Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (and 3000 Americans) have died, the once proud and educated Iraqi middle class has been eviscerated, oil prices have gone through the roof, and America, the birthplace of rock n roll and Marilyn Monroe, the conqueror of the Nazis and the Soviets, for 50 years recognized as a benevolent and powerful force in the world, has been revealed as impotent and petty, malevolent and inept. The far-reaching goals of transforming the Middle East, of establishing American hegemony over the oil fields of Iraq, of demonstrating the invincible powers of the American military have faded. Now America would be happy to restore the status quo ante. Now our leaders just want a face-saving way out and hope we and the world will forget. Now that all of us (except maybe Norman Podhoretz and Rudy Giuliani) realize the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a disaster, the question becomes whom shall we blame?
I will not forget, for maybe it is my fault. Mea culpa. Hear my story.
On February 13, 2003, the day before Valentines Day, a few weeks before the invasion I was working for a network news bureau in Kuwait, gearing up for the upcoming war. Our fixer told us that his cousin, the owner of a flower shop, planned to donate 10,000 flowers to children’s’ charities who would then give them to US soldiers, expressing their gratitude for the American boys protecting them from Saddam. We needed to pitch stories to our bosses in New York and this seemed perfect: grateful Arabs, cute kids, our brave men about to go into battle, and bouquets of flowers. It didn’t really matter to us that the florist was probably motivated as much by a desire for publicity as for any love of America. We were grown ups, used to the ways of the world. Making television is like making sausage.
Of course, the boys at the morning show in New York loved our proposal. Light and happy, and yet it could pretend to be a serious look at the impending war, a perfect Valentine’s Day story, a bonbon, a little gift for our soldiers from Matt and Katie. So the next day, we drove to the flower shop. Soon we realized there were no children’s’ charities involved, the flower shop owner had just mobilized his relatives’ kids. Probably, had we not agreed to film it, he would have called the whole thing off. Of course, we did not care. We had promised New York this story, we would deliver.
I filmed the shop, the flowers, the smiling kids. We interviewed the owner, who told us his generosity was motivated by gratitude for America’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991, liberating his country from evil Saddam. Driving to the US Army base, he led his nephews in chants of "We love Bush", which of course I filmed (it did not air, the producers thought it a little "over the top"). But when we arrived at the base the response we received was not at all what we had hoped for, not at all what Katie and Matt would expect.
The military police guarding the base, seeing 3 vans filled with flowers, happy children, and an American TV crew immediately and incomprehensibly assumed we were all terrorists, and so they pulled out their weapons, pointed them at us, ordered us out of the cars, told me to stop filming. I have been in this business long enough to know how to film surreptitiously, so I did, for my own amusement more than for practical purpose, because I knew none of this tape would ever make air.
It would not make air because this was not the story we had promised the morning news. It was not the happy happy story that would make our audience say, "Isn’t that sweet". American soldiers terrified of flower bearing nine year olds was not at all the image the New York producers wanted to project. It did not matter that this story, of fear and misunderstanding, of the American Army’s pathological preoccupation with "force protection" was more interesting, more important, and more real than the tale of flowers, grateful children, and brave soldiers we had sold. I wondered what the kids were thinking, when their flowers were rejected and instead of thank yous, they looked down the barrels of M-16s.
Our producer had the same thought. She asked the soldiers, if we could deposit some of the flowers at the front of the base, so we could tell the kids the soldiers would indeed get their gifts. An MP assented, and we unloaded piles of petunias, waiting for a bomb-sniffing dog to check them out. Since the florist and his kids had an articulate American TV crew with them, they were not arrested, but we were all kicked off the base.
Of course the children were disappointed but that was not our primary concern. We had promised a story and our job was to deliver it. We had filmed the set up of the flower shop and kids, the stand-up and the interview but we still needed the punch line of the grateful soldiers receiving their Valentines Day bulbs from the happy Arab children. Without that payoff, we didn’t have a story, we would have failed at our task.
We decided to go to a road near the base, and when an American Jeep stopped at the red light, the kids could give them flowers, I could get the shot, and the morning news would have the story they had assigned. No one need know of the misunderstanding which made American soldiers point guns at nine-year-old boys and girls armed with begonias, who had just been chanting "We love Bush, down with Saddam.
This is too bad. Many have argued that our failure in Iraq was due to the inadequate number of troops sent to police the aftermath of the fall of Saddam, or to the absurd disenfranchisement of the entire Ba’ath party (that is to say Iraq’s educated elite), or to the dismantling of the Army, leaving men with guns no way to feed their families. These explanations are all certainly true but I would like to suggest that on a slightly deeper level our disaster can be attributed to the very things I saw that Valentines Day, 2003, at Camp Doha outside Kuwait City.
There are two lessons I would like my country to learn from this misbegotten war. The first is that war involves death and we should not go to war unless we believe it is worth our sons’ lives. If it is not worth putting the cute Bush twins on point in Sadr City, don’t invade. The military had taken as the lesson of Vietnam that the American people will accept anything except the death of our boys. Thus the primary goal of the American Army in Iraq was not to lose any soldiers. Our men were told that anytime they feared for their lives, or the lives of their comrades, they could reply with deadly force. That is to say, if a car filled with an Iraqi family approaches a checkpoint a little too fast, and one soldier thinks he might be at risk, then he is justified in wiping out the mother, the father and their little babies.
This attitude taught the Iraqis that Americans have no appreciation of their rights, including of their right to live, that to the Americans, only American life is truly human. This is not a point of view designed to win the hearts and minds of an occupied people. Establishing security in the Green Zone, and ignoring it in the rest of the country, allowing the looting of all government ministries save the Oil Ministry, not allowing our soldiers to mix with the population that at least at first was grateful for the end of Saddam’s tyranny all are aspects of the same culture of fear, the culture of "force protection" that impelled US soldiers to point their guns at Kuwaiti children bearing gifts.
The second lesson is that it is very difficult to successfully occupy a nation when you don’t speak the language, when you don’t understand its culture or people, when you cannot recognize the difference between friend and foe. According to military sources, perhaps up to 95% of the men we have arrested in Iraq were guilty of nothing. But since we can’t speak Arabic, we cannot identify the 5% who actually are our enemies. Thus we have managed to alienate those Iraqis who might well have supported our program because to us they all looked the same. Again, perhaps this could have been predicted by the fear and incomprehension shown when the flower bearing kids accompanied by an American news crew showed up at Camp Doha.
Outside the base, standing by the red light, we still had no luck. Jeeps saw the kids and their flowers and either sped up and drove by or if the light was red, they stopped 50 yards up the road. American soldiers are not cowardly. Their reaction to us was based on their orders, which presumed that any stranger was a threat which was based on the conviction of their generals that American casualties for which they could be blamed would be a career killer.
Finally, I got bored with waiting around for a car to stop and strolled the 50 yards to a jeep, explained I was American, filming for a US network, and we just needed a shot of them getting flowers. So in the end, one jeep full of soldiers did me the favor, stopped in front of the kids, and with impatience and little gratitude accepted their Valentine’s Day gift. I filmed it, told the producer we had the shot, and we headed back to the hotel.
Maybe you saw the story that Valentine’s Day morning as you were drinking your coffee, getting ready to go to work. It was the story we had told New York to expect, not the story we saw. It confirmed the American publics assumption that this war would turn out okay while the reality indicated the potential for disaster.
So, in part, the war is my fault. I remember, at a dinner sometime that month in Kuwait, I asked a table of journalists which of us believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Of the twelve of us, only one did. Perhaps not coincidentally, he was the highest paid among us. But reading our copy, would anyone have guessed our doubts? The difference between what we say to each other sitting in the bar after work and what we file would terrify you.
Why didn’t I do my moral duty to the truth? Why didn’t I tell the producer I would not be a party to our distorting of the reality we observed? In part I can excuse my behavior because I just shot the pictures, I did not edit them but this denies my culpability. I knew damn well what shots the editor needed to tell the story the producers wanted to tell and I saw it as my job to give him the required images. I was just doing my job. So was the producer, so was the MP, so was Bush.
I have been thinking of writing this story for years. After I returned to New York, I told it to a friend and she said I should write it down. I laughed and said I couldn’t. If I did I would never work again. I joked the only way a journalist could lose his job is if he told the truth.
I am writing it now because of the new George Clooney film Michael Clayton. If newspapers no longer tell us the truth, thank God art still does. In the film, Clooney plays the eponymous shyster lawyer, a fixer for a big law firm. He has been paying off witnesses and greasing the wheels of corrupt business for years and it is beginning to wear him down. I felt the movie was the story of my life, had I been a shyster lawyer rather than just a shyster cameraman. Maybe, just maybe, it is the story of your life too. The most fascinating character in the movie is Tilda Swindon, chief council for a chemical firm. She is the heart of darkness, a woman who will order her minions to kill to protect her firm, her boss’ reputation. In most Hollywood movies she would be arrogant, confident, a Satan in a suit. Here, she is just doing her job, a job she doesn’t enjoy it that much any more. She is nervous and sad. Evil just became even more banal.
Michael Clayton says he is just a janitor, cleaning up messes for those who can afford his services. In my little way, so am I. So are we all. Years ago, sitting and laughing with bright and funny advertising people I joked, "What if we used are talents for good instead of evil?" We don’t of course, because evil pays much better.
My lifetime coincides with the decline of American power. When I was born, in 1958, a marine brigade landing in Beirut was enough to insure the Lebanese leader we favored would hold power. In 1958, when I was born, America still had a balance of trade surplus. That is to say, the world wanted to buy our products more than we wanted the buy the world’s. Back then, "made in Japan", was a joke, a byword for shoddy knickknacks, cheaply made, of dubious quality. Back then American steel, American cars, American technology, American culture were the state of the art.
Today, our entire army cannot hold two moderately sized nations. Today, we import much more than we buy and we import it funded by foreign credit. Our only export surpluses are in entertainment and aircraft. Our manufacturing prowess has been downsized, South Korea and Brazil make more steel than we do.
Who is to blame? It has been joked that the dumbing down of the American people has been accomplished by Harvard grads and this is my point: Our elites have betrayed us. Instead of recognizing their responsibility to their nation, they only see their responsibility to their career. Back in the 19th Century, conservative philosophers argued that in a world without God, morality would be impossible. Liberals like me laughed at their obscurantist despair. Of course we could be moral! Morality has nothing to do with religion. I am no longer so sure.
In a world without God, "success" becomes the only absolute and we arrive at a world where Colin Powell will lie to the United Nations, to the American people, because his boss, our President asked him to, where me and countless other journalists trimmed their stories to serve our masters’ agendas, where CIA agents gave the Vice President the intelligence they knew he wanted even when they knew it was dubious, where generals bit their tongues and told Rumsfeld what he wanted to hear, no wonder we lost this war.
Would General Marshall have bit his tongue as Powell did? Would George Kennan have decided that his career in the State Department was more important than telling the President the truth? Would Edward R. Morrow, have praised the President on air, while mocking him during late night drinking sessions? I think not. Back then men could not respect themselves if they betrayed their ideals. Back then people wrote novels about the temptations and tribulations of "selling out". They write these novels no more, for now "selling out" is our deepest aspiration.
America’s problems are real and profound but they are not in the Middle East. The last half-century has shown that military power, especially when it is technologically based, has limited effectiveness. Japan and West Germany have grown much faster than we at least in part because they did not waste 4% of GDP on their armies. Soon the Chinese may stop buying our Treasury Bills, stop giving us money to buy their stuff and then instead of consuming more than we produce, we will have to produce more than we consume, to pay back our debts.
Elementary macroeconomics tells us that ultimately only way to pay off our debts to foreigners is to export goods they want. That is to say, if we want our children to have a good life, we must begin to invest in productive capacity, in our human capital, in education. We must end the decline the competiveness of our products in the world economy. Increasing investment, at least initially, means decreasing consumption. This is not an easy sell, not for a politician that wants to be elected, not for a journalist who wants a promotion, not for a bureaucrat who knows his advancement is based on telling his masters what they want to hear.
I am not so vain as to think that had I refused to film our soldier grunting thank you as a smiling Kuwaiti girl gave him a Valentine’s Day bouquet I would have dismantled all the preparation for war. Perhaps even Colin Powell, had he publicly resigned rather than support a policy he knew was misguided, would not have prevented this disaster. But if every journalist, every State Department official, every CIA agent had uttered in public what they believed in private, then this war would never have occurred. The American people, remember, wiser than their elites, were not enthusiastic for this war. They accepted it, as I did, as General Powell did, as Tony Blair did, as inevitable, and thus somehow not their responsibility.
It is easy for us to blame Bush, or Cheney, or the Neo-Cons, or the Israeli Lobby, or Halliburton, or Congress, or the mainstream media for the war in Iraq. But we the American people knew better. Millions of us marched against the war and then went home and did our laundry or watched TV.
Although the image of America in the world has declined, although the price of oil has increased, although the lives of countless Iraqis have been shattered, we will survive this debacle. America is too big, too far away from the Middle East, to be truly harmed, even if the very worst should happen (which it very well might), even if after we withdraw, Iran and Saudi Arabia and Turkey invade the carcass that has become Iraq, even if the civil war now raging turns into a regional explosion.
The Russian Empire began to fall after its defeat in the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese war. The Soviet Empire fell when it lost Afghanistan to the Mujehaddin. War, especially defeat in war, is hard to spin. Military failure gives lie to the optimistic propaganda of our leaders. It gives us an opportunity to rethink what we believe, what our country needs. Our elites need to learn their responsibility to the nation, to the truth, to something more important than their careers. If they do not, they deserve to end up on the ash heap of history. Unfortunately, so will we all.