SOME DAYS, when the after party in Iraq isn’t going so well–which is to say, most days–I’m put in mind of the Bush administration’s admonition to be sunny-side-up journalists, to eliminate the negative, to accentuate the positive. God knows I try. I take stock in small victories, often overlooked. Like there was the time military engineers in Fallujah cleared a field of garbage, covered it with fresh soil, then erected goal posts to make a soccer field. Sure, the next day the goal posts had been stolen, and the dirt scraped from the field. “What kind of people loot dirt?” one frustrated Army captain asked the Washington Post. But you’ve got to crawl before you walk.
Then there was the Department of Defense press release which announced that veterinarians had purchased $42,000 in equipment for the Baghdad zoo, including an autoclave for instrument sterilization and a vaporizer to measure anesthesia drugs. (Damn you, New York Times! How could you let your liberal media bias get in the way of this triumph of the human/animal spirit?) Or how about when Marines in Qadisiya Province set up a Rotary Club–another advance that caught Big Media looking. Now, Iraqis, freed from tyranny’s grip, will have the inalienable right to gather in dingy meeting halls, listen to mediocre speeches, and to eat dried-out chicken.
Color me a gloomy Gus, but these undisputed successes don’t seem to mitigate say, the 25-member Iraqi governing council dwindling into the 24-member council on account of assassination, or U.S. choppers getting pegged out of the sky on milk-run transport missions, or U.S. soldiers getting their throats slit and their bodies desecrated in the streets of supposedly friendly cities like Mosul.
So that’s when it’s time to find a quiet place, take a deep breath, and let the rationalizing begin. This is most easily done by clinging to the cliché du-jour, as seen on TV. It used to seem that the Left had the monopoly on stupid war clichés. Who among us hasn’t become accustomed, every time a Hummer breaks down, to hearing that we’re facing “another Vietnam”? Who hasn’t winced while opening the morning paper to Doonesbury and Garry Trudeau’s 315th straight day of blood-for-oil, Halliburton groaners?
Still, as of late, the Right has given the Left a decent run in the stupid war clichés department. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, hawks and doves alike had a tough time encouraging citizens to take any pedestrian, non-heroic action, without warning that if these actions weren’t taken, the terrorists will have won. Over the summer, as we were continuously assured by the administration that the bad guys were desperate and on the run, we could not turn on our television sets without hearing that “the noose is tightening.” (Whether around Saddam’s neck, or ours–nobody seemed to specify).
Now, the most fashionable pre-fab rationalization to use when the news isn’t going as swimmingly as we want it to, is to select a place in Iraq, then a corresponding place in America. If the two places start with the same letter, all the better. Next, state baldly that no matter how lousy things are going, you’d rather fight the terrorists / Baathists / whoever-it-is-we’re-fighting in the first location, rather than the second. Lastly, sit back with a self-satisfied smile, as if that settles the matter.
So, for instance, Paul Bremer would “rather have us fighting [terrorists] somewhere outside the United States, than fighting them inside the United States.” President Bush is spoiling for a fight “in Iraq and Afghanistan and in other places” rather than in “New York or St. Louis or Los Angeles.” Still confused? Bush states it more simply: he’d rather fight them, “there than here.”
MORE CLOYING, however, is the tendency of Those Who Would Rather Fight to want to fight the terrorists in places that begin with the same letter as the places they don’t want to fight, thus making their formulations annoyingly alliterative, like a bad Maureen Dowd column. The Boston Herald, for instance, wants to fight in Baghdad, “rather than mopping up after mayhem in Boston.” A Fox commentator prefers “the Middle East so you won’t have to fight them in the Midwest.” New York governor George Pataki wants our troops fighting the terrorists “on the streets of Baghdad,” rather than our firefighters fighting them “on the streets of Brooklyn.” Representative J.D. Hayworth would rather “see the fight in Tikrit than in Tucson or Tacoma.” And Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld scores a fighting hat trick, since he’d prefer the fight to go down in Baghdad rather than “in Boston or in Baltimore or Boise.” Senator Kit Bond does Rumsfeld one better, wishing the fight to commence in Baghdad, “rather than Boston or Boise or Baldwin, Missouri, or Belton, Missouri.”
Once you get the hang of the Where You’d Like to Fight The Terrorists game, it’s easy to play, and lots of fun. Let’s try it. Match the Iraqi cities where you’d rather fight the terrorists on the left to the U.S. cities where you don’t want to fight the terrorists on the right. Then, check out the answer key below and see how good a terrorist-fighter you are.
| (A) Umm Qasr | (1) Kansas City, MO |
| (B) Nasiriyah | (2) Tifton, GA |
| (C) Karbala | (3) Umnak, AL |
| (D) Basra | (4) Nacogdoches, TX |
| (E) Tikrit | (5) Beaver Falls, PA |
A little practice, and you’ll know exactly what to do if you find yourself down-wind on some Sunday morning gasbag show. Whenever the Iraq catastrophe of the day is brought up, just look the moderator in the eye, and tell him that you’d rather fight the terrorists in Salman Pak than in the Salmon River of Idaho. That you’d rather fight the terrorists in Safwan than San Antonio. (I’ve lived in San Antonio–great place to get Mexican, no place to fight terrorists.) Better Berkeley than Baghdad. Or vice versa. That one’s a toss-up.
IT’S SIMPLE REALLY, to know where you’d rather fight the terrorists. It’s considerably harder to fight them. Which is why this hoary cliché needs to be retired once and for all. For there’s two things to keep in mind when declaring where in Iraq you’d rather fight the terrorists.
The first, is that we’re not altogether sure we are fighting terrorists, in the al-Qaeda sense of the word. As Newsweek recently reported in a piece entitled “War In the Dark,” “what the Americans don’t know is who, exactly, they’re fighting.” In a week in which four suicide-bombing attacks in Baghdad killed more than 30 people, one general told reporters “that the attacks were the work of ‘foreign fighters.’ Yet just 24 hours earlier his division commander . . . told a news conference that he had not seen ‘any infusion of foreign fighters in Baghdad.'” A recent Washington Post story reported that at one Baghdad briefing, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, in the dark himself as to the identity of the guerillas, said that 90 percent of the fighters the U.S. had killed or captured were Hussein loyalists or Iraqi religious militants–and only 10 percent were freelancers from abroad. Meaning that, according to his calculations, there’s a decent chance that if we weren’t fighting these particular terrorists in Babylon, we wouldn’t be fighting them in Bakersfield.
The second thing to remember, for most of the people declaring where they’d rather fight the terrorists, is that they are not personally doing much of the fighting. Who’s to say if you were coming up on the 11th month of your deployment in a hostile country where the natives, instead of showing gratitude, showed you the business-end of an RPG-launcher, that you might not enjoy fighting the terrorists in a place where you could claim home-field advantage, have a warm bed, a cold beer, and the occasional conjugal visit from a woman whose name you could pronounce.
For it is the luxury of those who talk about fighting, rather than of those who fight, to dispense smiley faces and silver linings. In the November 24th New Yorker, in a piece entitled “War After the War–What Washington Doesn’t See in Iraq,” George Packer writes in a painful reminder from Baghdad, “All the soldiers suffer from the stress of heat, long days, lack of sleep, homesickness, the constant threat of attack . . . and the simple fact that there are nowhere near enough of them to do the tasks they’ve been given.”
Not to mention the fact that nearly 200 of them have been killed since major combat operations ended. Fight the terrorists where you will. But it’s probably best to avoid diminishing the sacrifice of soldiers, by burying them with respectful silence, rather than with idiotic clichés.
Answer Key: A-3; B-4; C-1; D-5; E-2
Matt Labash is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
