Even the Right Thinks The War Rhetoric Is Stupid

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, hawks and doves alike had a tough time encouraging citizens to take any pedestrian, non-heroic action, without warning that if these actions weren't taken, the terrorists will have won. Over the summer, as we were continuously assured by the administration that the bad guys were desperate and on the run, we could not turn on our television sets without hearing that "the noose is tightening."

Now, the most fashionable pre-fab rationalization to use when the news isn't going as swimmingly as we want it to, is to select a place in Iraq, then a corresponding place in America. If the two places start with the same letter, all the better. Next, state baldly that no matter how lousy things are going, you'd rather fight the terrorists / Baathists / whoever-it-is-we're-fighting in the first location, rather than the second. Lastly, sit back with a self-satisfied smile, as if that settles the matter.

Once you get the hang of the Where You'd Like to Fight The Terrorists game, it's easy to play, and lots of fun. Let's try it. Match the Iraqi cities where you'd rather fight the terrorists on the left to the U.S. cities where you don't want to fight the terrorists on the right. Then, check out the answer key below and see how good a terrorist-fighter you are.

(A) Umm Qasr.......................... (1) Kansas City, MO
(B) Nasiriyah............................ (2) Tifton, GA
(C) Karbala.............................. (3) Umnak, AL
(D) Basra................................. (4) Nacogdoches, TX
(E) Tikrit................................... (5) Beaver Falls, PA


A little practice, and you'll know exactly what to do if you find yourself down-wind on some Sunday morning gasbag show. Whenever the Iraq catastrophe of the day is brought up, just look the moderator in the eye, and tell him that you'd rather fight the terrorists in Salman Pak than in the Salmon River of Idaho. That you'd rather fight the terrorists in Safwan than San Antonio.
For there's two things to keep in mind when declaring where in Iraq you'd rather fight the terrorists.

The first, is that we're not altogether sure we are fighting terrorists, in the al-Qaeda sense of the word. As Newsweek recently reported in a piece entitled "War In the Dark," "what the Americans don't know is who, exactly, they're fighting." In a week in which four suicide-bombing attacks in Baghdad killed more than 30 people, one general told reporters "that the attacks were the work of 'foreign fighters.' Yet just 24 hours earlier his division commander . . . told a news conference that he had not seen 'any infusion of foreign fighters in Baghdad.'" A recent Washington Post story reported that at one Baghdad briefing, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, in the dark himself as to the identity of the guerillas, said that 90 percent of the fighters the U.S. had killed or captured were Hussein loyalists or Iraqi religious militants--and only 10 percent were freelancers from abroad. Meaning that, according to his calculations, there's a decent chance that if we weren't fighting these particular terrorists in Babylon, we wouldn't be fighting them in Bakersfield.

The second thing to remember, for most of the people declaring where they'd rather fight the terrorists, is that they are not personally doing much of the fighting.

George Packer writes in a painful reminder from Baghdad, "All the soldiers suffer from the stress of heat, long days, lack of sleep, homesickness, the constant threat of attack . . . and the simple fact that there are nowhere near enough of them to do the tasks they've been given."

Not to mention the fact that nearly 200 of them have been killed since major combat operations ended. Fight the terrorists where you will. But it's probably best to avoid diminishing the sacrifice of soldiers, by burying them with respectful silence, rather than with idiotic clichés.