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October 13, 2007

Back Home in the Tired Superpower

By Richard Reeves

NEW YORK -- Back home after several weeks working in Germany, there is almost visceral pain in seeing that nothing has changed in the steady decline of the world's only superpower. One president, Jimmy Carter, says another, George Bush, is still sponsoring torture around the world, and Bush answers that it depends on how you define torture; the once-exuberant Democrats have huffed and puffed but apparently will do nothing about the end of the war on privacy in the land of the free; and one of our little mercenary armies just gunned down two women guilty of driving while Iraqi.

Well, there was one new thing: Our most famous (fictional) torturer, Jack Bauer, seems to be on his way to jail. Maybe someone is working through the list in alphabetical order.

The most distressing of these bits is the pathetic inability of the Democrats, the very, very loyal opposition, to actually do anything about the ongoing decline of what we used to call American values. We're just tired, or perhaps we really don't give a damn. If those women over there dressed sensibly, like Americans do, maybe we wouldn't have to kill them in front of their children.

Does that beg the question that many Iraqis and many other people around the world act just as badly as we do? Worse, even! No, it does not. We say we're different, don't we?

Are we?

I have written 180 columns against this war in the last four years or so, and I thought I should re-read them now that I'm back in this shining city on a hill. I couldn't. It is both too boring and too depressing, to say nothing of being so ineffectual. The only justification for such an exercise is that it ends any illusions one might have about what we knew and when we knew it. We are what we are: great talkers about human rights and the dignity of man and woman, but capable of believing any lies and going along with any injustice that does not disturb the collection of our daily bread.

This is what I thought worth repeating in the 20 or so early columns I forced myself to read:

Feb. 27, 2003. President Bush: "A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example. ... We will remain in Iraq as long as necessary, and not a day more." The same day, Peter W. Galbraith, who had handled the Iraq portfolio for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the odds for "chaos" in the country were better than 50 percent, and there was at least a 20 percent chance for "prolonged Iraqi resistance in urban areas."

March 28, 2003. "The White House is finally willing to talk about the cost of war in Iraq, throwing out a first figure of $75 billion," a column began. I offered the opinion that the cost had to be at least $200 billion, winning me several hundred letters calling me an "idiot" and a "traitor." The cost estimate now (in late 2007) has reached $2 trillion -- or something above $3,000 per American family.

Sept. 11, 2003. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked about who would pay for the reconstruction of Iraq. He mentioned oil, of course, but then added: "Tourism is going to be something important in that country as soon as the security situation is resolved."

Oct. 16, 2003. "'Private Military Companies' -- once upon a time they would have been called 'mercenaries' -- are a $100 billion industry, with most of that money coming from taxpayers. Their executives and employees are not answerable to military or congressional oversight or to reporters babbling about the public's right to know. Under this system, the public has no right to know. ... What our hired killers do is none of your business."

So much for what we knew when the war was just six months old. Now, as 2007 ends, with an isolated president persuaded he is doing God's work in the Holy Land even as he pays enlisted men $20,000 and officers $35,000 to stay in the military, a Congress terrified of being called soft on terrorism and a public that has long ago given up on bizarre victory scenarios, even those that promise tourism, we are reduced to writing the same columns we did four years ago as our national treasure and blood drain away into the sand.

What is the point of this? Loss of national respect and credibility? That has already happened. As for the press and other critics, if I knew what to do, I would write a better column than the cries in the night of the past four years.

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