Right. Our "intelligentsia": Christopher Hitchens, Marc Cooper,
Michael Berube, George Packer and all the others who would have been
writing articles in 1914 had they been alive in favor of stopping
the Hun.
And yet, as I strolled the crowded streets around the dazzling
Golden Mosque in the ancient Kadhimiya quarter of the city and
looked upon the black-robed Shiah women with tattooed lips and the
old wizened men puffing on hookahs under green fluorescent lights in
the corner tea shops, I couldn't think of one single justification
for waging war against this nation or its people.
And now, as Bush the Second noisily threatens to finish the job that
Poppy pooped out on, I find even less justification, if that's
possible. At least during the first Gulf War you could delude
yourself into thinking we were rescuing occupied Kuwait and
restoring rule to its syphilitic sheiks.
But this time around, what? We can be chums with the nuclear-armed
Chinese Stalinists who hold public executions of petty criminals and
beat up senior citizens in Tian An Men Square. We contained the
Soviets and their arsenal for 50 years, but we can't figure out a
way to deal with Saddam short of invasion?
When it becomes so patently obvious that the administration's
warmongering stems not at all from any authentic security concerns
but rather from cold and cynical domestic political calculation, why
is there no clear and steadfast anti-war opposition?
Instead, as New Yorker writer Henrik Hertzberg recently said, "In
Washington one side wants war; the other wants debate about war."
The result is a pro-war faction and a "maybe war" faction, he
rightly says.