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January 30, 2007
War of the Water Cooler
By Richard CohenWars get odd names. My favorite is the War of Jenkins' Ear (1739 to 1741), but the one about the Roses is good and so is the Hundred Years' War and also the French and Indian War which, somehow, neglects to mention that the British were also involved. Usually, though, those names are wonderfully descriptive and more truthful than an Orwellian moniker such as Operation Just Cause, which was that silliness in Panama (1989), or Operation Iraqi Freedom, the present debacle in the desert. A better name for it would be the War of the Water Cooler. This, I'm sure, is where it all started.
You can scour the vast literature about the Iraq War and how it started and not find the single moment when George W. Bush decided he had to go to war -- and why. The minutes of all the pertinent meetings, all of them surely monitored by Bob Woodward, either have produced nothing or will produce nothing because nothing was produced in these meetings. This war, I am sure, was the product of what Dick Cheney said to Bush at the White House water cooler. No one was present to take any of this down on paper.
"God wants you to do this, Chief.''
"Yes, I know.''
It was an amazing thing and it was prodded, mind you, by one man who thought that the presidency had been critically weakened by post-Watergate reforms (Cheney) and another (Bush) who didn't think much at all about anything -- but knew his heart was pure and his soul even purer and his hearing so keen he could hear God himself. He said this, you will recall, on at least two occasions, once to Woodward himself and yet again when he met with leaders of the Palestinian Authority.
"God told me to strike at al-Qaeda, and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did,'' Mahmoud Abbas quoted Bush as saying.
This is how the War of the Water Cooler started. I am sure of it, but no matter. In the intellectual style of Bush himself, it's immaterial that I can't prove my assertion; he cannot prove otherwise -- and that's what matters. In this case, it just so happens that the absence of a record is record enough to prove that the war started at the water cooler (if there is one, but no matter) and while it is true that Bush and Cheney cherry-picked the intelligence data and exaggerated it, what mattered above all is that they -- the two of them -- decided to go to war and the rest of the country just followed.
It's almost beside the point that Saddam Hussein lacked the weapons of mass destruction that were Bush's stated casus belli. By the time the war started, it was clear that Iraq had no nuclear weapons program to speak of -- Cheney lied about this -- and as for the rest, chemical and biological, why were they suddenly so menacing? After all, chemical weapons had first been used in World War I, and biological weapons, while plenty scary, were hardly practical. No one really knew how to make it work.
Two guys took us to war and now two guys keep us at war. The consensus of the country is that Bush/Cheney has failed. The president's approval ratings are lower than the average daily Washington temperature -- and it is winter, for crying out loud. Now Bush has authorized the so-called surge, which is meant to rectify the slide, the mess, the coming defeat. But to Cheney, there is no slide, no mess. "Bottom line is that we've had enormous successes and we will continue to have enormous successes,'' is the way he put it to CNN's Wolf Blitzer. This bizarre assessment, so at odds with truth, is a Rorschach of sorts and Cheney fails it stunningly.
But out in the hallway, at the water cooler that metaphorically exists, Cheney tells Bush he's winning and he's strong -- a regular Truman, another Lincoln and, not incidentally, another Nixon for his heroic re-establishment of the imperial presidency in aw shucks garb. And out by the water cooler Bush nods. He is a strong president and a good president. He has fought evil and done what was asked of him -- and the fallen are heroes and the brave are in heaven and he will answer (as do Hebrew National salamis) to a higher authority. And if, by your own water cooler, you should think all this is absurd, consider this: The war goes on ... and on ... and on.
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