Charley Reese: Quagmire Or Expensive Mud

Quagmire Or Expensive Mud

An American officer came to the home of an Iraqi family. American soldiers had killed the family's young son by mistake. The boy was taking his mattress to the roof to sweat out the hot Baghdad night when a nervous American on patrol mistook him for a sniper.

"How much compensation would you accept?" the officer asked.

"Ten dead Americans," the father replied.

Maybe that anecdote will give you some idea of what we've stepped into. It might not be a quagmire. I understand that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld doesn't like that word. OK, then let's call it a very expensive hole with a mixture of blood, oil and sand at the bottom of it. As of 100 days after the end of major combat, about 60 U.S. soldiers have been killed by hostile fire, and several more have died in accidents, suicides and from disease. That's the human cost, and there is no indication it will decrease. The monetary cost is $1 billion a week. That $1 billion, by the way, is just the cost of the military occupation. It doesn't count toward the rebuilding of Iraq, which some are now estimating will cost $100 billion.

So just what is an average of a dead American a day and $1 billion a week buying the American people? Peace? We had peace. We are the ones who broke the peace. Iraq had never in its history attacked the United States or even threatened to attack the United States. Well, there's the satisfaction of dumping a bad dictator (even though at this moment we don't know where he is). That's certainly a benefit to the Iraqi people, though somehow I don't think we're going to get a lot of thank-you notes in the mail. But it's no benefit to the American people. There are lots of dictators in the world. Always have been and always will be. Most of them, including Saddam Hussein, have better sense than to mess with us.

Well, how about defending freedom? The politicians always like to say that. Sorry, Iraq was no threat to our freedom. It was incapable of being a threat to our freedom. Al-Qaida never has had the capacity to threaten our freedom, except by provoking our own government to take our freedom away in the name of protecting national security.

As a matter of fact, that's the textbook purpose of one form of terrorism. Provoke the government until it clamps down so hard that it alienates its own population and therefore becomes easier to overthrow. I guess we will have to wait until the presidential election in 2004 to find out if that strategy is working. Thank God we can still "overthrow" governments with ballots instead of bullets.

Well, what about the war on terrorism? The administration now claims that dumping Saddam is part of that war. Trouble is, the only "terrorists" Saddam supported were Palestinians fighting for their independence. When the second uprising against the Israeli occupation began, Saddam sent a check to the family of any Palestinian killed in the uprising. Didn't matter if it was a child, an old woman or a young man. If any member of the family got killed in the struggle for independence, the family got a check. When the suicide bombings started, Saddam simply included those families, but he neither originated the idea nor set out specifically to subsidize suicide bombings.

No, there is one and only one justification for going to war against Iraq: that it was an imminent danger to the United States. That's how the war was sold to Congress and to the American people. More than 100 days after the war was supposedly over, no evidence that Iraq or Saddam was an imminent danger to us has been found. Not one shred.

If it's never found, then the American people must hold the Bush administration accountable for deception and for the deaths of their children and spouses and parents who were sent to fight on false pretenses.