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Bush’s Latest Idea
 In
the 1979 movie The In-Laws, Peter Falk plays a dotty
former CIA man who awes his sidekick, Alan Arkin, a timid dentist whose
daughter is married to Falk’s son. “Were you involved in the Bay
of Pigs operation?” asks the fascinated Arkin. Falk replies proudly,
“Involved in it? It was my  idea!”
“Success has a hundred
fathers,” John Kennedy quipped; “failure is an orphan.”
True, as a rule; but the Iraq war has a hundred fathers who still think
it’s a success, President Bush chief among them. It was his idea!
Now, heaven help us, he has
another idea: Let’s extend the war to Iran. No, he doesn’t want
to send U.S. troops into Iran; even he isn’t quite that goofy.
But Bush and his sidekicks keep
talking about the threat from Iran the way they used to talk about the
threat from Iraq. Something’s up. I look for air strikes on Iran soon,
maybe just a good night’s bombing, as proposed by Edward G. Luttwak
in the Wall Street Journal recently. You know, another
preemptive strike. Unannounced, but not unexpected. A predictable sneak
attack.
History repeats itself as farce,
Karl Marx observed. That would be a good epitaph for this administration. As
a connoisseur of political farce, I’m anticipating an inept sneak attack,
a combination of Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs.
Then what? As the Iranian people
rally behind their government, the whole Muslim world and everyone else rally
against the United States, the world oil market goes berserk, and Americans
start riding horses to work, Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld will
claim another success, complaining that the media are showing only the
downside of the operation.
According to Bush’s
interpretation of the Constitution, the president, in time of war, is
empowered to do whatever he’s in the mood to do. And Bush is now in
the mood to teach the Iranians a lesson they won’t forget, no matter
what the cost.
A quick air strike wouldn’t
require a congressional resolution and wouldn’t give the opposition
time to organize. At this point, Bush must turn every faux pas into a fait
accompli, as our French friends — well, former friends — might
say.
![[Breaker quote for Bush's Latest Idea: And for our next triumph ...]](2006breakers/060321.gif) Meanwhile,
Bush’s hairy-chested neocon friends
are coping with cowardice on the home front. They question the manliness of
liberals and Democrats, except for Hillary Clinton, and I myself have felt the
sting of their lash.
Here I must mention the most
familiar, yet most baffling, argument for war. It runs roughly like this:
“Our brave men and women are dying in [fill in name of relevant
country] to protect the very freedoms you yellow-bellied peaceniks
abuse.”
On this view, we owe all our
freedoms to wars, and all our wars are wars for freedom. Is that so? Well,
which wars gave us freedom of speech, trial by jury, property rights, the
right to remain silent, and the right to abortion? Are these the rights our
enemies were trying to take away? And just how did, say, Kaiser Wilhelm II or
Manuel Noriega plan to achieve that?
Obviously, as many libertarians
have pointed out, it’s precisely during wartime that government grows
and our rights shrink. Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D.
Roosevelt, and George W. Bush should have taught us this by now.
This isn’t the only country
that believes freedom depends on war. Unless Brittania rules the waves,
says the old anthem, Britons may all wind up as slaves. Well, Brittania no
longer rules the waves, and Britons, happily, aren’t slaves, but
they’re still singing that anthem.
Faith in war is the closest thing
America has to a national religion. It is closely allied to our faith in Great
Presidents. As for those who didn’t trust our Great Presidents, such
as Copperheads and isolationists, their name is mud.
So trying to talk Americans out of
going to war is a fool’s errand, like trying to persuade Yosemite Sam
to hold his fire for just a minute. If you get any reply at all, it will be a
truism: “The only thing these varmints understand is hot lead.”
As the old rabbis used to ask,
“Have your ears heard what your lips have just uttered?”
It’s no use trying to make people listen to you when they won’t
even listen to themselves.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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