1) Unfinished
war in the Gulf doesn't deserve parades (The Daily Collegian, Monday,
July 22, 1991)
2) Treating foreign policy like a video game is fun (The Daily Collegian, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 1993)
Unfinished war in
the Gulf doesn't deserve parades (The Daily Collegian, Monday, July
22, 1991)
I remember where I was when Iraq
invaded Kuwait last August 2.
Picture this scene: three
slightly hung-over roommates snoozing away in a Beaver Plaza apartment. A
clock-radio goes on, and an announcer's voice wakes us with a report that
thousands of Iraqi troops and tanks poured into Kuwait during the night.
"Holy Shit!" One of my
roommates exclaimed.
"No big surprise,"
said the other one. "They've been massing on the border for a week."
"That could get
messy," I said.
We all possessed the steely
nerves, the unflappable poise, that most students develop after four years of
waking up five minutes before an exam or ripping a paper off the printer just
before class. So we rolled over and went back to sleep.
Going back to sleep turned out
to be the pragmatic choice. Nothing much happened until January 16. And by that
time, General Norman Schwarzkopf commanded enough firepower to blast Iraq back
to the Stone Ages in only 43 days.
By performing a lobotomy on my
psyche, I managed to cut away most of the cynical, bitter parts. So I now have
no doubts that the Gulf War served our national interest. I believe that
killing 100,000 Iraqi troops taught Saddam Hussein an important lesson about
the cost of aggression. But I still don't understand why we didn't finish the
job.
Bush wanted, and still wants,
Saddam Hussein out of power. He kept making those ludicrous comparisons between
Hitler (an evil genius) and Hussein (an evil dunce). But his decision to attack
did result partly from his outrage after reading the Amnesty International
report on the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. From then on, Bush didn't hide his
belief that any attack on Hussein was morally justifiable.
Then, with the 101st Airborne
Division sitting only 150 miles from Baghdad and virtually no organized Iraqi
resistance left in the field, Bush announced a cease-fire, ending the war.
Schwarzkopf himself has called
war a "profane thing." But in an interview back on March 27, he made
a revealing comment about his 100 hours. "Frankly, we could have
completely closed the door and made it, in fact, a battle of
annihilation." Of course, Bush promptly squelched Schwarzkopf because the
praise for Bush's restraint also made our Leader look like a wimp.
Bush abided by the United
Nation's resolution, halting the coalition attack after liberating Kuwait and
destroying Iraq's offensive capabilities. He did the nice, the humane thing;
but at that point, it probably wasn't the smartest decision.
Allowing Hussein to hold onto
power made the carnage of those 43 days merely a horrible waste. We supported
Hussein for years, hoping he would become a Middle East peacemaker. And here
was an opportunity to correct that mistake and bounce a ruthless dictator from
his seat.
Instead, we tossed the
opportunity in the trash bin of history and watched Hussein unleash his
helicopter gunships, bombers, tanks and artillery on the Shiites and Kurds.
I wanted to protest our inaction
by occupying a University building, but I couldn't decide on a good one. If you
take over the Telecommunications Building, the administrators get the police to
arrest you. Willard Building was designed with no central open spaces and no
easily opened windows just to thwart takeovers by wild-eyed, messy-haired radicals.
So Hussein continues to mangle
people and to weasel out of the truce terms. Last week, President Bush and
French President Mitterrand threatened future military action against Iraq if
Hussein keeps hiding his nuclear facilities.
Operation Provide Comfort also
ended last week as the remaining 3,170 Allied troops left northern Iraq, after
warning Hussein to stay away from the Kurds. Any takers on a bet that he
ignores the warnings?
Here on the home front, we're
still celebrating the return of our troops. These victory parades bother me.
I'm glad we lost so few of our 540,000 service personnel, but there's something
warped about celebrating a "turkey shoot."
Besides, all our troops didn't
make it home in time for the parades. The 5th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, for
example, went straight from the Gulf to Bangladesh to help the cyclone victims.
Of course, General Schwarzkopf
got to come home and act as the grand marshal of the Kentucky Derby. He
obviously never read Hunter S. Thompson's "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent
and Depraved." And the STORMIN' NORMAN FOR PRESIDENT T-shirts show just
how badly our country wants a few heroes or, in modern terms, role models.
I can almost smell the quiet
desperation in the air as more and more people start to realize how badly we've
messed up this country. Since Big Brother can't seem to save us, maybe
Schwarzkopf is our only hope. I'd vote for him.
President Bush is happy, though.
As long as the Gulf War stays won, nothing less than an atomic bomb will pry
him out of the White House in 1992. "Read my lips," Bush will
probably say during his campaign. "I win wars" (USA -- 1, Iraq -- 0;
USA -- 1, Panama -- 0).
As for me, I'm in the process of
regrowing my frontal lobe so I can be cynical and bitter again. Last night, I
thumbed through Newsweek's Commemorative Issue on the Gulf War and spent almost
an hour looking at the pictures of our casualties. I read the brief biographies
of all of them, and I wish I could tell you that I grieved for them.
But I'm not going to mouth the
platitudes. I didn't know any of them or see them die; and so, their deaths
seem far removed from me. I do wish I had met some of them because I'd like to
know the people who die to protect my "national interests."
I can't shake a nagging
premonition that I'll see another set of these pictures in the not-too-distant
future. Maybe from another bout with Hussein, or with the North Koreans, or
with Libya, or the next threat to the American way. I wonder if I'll recognize
someone in that batch.
Treating
foreign policy like a video game is fun (The Daily Collegian, Tuesday, Jan.
26, 1993)
As soon as I start thinking
about foreign policy, my mind's deepest sludge pits spew forth a frightening
fantasy.
I see myself as a rabid
conservative absolutely certain of my self-righteous beliefs. I become a young
man who believes that Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh are a Holy
Trinity.
Every time Saddam Hussein
disregards the U.N. resolutions, my darker side stands up and cheers.
"Blow that ambitious scumbag into many tiny pieces," I holler at the
exuberant pilots on CNN.
Every time a brave but foolish
Somali tribesman shoots at, say, the entire 10th Mountain Division, my foolish
side waits to see how many tons of ordinance we throw at him. M-16s, M-60s,
Cobra helicopters, armored personnel carriers -- use them all. Get our money's
worth.
Luckily, a simple newspaper
headline can yank me out of this deranged state of mind. When I recently saw
the headline "1st U.S. Marine killed in Somalia," I became my normal
self again.
Wait a minute, I said. Why did
21-year-old Private First Class Domingo Arroyo have to die? Why should I give a
damn about Somalia?
President Bush certainly didn't
give a damn until Time and Newsweek started running pictorials of dead babies
and starving children. I have no doubt that he's a decent, caring individual,
but I also believe he didn't think the situation in Somalia involved important
national interests.
Bush's logic probably went
something like the following:
-- The media is going into a
feeding frenzy again -- possible bad P.R. ahead.
-- Foreign policy is where I
proved I am not a wimp.
-- Wouldn't this look good in
the history books?
-- Maybe the American people
want me to do something about this situation.
When Operation Restore Hope
creaked into action after months of anarchy and starvation in Somalia, I
immediately started hearing the conservative pundits yelp that the president
acted only because the evil liberal media and the deluded innocent public
pressured him.
"Like, isn't that
democracy?" I asked, scratching my head.
"Didn't Joe get assigned to
the 10th Mountain Division after he graduated from ROTC?" asked my
roommate.
We spent the rest of the night
trying to remember if our friend might be over there. We never actually
considered whether the troops should even be in Somalia; after all, the
operation seemed like a very humane gesture.
But I could list a dozen
countries whose people know just as much about suffering as the Somali people.
In Bosnia, part of the Serbian ethnic cleansing program revolves around mass
rape -- the theory being that the shamed Moslem women will leave their
villages. To me, calculated cruelty seems worse than the callous indifference
of General Aidid and the other Somali warlords.
U.N. Resolution 794 says that
"the magnitude of the human tragedy constitutes a threat to international
peace and security." Those words will force the U.N., if it doesn't want
to look completely powerless and ineffectual, to conduct these "missions
of mercy" in many other nations.
Maybe the U.N. has a brilliant
plan to foster dependency in the nations of the world and achieve world
domination by default, but I doubt it. So the resolution probably just means
that bandits, thugs and various other nasty people will get more chances to put
U.S. Marines in body bags.
The key once again revolves
around "this vision thing." What principles are we willing to ask our
troops to die for? Do we only act on those principles when the situation is
"militarily doable?" Can we even afford to conduct these operations
for much longer?
We have the most effective and
powerful military in the world, and a few humanitarian missions will not erode
their efficiency at killing enemy troops. One of my co-workers at the local
runaway shelter, just back from three years in Africa as a Peace Corps
volunteer, summed up our Somalia intervention in this way: "If we have the
capability, these operations are what we should be using the military
for."
Capability is the important word
here. We've almost reached the point where we can afford either our military or
our entitlement programs. When we shot down that Iraqi MiG-25 on Dec. 27, CNN
reported that our F-16 fighter fired one missile -- a $500,000 AMRAAM. With
$500,000, I could pay my tuition for the next 138 years and earn 55 Master of
Fine Arts degrees -- my idea of paradise. Apache helicopters go for $11.7
million. What could a Head Start or Upward Bound program do with that kind of
money?
Simple truth. If the U.S. wants
to keep leading the world's "Feel-Good" parade, we will make
sacrifices in other areas. That means a gas tax, less student aid, fewer jobs
available upon graduation, smaller paychecks and fewer children.
Personally, I'm all for the
moral, idealistic crusade. Being idealistic is easy for literary types whose
earning potential approximates the net profit of a 12-year-old adolescent with
two paper routes. I'm willing to sacrifice a car, a house and my 2.3 children
to follow the path of righteousness.
In the meantime, don't be surprised if you see me stomping around campus with foam dripping out of my mouth. Now that we have 1,300 soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division in Kuwait, I'm just waiting for some ground combat.
I'm hoping there'll be some night fighting. That's when death and destruction make the prettiest pictures.