Epilogue: A Question of Truth

NEW YORK – After a week back, I’ve man­aged to get some sleep in, say “hey” to a few friends, put up some pic­ture pages (part one and part two) and try to take stock of the after­math of this war. This is dif­fi­cult, how­ever, as the urban envi­ron­ment of New York City is so alien to the expe­ri­ences of the past month that it might as well be a dif­fer­ent planet. It doesn’t help that I’m still step­ping gin­gerly around the East Vil­lage (resid­ual fear of land­mines), look­ing for sniper posi­tions on the sky­scrap­ers and mar­veling that peo­ple aren’t all car­ry­ing AK-47s. But that’s noth­ing com­pared to what the Iraqi peo­ple have had to go through, and what they’re fac­ing. To a cer­tain degree, the same goes for the peo­ple of Amer­ica who, it may be, were lied to about the rea­sons for this war.
Accord­ing to the Inde­pen­dent in the U.K., the Bush White House based its case for invad­ing Iraq on a “selec­tive use of intel­li­gence, exag­ger­a­tion, use of sources known to be dis­cred­ited and out­right fab­ri­ca­tion.” The weapons of mass destruc­tion that were said to have posed an immi­nent threat to the United States and the free world have yet to be found, although Bush promises they will be. Again, the Times reported April 27:

In north­ern Iraq, a mil­i­tary chemical-analysis team said today that a cache of bar­rels and two mobile lab­o­ra­to­ries found near the vil­lage of Bayji were most likely not used for chem­i­cal war­fare pur­poses, coun­ter­ing ear­lier reports from an Army offi­cer at the site.

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p>For New York Times colum­nist Tom Fried­man, this is no big­gie. “We do not need to find any weapons of mass destruc­tion to jus­tify this war,” he wrote this week­end. “That skull, and the thou­sands more that will be unearthed, are enough for me.” He was refer­ring to a graphic and affect­ing photo the Times ran on its front page on Fri­day. This is the same man who wrote on Feb. 19:

I am also very trou­bled by the way Bush offi­cials have tried to jus­tify this war on the grounds that Sad­dam is allied with Osama bin Laden or will be soon. There is sim­ply no proof of that, and every time I hear them repeat it I think of the Gulf of Tonkin res­o­lu­tion. You don’t take the coun­try to war on the wings of a lie. (Empha­sis added.)

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p>Friedman wasn’t talk­ing so much about WMD in that ear­lier col­umn, but the point remains the same. In mat­ters of start­ing wars, you bet­ter have the moral high ground, and you don’t get there by climb­ing a lad­der of false­hoods. For peo­ple wholly sup­port­ive of the war, how­ever, the tonic of tri­umphal­ism is sweet indeed. Many are now say­ing “I told you so” to those of us who opposed it. A reader — I can’t find the email now — asked some months ago if I would change my mind on the war if it was proven that Iraq was devel­op­ing weapons of mass destruc­tion. I answered that no, I wouldn’t, since I didn’t — and don’t — believe that the war was about WMD or an evil tyrant but about realpoli­tik plans for pro­ject­ing Amer­i­can power into the Mid­dle East. My response to this reader is to flip the ques­tion: “Do you still think this war was nec­es­sary since it may very well turn out that there are no WMD to be found?”
(Mind you, I’m sure the U.S. will find some cache of chem­i­cals or a few war­heads, but Pres­i­dent Bush repeat­edly invoked a clear and present dan­ger to the sur­vival of the United States as a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for war. A few dozen litres of mus­tard gas or even VX does not strike me as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for shred­ding the U.N. Char­ter, demol­ish­ing NATO, harm­ing fur­ther the United States’ image abroad and increas­ing the risk of ter­ror­ism at home.)
Still, some very real good occurred from the top­pling of Sad­dam. There is no doubt the future of Iraq will be much, much brighter with­out him. The war was pros­e­cuted fairly well with rel­a­tively low civil­ian casu­al­ties, there was no urban war­fare and at least some Iraqis in the Arab parts of the coun­try cheered the U.S’s entry into Bagh­dad. (The Kurds were, nat­u­rally, ecsta­tic, but the warm wel­come I received should not be taken as indica­tive of the mood of the coun­try as a whole. Many, many Arabs are angry over what hap­pened to their coun­try and the Kurds are ready to bolt from Iraq if they get the chance.) But the after­math of the war could be more dam­ag­ing to Amer­i­can inter­ests and the Iraqi peo­ple. U.S. sol­diers today fired into a crowd of civil­ian pro­test­ers at Fal­luhaj, about 30 miles west of Bagh­dad. The direc­tor of the local hos­pi­tal said 13 peo­ple were killed and 75 injured. This is the third such inci­dent such as this, with the other two occur­ring in Mosul.
Trigger-happy troops, Sec­re­tary of Defense Don­ald Rumsfeld’s cav­a­lier atti­tude toward the rape of a nation’s cul­tural his­tory — with jour­nal­ists and sol­diers tak­ing part — as well as dis­turb­ing but totally uncon­firmed sto­ries I was told by troops about atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted by U.S. forces against pris­on­ers all point to one thing: the need for a skep­ti­cal and close exam­i­na­tion of America’s role in a post-war Iraq.
This exam­i­na­tion is not going to come from the net­works, obvi­ously. CNN’s news head Eason Jor­dan, already fac­ing crit­i­cism for the arguably morally bank­rupt pol­icy of not report­ing Saddam’s thug­gery in exchange for 12 years of access, revealed to Howard Kurtz on “Reli­able Sources” last week that the retired mil­i­tary per­son­nel used on air were all approved by the Pen­ta­gon! (L.A. Times, reg­is­tra­tion req.) “I went to the Pen­ta­gon myself sev­eral times before the war started and met with impor­tant peo­ple there and said, for instance, at CNN, ‘Here are the gen­er­als we’re think­ing of retain­ing to advise us on the air and off about the war,’” he said. “And we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was impor­tant.” Cozy arrange­ment, there.
By and large, the tele­vi­sion reports were uni­formly awful, in my opin­ion, with a rah-rah patri­o­tism that tele­vi­sion excels at. Print reporters were bet­ter, how­ever, with crit­i­cal reports and unfil­tered quotes from troops, includ­ing New York Times reporter Dex­ter Filkins quot­ing a sergeant as say­ing he shot an Iraqi woman because “the chick got in the way.”
This crit­i­cism is not to take away from the courage of the reporters in the field. I was a chicken and mainly stayed away from the rough stuff so I don’t include myself in that pre­vi­ous sen­tence. Twelve jour­nal­ists died in this war, out of about 1,500 cov­er­ing it. None of those 12 peo­ple had to be there; they chose to be there. Their moti­va­tions, I’m sure, ranged from the noble ded­i­ca­tion to the story and the peo­ple of Iraq to the base lust for glory and a col­lec­tion of war sto­ries. Most likely it was a com­bi­na­tion of both. I am includ­ing myself here and speak­ing from per­sonal expe­ri­ence.
So what comes next? For Iraq, no one knows. Pres­i­dent Bush says the U.S. will install democ­racy but that doesn’t include a Shi’a-led Islamic state — a wise choice, even if it does leave the United States open to hypocrisy. We’ll see to what degree democ­racy really does come to the new Iraq. But I know this: The Amer­i­can peo­ple, in whose name this war was waged, need to hold this administration’s feet to the fire. It’s obvi­ously too late to stop this war, but we as a demo­c­ra­tic nation still have a respon­si­bil­ity to make the after­math as ben­e­fi­cial to the Iraqi peo­ple as pos­si­ble now that it’s over. That means that cor­po­rate crony­ism that seems to be the pre­ferred method for award­ing lucra­tive rebuild­ing con­tracts needs to be protested — loudly. Any back­slid­ing on demo­c­ra­tic actions or a dis­con­nect between admin­is­tra­tion actions and rhetoric have to be com­bat­ted as vig­or­ously pos­si­ble.
The anti-war crowd would be crim­i­nally irre­spon­si­ble if it just washes its hands of the mat­ter and con­sid­ers the bat­tle to halt mil­i­tary action in Iraq a failed cause and moves onto the next cause cele­bre. And if the pro-war peo­ple think they now have a right to say, “We told you this war would go well,” they damn well also have a respon­si­bil­ity to hold the peo­ple they sup­ported to their word. It’s time for them, the “win­ners” in the “Should we go to war or shouldn’t we?” debate, to put up or shut up.
I per­son­ally don’t plan on sit­ting back and let­ting things just hap­pen, on let­ting Iraq slip from the con­scious­ness of an eas­ily dis­tracted peo­ple. I’m work­ing on a book pro­posal exam­in­ing the three acts of this drama — build up, the war itself and its after­math. I’ll be return­ing to Iraq as soon as pos­si­ble to research the rebuild­ing and to explore those dis­turb­ing sto­ries I heard. Most impor­tant, I’ll be keep­ing the voices of the Iraqi peo­ple front and cen­ter, some­thing the main­stream media tend not to do.
Do keep in touch. Things are get­ting com­pli­cated — and interesting.

Some sta­tis­tics on B2I Num­ber of donors: 316
Total amount raised: $13,834.16
Largest dona­tion: $2,500 (anony­mous)
Small­est dona­tion: $1
Aver­age dona­tion: $43.78
Median dona­tion: $20
Total num­ber of unique vis­i­tors since Jan. 16, 2003: 462,036
Peak day: March 27, 2003 with 23,328 unique vis­i­tors
Num­ber of coun­tries rep­re­sented: 140, includ­ing almost every coun­try in the Mid­dle East.
Who’s read­ing?
B2I has been accessed by every branch of the U.S. mil­i­tary as well as Cen­tral Com­mand, Pacific Com­mand, South­ern Com­mand and Euro­pean Com­mand. It was also accessed from the CIA, the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, NASA and the United States Supreme Court. It has been men­tioned in the Boston Globe, Jim Lehrer’s New­sHour, Time Out New York, Reuters, NPR, CNN and many other media outlets.

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