Yes, we have made a grave and terrible mistake that cannot be quickly swept under the carpet. And if there was a carpet, would we even be willing to sit down with its merchant and haggle over tea?
I was in Morocco in 1993 with my wife, and we had met another couple from California and decided to take a drive with them from Fez, up over the Atlas Mountains, to the Dades and Todra gorges, a bit out to the desert, then back across the Atlas and down into Marrakech. Soon after taking off from Fez, we came across a stranded motorist who waved us down and asked for a ride to the next village to get some help. At his village, he hopped out of his car, changed into blue clothes, and took us to his carpet shop. We didn't buy any carpets, but I think we had some tea, and he hopped into his pneumatic tube and went back to his broken down car, and we hopped into our white deux cheveux and headed into the mountains.
Morocco is on my mind I guess because of the bombings there, and in Algiers, and Iraq, and the numbers get mentioned and the deaths get counted, and the dead get buried and the grievers grieve. These are muslims who are dying, and there really seems there isn't a benchmark number that comes up - 100, 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 - and gets pounded into our heads by the ticker tape of television and the snippets from the radio and the bits from the computer. 30,000? 600,000? How about 6,000,000?
There are many discussions about frame shops and slogan symposia and sound bite breakdowns surrounding our present grave and terrible mistake, and it has become unmistakably clear that we are treading water between rip-tides and under tows. I would like to propose a frame we build around these deaths: whenever one is in a discussion of activity in Iraq, and those discussions concern deaths, the first number mentioned should be of the Iraqi dead. After their dead are recognized, then we mention the number of American troops dead. And as we recite, or spout or declaim or just merely remark these numbers, we call them benchmarks: "We have met the 700,000 benchmark in Iraqi dead, and we are close to the 4,000 benchmark of American forces dead." These are the benchmarks that we should be keeping track of, and that is the order in which we should recognize them.
It is tragedy of the highest magnitude that we are witnessing at this moment, and I feel insignificant much of the time, shocked and outraged at others, benign now and then, but comfortable at the same time. Maybe it's just easier to accept 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000 than 30,000 or 600,000 or 1,000,000 and so we focus on ourselves. This tragedy may not have struck me personally, but it strikes me fundamentally: how will we be perceived historically? Let us just remind ourselves now how we got where we are, so that when we are history we will be prepared for the bitter that we became.