought the President and his advisors had real knowledge of Saddam's weapons and his plans to use them, but could not sway public opinion in their favor by revealing the information without endangering the lives of our spies in Iraq.

When I asked these sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds how they felt about a draft in view of the fact that they were coming up to the age where they might be called, one boy made a statement worth 10,000 buttonholes filled with American flags.

“Personally,” this young man said, “I think the draft is an absolutely legitimate form of service to your country. If you want to live in the most prosperous nation in the world and have all the opportunities that we have as Americans, the least you can do is offer, in some way, service to your country.”

It's hard to see the bright side of anything when you look at our whole world these days. There are so many bad spots that if the world were an apple, you'd throw it away.

Too many people on earth aren't civilized by our standards and don't enjoy the comforts of a real home or any kind of cultural life that separates human beings from the lesser animals. Here it is early in the twenty-first century and even civilized nations spend more money on ways to kill people than they spend educating their young.

The military budgets for many countries are a disgrace to mankind. The expenditures are all listed under “defense” even though there's no likelihood whatsoever that most of the countries will ever be attacked and have to defend themselves. If they were attacked, their armies wouldn't be able to do anything about it anyway; they're probably big
enough to keep the citizens poor but not big enough to protect them from an enemy.

Take Zambia. I've picked Zambia at random. There are 10 million people in Zambia. They have horrible AIDS and famine problems but spend $65 million annually on what they call “defense.” Wouldn't you think Zambia would abandon its military budget and spend that $65 million on trying to correct those problems?

I watched the victory celebrations in Baghdad and have seldom in my life been so pleased to find I was wrong. I did not think we should attack Iraq without the approval of the United Nations. The UN was wrong, I was wrong and George W. Bush was right. Fortunately, he's President and I am not. There's a lot of the world left that needs straightening out, however, and I hope he doesn't set out single-handed to do it with military force.

For some reason I don't understand, we have made our prosperous civilization the envy of many people in the world but, while they like our standard of living, our cars, our music, our food, our technology and Coca-Cola, we have not always made our case for the democratic system that enables us to have those things. Democracy has been so good for us and seems so incontrovertibly the best system of government that we don't understand why the people of every country on earth have not insisted on democracy.

We've had a most notable lack of success exporting democracy to Muslims. About three quarters of the 145 non-Muslim nations in the world are democracies, or call themselves that, but of the 47 Muslim nations, 36 are not democratic. From the President on down, we are religiously correct enough to publicly respect Islam. In private, however, we question what it is about the religion that so often leads its followers to reject the system where the people choose for themselves how they will be governed. One of the unfathomable mysteries of history has been why so many people, given free choice, choose not to be free.

I am optimistic about life in general but specifically pessimistic about the long-term potential for peace on earth.

People don't understand looting. It's a crime all its own, different from robbery or theft. We've even made a lighthearted noun of it, referring to “the loot.”

Most of the people who loot wouldn't think of stealing. The looters in Baghdad didn't think they were stealing because the stuff they took didn't belong to anyone. It was lying there and if they didn't take it, someone else would. That's the looter mentality.

Whatever else you think of me, you probably wouldn't think of me as a looter but I was one. My first experience came as a reporter in World War II. We came upon a huge cave in a small mountain near Cherbourg that the Germans had used to store thousands of bottles of wine and liquor for their officers.

I went in with a reporter named Al Newman, of
Newsweek
. If Al had found a $100 bill in the street, he would have looked for whoever dropped it so he could give it back. He was absolutely honest, but he filled our jeep with bottles. For reasons having nothing to do with morality, I didn't take any because I didn't drink—a youthful shortcoming that I have since corrected.

It didn't seem wrong. The loot wasn't being taken from its rightful owners. The Germans, dead or imprisoned by this time, had already taken it from whomever the French owners had been.

This was not my only experience with looting during the war. Like every growing boy, I'd always wanted a motorcycle and when I found one abandoned by a captured German soldier, I climbed on and took it. In GI terms, I “requisitioned” it and drove off with “the loot.”

On another occasion, I came upon a German command car that had been hit by our artillery. The four occupants were dead but next to their vehicle was a black satchel like the ones doctors used to carry when they made house calls. I opened the leather bag and found it filled with thousands of marks that were to have been used to pay German soldiers. I took the bag with the money. I cannot recall what I did with it,
or whether the marks would have been worth anything but, as a looter, the morality of what I was doing didn't enter into my thinking.

When German soldiers were captured, they were relieved of any valuables they were wearing or had in their pockets. Bill Mauldin drew a cartoon showing a group of prisoners lined up in front of an American sergeant.

“Are there any questions?” the sergeant in the cartoon is asking.

A German soldier has his hand raised and asks, “Ven do ve get our vatches back?”

That cartoon probably isn't in any collection of Bill's work because it doesn't project the image of American soldiers that Americans like to see.

The looting in Baghdad may be the worst since Hannibal sacked Rome but not because of the furniture, computers and television sets that were taken. Inexcusable were the actions of ignorant looters who carried off the irreplaceable treasures of the National Museum.

Sad too, is the realization that the Iraqis on whom we visited such destruction were not so different from ourselves. They are civilized people who went to great effort and expense saving the history of their world for 7,000 years back. They had built and maintained the National Museum to preserve their culture. Looting of the collection isn't what we intended to have happen when we set out to destroy Saddam Hussein, and we should have taken steps to prevent it. I am selfishly pleased the looting wasn't done by Americans.

The looting in Baghdad does not mean that human beings are monsters. It only means that war turns us into less admirable people. It takes one to know one.

I spoke to a class of high school juniors. While I was being introduced by the history teacher, I stared at the boys and girls seated in front of me
and idly wished I had the life ahead of me that they have ahead of them. My brain paused and I had a terrible thought: There was a real possibility these good kids wouldn't get to live to be as old as I was.