Mar. 10, 2003 This non-rush to non-war's killing me, By Mark Steryn
Is there a columnar equivalent of Viagra? I mean, I started writing about the impending war with Iraq in late September 2001, and after 18 months I'm beginning to flag. What's even worse is I don't think I've had a new thought on Iraq in months.
On September 27, 2001 I addressed the argument that removing Saddam would merely result in a marginally less bloody thug: "But a new thug is still better than letting the old thug stick around to c*ock snooks(I like that word...Snooker) at you. If Saddam had been toppled [after Gulf War I], the nutter du jour would have come to power in the shadow of the cautionary tale of his predecessor."
That's still the way I feel. That's still the best reason for killing Saddam it teaches the most basic lesson of all: Mess with us, and you're gone.
In hard geopolitical terms, everything after that is a bonus: the liberation of the Iraqi people, the introduction of democracy, the beneficial effect on oil prices.
But, as I've said, I've said all that. In my first draft of this column, every paragraph began with "As I wrote in March last year," "As I wrote in June," "As I wrote in October."
Oh God, I thought, I must have some new material somewhere. It's one thing for the president to stagger around like a punchy old prizefighter mumbling the same old lines "He gassed his own people" but some of us feel a bit silly saying the same thing over and over.
The only consolation is that the anti-war crowd are having an even harder time keeping it up than I am. The "human shields" are leaving Iraq, having given up trying to shield anything but the remaining shreds of their dignity. "They have the courage of their convictions," said one of their defenders on the radio.
Au contraire, that's the one thing they don't have. They got to Baghdad only to find their Iraqi "coordinators" wanted to deploy them not at "humanitarian" facilities, but at military bases. One British teacher said he was used to working with young children and would have preferred to be deployed at an orphanage. The Iraqi official tried, patiently, to explain that the orphanage has already got all the human shields it needs: They're called orphans.
The bewildered Brit seemed to find this hard to follow: Here's a man who's convinced that Bush and Rumsfeld are slavering to drop a bunch of daisycutters on the orphanage and blow a ton of Iraqi moppets to kingdom come, but thinks that they'll cease and desist just because some droning Welsh leftist is sitting amongst all those inviting underage targets.
It would be nice to think that these posturing ninnies will be slightly ashamed at the realization that they were no more than pathetic Saddamite stooges, but no doubt by the time they're back home their cheerleaders on the Left will have restored their sense of their own heroism.
Even more telling than the human shields scramming out of town is the alarming failure of recent "naked protests" to get naked. Many of my fellow warmongers have mocked the nude protests mounted by the women of Marin County, cruelly pointing out that many of the bits on show are excessively dimpled and saggy.
I don't see as many naked women in the course of an average week as I would wish, so I'll take what I can get. If we have to have an incoherent, anti-Western "peace" movement, then women showing off their hooters in support of a culture that would stone them to death for showing off their ankles is about as good as it's gonna get.
BUT EVEN by the impressive standards of risibility demonstrated by the "peace" movement, has there ever been a sadder "naked protest" than that staged by the students of Illinois Wesleyan University? The male "nudes for peace" stood around wearing their boxer shorts and, worse, little white ankle socks and sneakers.
C'mon, guys, why so shy about letting us inspect your weapons of mass destruction? According to the Security Council resolution on nude protesting, it's a material breach to put material over your breech. If you don't want to take it off, maybe you should skip the naked thing entirely, stay inside and read up on what's the capital of Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile, the celebrities keep yakking on, despite a poll indicating that celebrities pontificating on the war doesn't change the public's attitude to war, only to the celebrity.
So the Screen Actors' Guild is now worrying about a new "blacklist" against anti-war celebrities. No such blacklist exists. Many of these guys (Ed Asner, Mike Farrell) haven't got a career to blacklist anyway. But it seems a mite inconsistent to use your celebrity status to advance your politics and then complain that your politics is impacting your celebrity status.
Here, for example, is elderly rocker Chrissie Hynde on stage the other day: "Have we gone to war yet? " she asked sarcastically, early on. "We f------ deserve to get bombed. Bring it on." Later she yelled, "Let's get rid of all the economic s--- this country represents! Bring it on, I hope the Muslims win!"
Fair enough. Each to their own. But if this sort of thing makes some of us less enthusiastic about buying Miss Hynde's albums or watching Martin Sheen's TV show, it's hard to see why their corporate executives shouldn't take it into account. As Miss Hynde would say, that's the economic s--- this country's all about. So the more anti-war types are on TV, the loopier they look. The longer this non-war goes on the more exhausted the pathetic narcissism of the "peace" poseurs looks.
But in this weird holding pattern even the non-silly types are feeling the strain. Every time the Arabs hold a summit these days, it's like closing time at a Glasgow pub. At the Arab League meeting in Cairo, Colonel Gaddafi and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah almost came to blows.
"Your grave awaits you!" Abdullah told Gaddafi just before Egyptian TV pulled the plug. In Qatar a couple of days later, the Kuwaiti foreign minister denounced the Iraqi vice president as "an infidel and a charlatan," and the Iraqi responded by telling the Kuwaiti, "Shut up, you monkey." A curse be upon your moustache."
This is less offensive than "I f*art on your beard" (a traditional Arabic expression of ill will), but only just. A couple more Arab League get-togethers and they'll be tearing each other's facial hair out.
I'll be tearing my own out if this goes on another month. This interminable non-rush to non-war is like a long, languorous, humid summer where everyone's sweaty and cranky and longing for the clouds to break and the cool, refreshing rain to fall.
Bring it on, please.
The writer is senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc.
