Kermit versus Freddy versus Jason (6/17/03)
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War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. [Dick Cheney et al. 2003.]
Ah, there’s nothing like a Hollywood ending.
And now, as Bruce Willis and his Howling Commandos accept the accolades of an adoring crowd of — uh, Wogs — your itinerant critic slips out of the theater ahead of the crowd, and, brushing the popcorn from his flak jacket, makes note of his few remaining questions:
[1] Weren’t there similar crowds cheering when the Israelis rolled into Lebanon and for that matter the West Bank? Just what do these people cheer for? indeed, what won’t they cheer for? — Incidentally, what was the supposed logic of those Middle-Eastern talking heads who all immediately followed the admission that Saddam was now revealed to be a brutal pig whose own people loathed him with the qualification “but nonetheless this defeat is a tragic humiliation for the Arab people”? To adapt yet again a phrase I first heard turned in the Stone Age of the mainframe computer, don’t these guys have a problem with their interfaces with reality?
[2] What happened to the chemical and biological weapons? Why do I have the nagging feeling that there will be a loud silence on this point for a week or two, and then Wolfowitz will leak it to Safire that the famous mobile laboratories have slipped out of the country ahead of the posse and are now in............Syria?
[3] In re Safire, incidentally, though I love and revere the guy for what he’s done to blow the whistle on Ashcroft and Poindexter, can you really trust his judgment any more? Didn’t he hit the same dark notes of warning in the arias he’s been singing about the Iraqi mastermind when he was claiming Sadat was just another cynical and ruthless Nasserite and that the collapse of the Soviet Union was just another clever Commie plot [see Christopher Walken in
Blast From The Past] hatched by Andropov’s disciple Gorbachev?
[4] Why were they so sure that the chemical and biological weapons existed? of the extent of the program? Wasn’t it just that they knew we gave them to Saddam in the Eighties, back when they all still thought he satisfied the comfortable old cold-war description “He may be a fascist thug, but he’s our fascist thug”? — And what about that long-forgotten anthrax mailer, incidentally? Isn’t there something similar they’re holding back there? — Why are we suddenly hearing these mutterings about the contributions of the French, the Germans, and the Russians to the Iraqi war machine? isn’t this just intended as a distraction?
[5] Would the phrase “winning their hearts and minds” ever have been heard at all, even for those twenty-four hours or so that it survived in public discourse, if anyone in this administration had actually served in Vietnam? Isn’t “death squads” a trifle risky, for that matter? even though Roberto D’Aubisson’s fifteen minutes are presumably up.
[6] They say that the generals are always fighting the last war; but isn’t this just the problem with our liberal brethren? Isn’t it obvious that everyone is still protesting Vietnam? Isn’t this just another depressing corollary of the unfortunate fact dictated by historical accidents of demographics that the academic population still consists mainly of people who got tenure before 1970?
[7] Shouldn’t we give credit where credit is due? Isn’t the Pentagon nearly the only branch of the bureaucracy that ever tries to learn from its mistakes? Since Vietnam they’ve eliminated the draft and instituted the most successful program of affirmative action in American society; since the technical embarrassments of the Eighties they’ve improved their maintenance procedures so that their hightech equipment actually works a fair percentage of the time [compare the three out of eight helicopters that broke down trying to spring the Iranian hostages, or the one out of three wings of fighter-bombers that had to turn back in the strike on Libya]; after fifty years of bullshit on the part of the Air Force, they can now actually hit the targets they aim at; since the first Gulf War they’ve admitted that trying to restrict media access was a mistake, retrofitted most of their arsenal for precision delivery, introduced two or three generations of robot aircraft, and networked their operations to a degree unprecedented in warfare; and between the first and third weeks of the campaign just concluded they managed to adjust their strategy in medias res. Meanwhile NASA is still buying 8086 chips, the Post Office still sorts mail by hand, the FBI can’t send email, the Census Bureau is prohibited by law from performing an accurate count, and it’s an open secret that Trent Lott is not the only guy in Washington who wishes the Dixiecrats had won and the country was still segregated.
[8] Are Cheney’s business cronies really going to make a hundred billion dollars from reconstruction contracts? How much of that will find its way back into the Bush re-election war chest? Is this supposed to be the reply to the French and Russian protests about lost investments: they just weren’t thinking big enough?
[9] Does Kerry even stand a chance? According to this week’s fundraising scorecard, he has about seven million in the bank; Bush already has two hundred million lined up, with much more to come. — Can anybody else run against Bush? Don’t the Democrats have to put up a real war hero against the Republican chickenhawks?
Best director/Best screenplay: hard for an outsider to identify, but presumably some unsung staff colonels in the bowels of the Pentagon.
Producer who will take all the credit anyway: Cheney. The laugh line about retired military officers embedded in television studios is already regarded as a classic. But I’m sure I heard an unspoken threat: we know where you live.
Best actor: the Iraqi information minister. [I think the part goes to Roberto Benigni.]
Best actress: Monica Bellucci as Jessica Lynch.
Best cinematography: predictably, for all that green grainy night-vision footage. This will instantly become a cliche.
Best f/x: though I generally take the Pentagon’s claims with a grain of salt and had not, accordingly, thought they were serious about the multiple-target-acquisition capabilites of the Apache helicopter, I did, in unvarnished and unretouched video, see one rear up and launch four missiles simultaneously; all of them immediately veering off in different directions. Sheesh. — Honorable mention: the footage of the A-10 Warthog circling over Baghdad; it does indeed slow visibly when it fires a burst from its Gatling gun, and it does seem credible that a long burst would in fact cause it to stall. [As for the building it was firing at, I thought that would fall down.]
Guy most emblematic of the masses who labor below the line [as they say in Tinseltown] and never get credit: the dude I was watching in the background while the MS/NBC correspondent hogged the camera to bitch about the sandstorm. He had the engine out of a Bradley and up on a pallet under a tarp while he was working on it; just a little snapshot of the labor involved in trying to keep everything running all the way to Baghdad. Without him, and a hundred thousand like him, they’d all still be in Kuwait.
____________The double helix (2/21/03)
