The march toward a disastrous war with Iran seems to have finally hit a bump in the road.  The new National Intelligence Estimate suggests that Iran ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Could this be a step toward rationality in our relationship with Tehran? Is a day coming when we understand the Iranians as a more or less rational people pursuing their self-interest in a methodical and predictable way?   Are normalized diplomatic relations on the distant horizon?  Will poor Kim Jong-il finally be able to get some attention for actually doing the things we wrongly accuse Iran of?

Probably not.  The Bush Administration has made it clear that this will not change its policy toward Tehran.  The problem with this attitude is that it creates a situation in which Iran can’t win.  If they continue with their nuke program, we will push for additional sanctions and military intervention.  If they cease their nuke program, we will push for additional sanctions and military intervention.  A (severely whittled down) stick and no carrot leave the U.S. with no influence at all.

The sad reality is that, until we elect a new president, our policy toward the Middle East will continue to be based largely on imaginary WMD programs.  Not ideal, but not as dangerous as it was before the new NIE, either.

It seems to me that Americans are retreating further and further into a fantasy world. Perhaps it’s the Bush administration’s disdain for reality-based thinking or a reaction to an increasingly complicated world, but it’s starting to get a little crazy.

The Blackwater hullabaloo (brouhaha?) is a perfect example of our ability to obscure everything with euphemism, to look the other way, and then to act shocked when the painfully obvious becomes impossible to continue to ignore.

Blackwater personnel are not “private contractors.” They are mercenaries. And while they will undoubtedly go on about their protection role, they, in the proud tradition of mercenaries throughout history, are arrogant, difficult to control, and violent. This tends to be a common trait in people who kill other people for money.

Now, I’m not being critical—most wars are about money and there is no question that these guys are good at what they do. The reason that they’ve been able to operate with so little oversight for so long is likely because they haven’t lost a single American diplomat on their watch. Think about it: If you’re a congressman visiting Iraq, who would you want protecting you—a well equipped, well paid, former SEAL or a nineteen year old reservist still waiting for his flak jacket to be delivered? And what would you be willing to overlook for that level of protection?

What bothers me isn’t so much Blackwater’s behavior, it’s the sudden stunned outrage I’m seeing in the media. It’s as though someone at NBC finally got around to looking up “mercenary” in the dictionary.

War is a nasty business. It’s expensive, brutal, and complicated. Of course, you can whitewash it, but eventually it comes to roost. Those dead servicemen you don’t see on TV make their absence felt at home. The war tax you’re not paying creates a budget deficit that drags on the economy. And the mistakes this administration continues to spin create a quagmire it could take decades to get out of.

Oh, and mercenaries aren’t the sweet guys we told ourselves they were.

First of all, let me say that I was a little embarrassed when the head of Columbia University likened Iran’s president to a cruel and petty dictator. I mean, of course he’s petty—he’s a professional politician. But he’s not particularly cruel by world standards and he’s an elected official with heavy oversight, so not exactly a dictator either. If our “intellectual elite” want to resort to name-calling, they should at least try to get the facts straight.

Don’t get me wrong, Ahmadinejad is the worst kind of populist—a man who panders to his electorate’s basest instincts with half-truths and sound bites. But talk is cheap and I began to try to remember exactly what Iran has done to us to warrant so many comparisons to the Third Reich. Have they indeed unleashed a holocaust on the American people?

Decide for yourself. A brief history of our relationship with Iran:

1951: The Iranian government nationalizes British Petroleum’s holdings in Iran.

1953: CIA-led Operation Ajax deposes Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh. He is replaced by the U.S.-friendly dictator, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who solidifies his position by using his intelligence agency, SAVAK, to crush political rivals.

Late 1950s-Present: Iran supports an intermittent nuclear power program, initially supported by America’s Atoms for Peace initiative. More recently, the U.S. has accused the Iranians of having a nuclear weapons program, which they deny. The truth is unclear, but Iran has been widely criticized for not being forthcoming with information and inspections. It seems likely that they have designs on becoming a nuclear power.

Late 1970s-Present: Iran supports Hezbollah, which has carried out numerous terrorist acts, including ones against Americans. It’s hard to calculate exactly how many Americans Hezbollah has killed, but I can’t find support for any number over 500—significantly less if you take them at their word that they were not involved in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing.

1979: The American-supported Shah is overthrown by the Iranian Revolution and the country is converted to an Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Khomeini.

1979: Iranian students take over the U.S. embassy, accusing personnel of plotting to overthrow Khomeini like they did Mossadegh. They release most of the women and African-Americans in the first few months but continue to hold a significant number of hostages.

1980: The U.S. mounts a failed rescue attempt in which eight soldiers die in a plane crash.

1980: Iraq invades Iran.

1981: U.S. embassy hostages are released unharmed after the U.S. caves in on a few points, including no further interference in Iranian internal affairs and the unfreezing of Iranian assets.

1980-1988: The U.S. publicly provides technological and financial support, as well as intelligence and equipment, to Iraq in its fight with Iran. An estimated 500,000 Iranians are killed. This is nearly 1% of their current population, or the equivalent of a war that kills 2,250,000 Americans.

Having said that, the Iranians probably could have avoided many of their casualties by taking an entirely defensive attitude and not attempting to press their advantage.

1987: The U.S. attacks Iranian oil platforms in retaliation for an Iranian attack on a U.S.- flagged Kuwaiti tanker. America is later criticized for this attack by the International Court of Justice. No American casualties. Iranian casualties unknown.

1988: The U.S. begins Operation Praying Mantis in response to the USS Samuel Roberts hitting an Iranian mine (four Americans seriously injured). Two Iranian warships, as well as six speedboats, are sunk during this operation. Iranian casualties are not known. Two U.S. marines are killed when their helicopter crashes. The cause of the crash is unclear.

1988: The USS Vincennes shoots down an Iranian airliner killing all 290 people aboard. The U.S. says it’s an accident, but the Iranians believe it to be intentional. Then Vice President Bush reacts by saying: “I will never apologize for the United States of America—I don’t care what the facts are.” The U.S. pays $6,180,000 in reparations to settle a suit brought by Iran in the International Court of Justice.

2002-Present: G.W. Bush identifies Iran as a member of the Axis of Evil. Numerous threats are made by various U.S. politicians including the refusal to rule out a nuclear first strike against Iran.

2003: The U.S. invades Iraq primarily because of the now discredited belief that Saddam Hussein had a dangerous WMD program.

Circa 2005-Present: G.W. Bush accuses Iran of supporting attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. Evidence is scant, but it is probably true on some level.

2005-Present: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vomits a flood of obnoxious political bluster, including support for the idea of destroying Israel, denying the holocaust, and your customarily vague “Death to America” rhetoric.

2006: Iran announces that it has enriched uranium, though to nowhere near weapons grade.

So there you have it. Based on my best estimate, the U.S. is directly responsible for around a thousand Iranian dead and indirectly responsible for over a hundred thousand, as well as for replacing their democracy with a dictator.

As for the Iranian side, realistically they’ve been directly responsible for no American deaths and indirectly responsible for somewhere between 100 and 1,000 (depending on the truth behind the Beirut barracks bombing and their level of support for Iraqi insurgents).

You may think this is a defense of Iran’s government. It’s not. I believe them to be repressive, theocratic, and prone to violence against their own people. What I’m trying to say is that it’s a bit ridiculous for Americans to act like the innocent victims of Iran’s evil. Maybe it’s time to forget the past and concentrate on creating a productive future.

All this talk of immigration reform strikes me as yet another example of politicians pandering to the American people, who have made dishonesty and crushing incompetence a prerequisite for getting elected.

Let’s talk simple facts:

1: It’s illegal to be an illegal immigrant.

The government already has the authority to round up illegals and deport them, as well as the authority to punish their employers.  So, why don’t they?  And if they aren’t willing or able to enforce the current laws, why would we believe that a bunch of new laws would help?

2:  There is already a guest worker program.

But, like most government programs, it’s unrealistic, hopelessly bureaucratic, and completely backlogged.  My town, for instance, is a seasonal resort and needs summer workers.  Current approval backlogs for workers will get them to us just after Labor Day.  Granted, the now-dead reform bill attempted to liberalize and streamline this system, but what were the chances that a patchwork of compromises and amendments would have done anything but create more bureaucratic overload?

3:  Border security doesn’t work.

This is why we have twelve million illegals in the first place.  It’s also why, after decades of effort and billions of dollars, narcotics continue to flood our streets. Besides, can you imagine how many Mexicans we’d have to hire to build a border wall?

4:  There are easy ways to deal with this.

Most illegal immigrants use fraudulent social security numbers—either invalid ones or stolen ones—and pay income and social security taxes.  Oddly, the Social Security Administration is legally barred from sharing information with law enforcement or immigration.  In fact, they aren’t even allowed to tell you that someone has stolen your identity. This seems insane (even by government standards) until you realize that these mismatched numbers are bringing in billions of dollars in revenue every year.

So if we’re really committed to controlling immigration, a good first step would be to have Social Security send notifications of suspicious use of numbers to their owners.

Is a three-year-old applying for a firefighter gig?  Is one person working three full-time jobs in three different states?  Is a woman who calls herself Juanita Martinez providing a number belonging to Dick Cheney? In light of what we’ve learned about the government’s current surveillance habits, this doesn’t seem all that intrusive.

5:  We’re not going to lift a finger.

So, are we going to have someone write a simple computer program and coordinate between Social Security, the IRS, and Homeland Security? Hell, no. Politicians will continue to make speeches proffering solutions they know won’t work, U.S. businesses will continue to fill their positions with illegal immigrants, and pregnant Mexican women towing toddlers will continue to outmaneuver our border security.

So relax.  Fifteen years from now, those yummy takeaway burritos will still be cheap as dirt, hotel sheets will still be freshly laundered, and your senator will still be on TV demanding that something be done about illegal immigrants.  The only difference is that instead of twelve million, there will be twenty-five million.

If there’s one thing we Americans are spectacularly bad at, it’s putting ourselves in other people’s shoes.  There are a lot of reasons, I suppose:  Geographic isolation, the fact that we’ve been so successful, etc.  But it’s getting kind of dangerous.

This administration in particular has made an art of creating bizarre fantasies about the Middle East and then hiring “experts” to agree with those illusions. Ideologically comfortable, but is it wise to take action with no clue what our opponent’s countermove might be?  Remember “They’ll welcome us as liberators?”  I’ve spent less than a month in the Middle East spaced out over two decades and even I knew better than that.

As a thriller writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes villains tick.  And since Iran is shaping up to be our next order of business, I’ve come up with a short quiz to give people the tools to predict that country’s positions.  It’s not as hard as everyone makes it look.

1:  When the Soviet Union, a country that made no bones about wanting to do America harm, invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. started a massive program of support for the Afghan insurgency to keep the Soviets from consolidating their position.

Therefore, when America, a country that makes no bones about wanting to do Iran harm, invades Iraq, we can expect the Iranians to:

A:  Welcome us as liberators
B:  Help us build airbases where we can stage bombers for cross-border runs
C: Start a massive program of support for the insurgency to keep America from consolidating its position.

2:  In reaction to being threatened with a preemptive nuclear strike by the Soviets, the U.S. built an elaborate nuclear deterrent.

Therefore, in reaction to being threatened with a preemptive nuclear strike by the Americans, the Iranians will:

A:  Make Paris Hilton queen
B:  Disband their military and do whatever we say
C:  Attempt to build an elaborate nuclear deterrent

3:  As Americans have come to feel increasingly threatened, we have turned to religion for comfort. More and more, we encourage the weakening of the separation of church and state and insist that our politicians espouse conservative religious values.

Therefore, as the Iranians feel increasingly threatened they will:

A:  Convert to Christianity
B:  Become an atheistic, secular state
C:  Insist on increasing religious participation in their government

4:  In the face of imminent danger, G.W. Bush has never given in to our opponents, has stepped up his tough-guy rhetoric, and has tried as hard as he can to make the threat to the average American as stark as possible.

Therefore, in the face of imminent danger, we can expect Ahmadinejad to:

A:  Cower and tell his people to do whatever we say
B:  Duck and cover
C:  Never give in to the U.S., step up his tough-guy rhetoric, and try as hard as he can to make the danger to the average Iranian as stark as possible.

If you answered C on every question, I hope you’ll consider going to work for Homeland Security. If you answered A on every question, you should probably seek political office.

The reason this blog doesn’t take comments isn’t because I brook no dissent, but because there’s some kind of glitch neither I nor my web guy have been able to figure out yet.  So, if you have something to say, email it to me through my main site and I’ll try to get it up.

Kyle

One of the weird things about being a novelist is that it makes you an accidental expert in all kinds of useless areas. A while back I spent a year writing a book about the tobacco industry and to this day, I can’t help picking apart every article I see on the subject.

The main thing I learned about tobacco is that the conventional wisdom is almost always BS—just a product of the push and pull between propagandists on both sides. The truth is that the history of tobacco and the history of America are hopelessly intertwined. This country began as a social experiment financed almost entirely by tobacco exports.

Unfortunately, it turned out that all our puffing wasn’t as harmless as it was made out to be. This wouldn’t have surprised even Christopher Columbus, who, five hundred years ago (and without so much as a single PhD) wrote about the addictive properties of tobacco. As for the health benefits of drawing hot smoke into your lungs, let’s just say there’s a reason they don’t tell you to stand tall and take deep breaths when your house is on fire.

The widespread acceptance of these painfully obvious facts has caused Big Tobacco to go from being one of the most respected industries in the country to being the poster child for corporate evil. Of course, much of this is well deserved. When information about the dangers of smoking began to surface, the industry did everything possible to suppress it. But even with a clientele desperately wanting to believe, no amount of denial and equivocation could continue to conceal tobacco’s staggering death toll.

Cigarettes aren’t the only dangerous product being marketed to us, though. Consider that other American oral icon, the doughnut. Obesity has become a national epidemic and the seriousness of the associated diseases are enough to make you start using cigarettes to suppress your appetite. While young adult smoking rates remain relatively stable, the occurrence of diabetes increased seventy percent between 1990 and 1998. Children are also being victimized, bringing into question whether Cap’n Crunch may someday be remembered as a more ruthless killer than Blackbeard.

Setting aside the carnage resulting from poor health habits for a second, consider the economic costs of smoking. Is this country really being forced to pony up billions of dollars to cover smokers’ inflated health care bills? The answer is probably not. While tobacco’s opponents are quick to point out that smokers die ten years younger than non-smokers, they are slow to credit back the sunny side of that statistic. A study prepared for the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that the savings to social security, elderly care, and pensions actually creates a net surplus of fourteen cents for every pack sold.

It gets better. Tobacco is the most heavily taxed consumer product in the world. In fact, a tobacco attorney I interviewed for my book considers the U.S. a majority partner in the tobacco business because the government collects as much as a few dollars per pack while the companies themselves have to settle for the scraps. When you include taxes and the payments related to the $247 billion settlement with the states, it could be argued that it’s your patriotic duty to smoke. The more the better.

Of course, none of this has been lost on tobacco executives. Battles over tax increases generally meet only half-hearted resistance. If there is one thing industry strategists understand, it’s promoting dependency. The more reliant the government becomes on tobacco taxes, the less likely it will be to do anything meaningful to curb smoking.

This long and divisive history has left America’s relationship with tobacco completely dysfunctional. Beyond occasional increases in taxes and the uncoordinated banning of smoking in public areas, we seem content to let the courts take the lead in making decisions about whether we’re going to continue to be able to light up. Is that really a good idea? Beyond the lawyers who have collected billions in fees, who benefits from all this legal wrangling? Should we leave public policy decisions to twelve unelected people sitting in a jury box? Do we give up a little bit of our freedom every time we ask to be protected from ourselves?

The question we need to ponder is whether we feel comfortable living in a country where it’s legal to produce, market, and use unhealthy—even deadly—products. If the answer is yes, then each of us needs to carefully weigh the benefits and risks associated with smoking and take responsibility for our decisions. If the answer is no, then we need to pressure our representatives in the government to ban tobacco products entirely and bear the economic consequences. In the end, we can’t have it both ways.

Sometime after writing Sphere of Influence, I was contacted by Dr. Emad El-Din Aysha, an Egyptian political science professor, who was interested in where I came up with my idea for the book (it related to the connection between terrorism and the international narcotics trade.)

We struck up a friendship and he’s helped me a great deal with research and perspectives relating to the Middle East. Oddly, one of his most fascinating emails was a review of the movie Tears of the Sun that he wrote for an Egyptian newspaper.

While I’m not exactly a touchy-feely pacifist type, it makes me wonder if some focus on cultural understanding might go a long way.

I’ve posted excerpts from his review below, with the responses I sent him interspersed in italics.

Thursday • September 11 • 2003

Tears of the Sun: The next ‘Quiet American’?

Waters (Bruce Willis’s character) comments that God forgot these people. There is also a scene where the priest tells one of the nuns that a thousand problems don’t create doubt in the existence of God or His mercy; then they’re butchered. Which tells you that the decision to protect these people, through strength and not merely faith, is
doing God’s work. This becomes even more apparent when you discover
that the commander of the rebels that go about raping and pillaging has a
Muslim-Arab name, Colonel Idris Sadick.

There is also a reference to how the rebels are prepared to kill anyone
from a different ‘church’, a very Christian name for religion. And, of course,
the president’s son has a noble Christian name, Arthur (of the Round
Table), and the Christian that rats on the group of refugees to Colonel
Sadick is named Gideon. When Arthur reveals his identity to Waters, he
says his father was butchered because of his commitment to
democratising Nigeria. When they reach safety at the end of the film and
people gather round him, Arthur says ‘Freedom!’ (boo, hiss).

Interestingly, I don’t think most Americans would recognize Idris Sadick as a Muslim-Arab name. In fact, Americans put no stock at all in the meaning or etymology of names. We name our children based on fads or by sound (i.e. to avoid rhymes, alliterations, etc.) The vast majority of Americans named Sara, for instance, probably wouldn’t know that was a Biblical name and might not even be Christian. The names Arthur and Gideon are not a religious statement, but a concession to an American audience that struggles with those consonant-laden African names.

I think it’s hard for Arab-Muslims to understand that religion just doesn’t loom that large in American life. Amongst our Christian community, the most consistent worshipers are the Catholics with church attendance hovering at fifty percent but in significant decline. The second most consistent worshipers are the Anglicans with attendance levels of only 12 percent. While we have some fairly vocal right wing Christians in this country, we are a very secular country on the whole.

It seems to me that the average Arab-Muslim sees everything through a filter of faith, whereas the average American sees everything through a filter of money. If anyone tells you that we are on some kind of religious crusade against the Muslim people, do not believe it. The very idea of interfering in someone else’s method of worship is abhorrent to the vast majority of Americans.

Leaving aside the kind of post-11/9 US rhetoric evident here, what we’re
seeing is something much more serious and frankly a lot uglier: a return
to the kind of naïveté that characterised America’s involvement in Vietnam,
hence the reference to Graham Greene’s classic, The Quiet American.
Given how unemotionally quiet (and annoyingly smug) Bruce Willis is in
the movie, I think the comparison between his character and Alden Pyle in
the novel is more than adequate.

In the novel, that takes place in the late 1950s before America’s full entry into the war, we are introduced to the young, idealistic and thoroughly well-intentioned character of Pyle through the eyes of the wily, more experienced British war correspondent who
narrates the story. Pyle is in search of a third ‘democratic’ force to help
free Vietnam from the twin evils of Communism and the remnants of
French colonialism. In the process, he throws in his lot with a renegade
Vietnamese general in an effort to do just that, paralleling what the
Americans did with Ngo Dinh Diem. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
The tribal Ibo heir to the throne and his deposed father before him,
President Azuka, the wise man who is ahead of his people, have a vision
for its democratic future. The fact that he is a tribal (unelected) king, that
his son will undemocratically succeed him, and that his tribe is in charge
of the country for no good reason, seems to pass the Americans by. Much
the same was true of US co-operation with the anti-French Ngo Dinh
Diem, who was later deposed through an (undemocratic) military coup
organised by the Americans, bringing to power people who were even
less democratic, all in the cause of ‘God and democracy’, not to mention
introducing development according to the US economic model.

I would strongly argue that Vietnam was not an example of cultural imperialism but an example of ultimately unfounded communist paranoia. The Domino Theory was very much in our collective consciousness at the time.

Americans have a very strong missionary streak that does lead them to
help other nations out of good intentions, but they do it in a
condescending top-down way that ignores the lessons of history and the
realities of the particular situations they’re in. Just look at the monumental
cultural blunders America is making in Iraq.

Unfortunately, I cannot argue with this assessment.

The choice of the name Alden, incidentally, is probably a reference to John
Alden (1599-1687), one of the pilgrim founders of the Plymouth colony,
people who later massacred the Indians after escaping to America for the
sake of religious ‘freedom’. (NB: Pyle is probably a reference to pylons, in
this case the kind of pillars found in temples).

Be careful to not give Hollywood too much credit for veiled historical references. I would be surprised if there’s a single person working in the movie industry who knows who John Alden is. I didn’t and I read a lot on the subject of history.

Greene makes reference to this American historical ignorance when Pyle talks about his first pet dog, named Prince after the Black Darkness, not knowing that that particular
prince massacred women and children at Limoges. When Pyle is told
this, he says he doesn’t ‘remember’ taking that at school. America today
is very much like the America of The Quiet American, with Congress
pushing for war, McCarthyism and intellectuals with grandiose abstract
ideas who know very little about the countries they’re interfering with.
America, as usual, as always, seems to have forgotten the past, its own
past, and is heading headlong on a collision course with a whole new
league of genocidal dictators out for Muslim blood, with George W. Bush
as their crusading patron saint, Alden Pyle. As for a modern-day York
Harding, the academic that sets Pyle on his path, we have Paul Wolfowitz.
God help us all!

Keep in mind that Bush is enormously unpopular in many sectors of the U.S. In fact, I would say he is one of the most passionately hated presidents in American history. There was (and is) huge opposition to the war with Iraq and I believe he will be voted out based on his hopelessly botched foreign policy. This is a remarkable statement as Americans generally ignore foreign policy. (Author’s note: This was written before the last election. Not one of my best predictions.)

On the topic of Americans remembering their own bloody history, I’d like to
remind the (minority African-American) director that long before ethnic
cleansers went around cutting women’s breasts off in Africa, US-trained
death squads (like the fidaaiyi Saddam) were doing the same in Central
America during the Reagan presidency. And don’t forget the drug-dealing
Contras who funded much of their war through money made from selling
cocaine to black Americans in the States (see Jeffrey St. Clair and
Alexander Cockburn’s Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press).
Americans always end up working with unseemly characters in their
‘democratic’ forays into the Third World and become dependent on these
people even when they find out how brutal they are, just as Pyle had to put
up with General Thé.

While I’m not necessarily defending specific historical actions, sometimes you have to go with the lesser of the evils.

I’d just like to see them make a movie where American soldiers are willing to fight under a UN flag and UN directions for the sake of the oppressed and the poor, and then we’d see how ‘well-intentioned’ quiet Americans like Bruce Willis are.

As a good friend of mine is fond of pointing out, it’s virtually impossible to get the UN to fight at all.

A great many Americans, I’m sad to say, are really, really full of it. Bruce
Willis being a case in point. He was recently in Iraq earlier this month,
visiting GIs there to boost their morale through (what he calls) singing. He
only had to open his mouth while being interviewed and prattle on about
his own personal in-depth analysis of what America was doing there. First
he said that even though he’d only been there a couple of days he got the
impression straight away that everything was A-okay, with the American
troops being welcomed warmly in the streets and good work being done
to rebuild the country.

There are a few things that I don’t understand about America myself. One is our obsession with celebrities. Bruce Willis, of course, has no expertise in this area, but people still listen to him. I don’t think we’re unique in this, though. Arab countries must have singers/actors who like to talk about politics, too.

Second, Mr. Willis said that kids were finally being inoculated, evidence
that now that military operations were over, the real good that the
American armed forces could do was at last being done. He makes it
sound like Iraq was some famine- and plague-ridden African disaster
zone (and that’s a stereotype itself, given that Africa has a food surplus)

I would argue that massive political failures in sub-Saharan Africa have left an enormous number of people hungry, despite food surpluses in a few select countries. And now land reform in Zimbabwe has reduced food production there by 75%.

where health services didn’t exist till the Americans got there. He seems
to forget that, despite the despicability of the Saddam regime (with the US
heavily implicated in this despicability), Iraq was quite exemplary when it
came to healthcare, education, public utilities, infrastructure and women’s
rights, till the Americans came along and blasted the country’s
infrastructure and government services from here to kingdom come
during the Second (or was that First?) Gulf War.

In the first Gulf War, Iraq invaded a nation friendly to us (and, let’s be frank, who have something we need.) With no reaction from anyone, Hussein would have been free to march across the Middle East (remember our obsession with the Domino Theory), killing countless Arabs and eventually dragging Israel into the fight, which would have been disastrous for everyone involved. We warned him repeatedly to pull back. We very publicly built up a huge fighting force. Still, he wouldn’t back down—instead making childish and utterly moronic statements about defeating us.

Most of the child fatalities in Iraq since that first war have been caused by
the spread of cholera and other epidemics because the water and
sewage systems were very deliberately destroyed by the Americans
during that war. Not to mention the sanctions’ regime that prevented Iraq
from importing pencils because the carbon in them could be used for
WMD purposes! It’s rich talking about the ‘help’ Americans can provide
the Iraqis – help they haven’t been providing the Iraqi people – when the
help is needed to clear up damage caused by the self-same Americans!

Again, I’d argue that the first Gulf War was not our fault, though I am willing to concede that our handling of the subsequent peace has been poor.

Shades of The Quiet American here too, the scene in the movie version
when Pyle says the damage and deaths caused by General Thé’s
bombing campaign against civilians (sound familiar?) wouldn’t matter in
the long run because they would win the war against the Communists
and the French colonialists, leading to a rehabilitated, modern and
developed state (on the American model, which has lousy illiteracy and
poverty rates, and an extortionary healthcare system).

Now that just seems inflammatory. The US has the highest literacy rate in the world, poverty for a family of 4 is defined as under US$18,000 (an amount that would make them wealthy virtually anywhere else) and even the poorest Americans enjoy health care that is far superior to most of the rest of the world.

Third, Willis complained about how the liberal media tried to dissuade
America from the war and convince everyone there weren’t any WMDs
there and that the American public was against the war in any case. He
seems to forget that some of the largest anti-war protests in American
history took place against this war, and they took place, for the first in
anyone’s history, before the war even started, sure proof of how morally
‘driven’ they were.

Again, Willis is an actor and doesn’t speak for America. Except, I suppose, on issues relating to acting…

Most college brats in America were opposed to the Vietnam War because they didn’t want to soil their hands in a war zone, though they weren’t really concerned with the dropping of napalm and Agent Orange on Vietnamese villages.

This is absolutely untrue. There was enormous and well-documented concern for the suffering of the Vietnamese.

As for the liberal media in America, what the hell is he talking about? What liberal media? And if they even exist, are they any match for the illiberal, Rupert Murdoch-dominated media empire?

As for the WMD issue, Mr Willis seems to have forgotten his own remarks on this, when he said that it didn’t matter whether WMDs were there or not because Saddam had gone too far and had to be removed.

Moreover, by scoffing at criticisms about whether there is enough proof of
the presence of WMDs, he seems to forget that it is the media’s job to
criticise, speculate, be skeptical, review the facts, come up with their own
points of view and express other views. Hence, their description as the
‘fourth estate’.

We have growing problems in America with our media. Accurate and fair reporting used to be its primary goal. Now its primary goal is hoarding advertising dollars. This means that accuracy and balance are irrelevant. They simply want to attract viewers and to do that they create easily digested stories that don’t upset their viewers.

I would argue, though, that the Arab media has a similar problem. People want to hear anti-American slant, so that is what they’re given.

I truly wish both our presses would adopt a more understanding and conciliatory tone. Whipping up anti-American or anti-Arab frenzy is incredibly dangerous. What happens, if, as we fear, some terrorist gets hold of a WMD and sets it off in a US city? These terrorists, it seems, would get what they so desire—a (briefly) destabilized America. But what would be the consequence of that? I would argue that it would result in a retaliation that would leave the entire Middle East in ruins. In light of this, it seems that a cooling off period on both sides would be a very good idea.