LUDIC LOG

So, it's war, is it? Thank goodness. It's been so long since we saw American servicemen coming home in sacks, hasn't it? Too long, if you ask me. This country has been aching for a good solid high-fatality dust-up since the Nam. What good is a war where the enemy is too tiny (like the invasion of Grenada), or isn't human (like the war on drugs), or is largely imaginary (like the war on terrorism)? It's about time we got some big, belligerent dictator to pick on again. And no half-measures this time! We spent a lot of money and effort pretending that Saddam Hussein was a menace to the world and had to be done away with; it would be anti-climactic if we didn't have plenty of American casualties this time around. Besides, we have to use all these wizard rockets and bombs, or they'll go bad -- or worse, they'll just sit there, and we'll have no reason to spend lots of money on more.

The six anti-war articles to have appeared in the American press since the prosecution of this just and desperately needed war began have all contained the phrase "in war, the first casualty is always truth", and I have no intention of breaking precedent. But really, this dandy little truism rests on a basic error: that truth was alive to begin with. I'm afraid that truth was killed long before this war even started. In fact, it was quietly strangled to death in a back alled in 1998, when Richard Perle and his American Enterprise Institute cronies first lobbied then-President Clinton to resume hostilities with Saddam Hussein's ruined country on the bogus grounds that it was a threat to regional stability. Since then, the corpse of truth has not fared well; it was sodomized by morgue attendants when the government attempted repeatedly to link the September 2001 terror attacks to Iraq, it was subjected to a messy botched autopsy when facetious, hypocritical talk of a humanitarian effort to liberate the oppressed Iraqi people began, and when all the bogus accusations of weapons of mass destruction began, it was dropped out of its casket at the cemetary, where it proceeded to roll down a hill and get run over by a passing garbage truck.

Not since the Polish attacks on the radio station at Gleiwitz have there been so many fabricated pretexts burning up the wires of an utterly compliant press corps as there is now. It's difficult to avoid hyperbole at a time like this; there's been no time in recent memory when the news media are so bursting with nonsense spoonfed to them by the authorities or picked up from dubious sources. The war is less than two weeks old, and already we've had the greatly exaggerated reports of Saddam Hussein's death (followed up by grade-Z spy novel nonsense about doubles and faked videotapes; one wonders when the Iraqis will unveal the hologram of Saddam), the piteously oversold 'shock and awe' campaign, false reports of suicide bombings and mass surrenders, specious plots against foreign journalists, stories of defections of high-level Iraqi officials that were cut from whole cloth, innumerable 'discoveries' of chemical weapons that turned out to be elseways, and, of course, the inimitable 'mass uprising' that wasn't in the city of Basra. Some lies were predictive (such as the Iraqi citizens greeting their liberators with open arms, an event that hasn't materialized yet) and some were indicative (a report -- originating in a right-wing Israeli paper -- of the discovery of recently minted Russian-made missiles that was repeated in several wire reports, despite being completely false) and some were lies of omission (the gaping void of detail about almost everything specific about our military actions coming from Pentagon briefings, in marked contrast to both Iraqi briefings and American ones prior to Gulf War I, when the whole thing became an exercise in image management). But they're all lies, and they just keep coming.

One wonders what the President thinks of all this; one wonders if he thinks about it at all. Certainly he does in an abstract way; perhaps he's even deeply concerned about the safety and security of American troops (not so much so that he would simply end the war, but still). The human mind seeks restlessly for comparisons, for metaphors, for similarities by which to make the inexplicable explicable, and maybe we've found one here: George W. Bush, before assuming his inheritance, was the governor of Texas. And as the governor of Texas, he was notorious for vigorously pursuing the enactment of the death penalty for convicts in that bloodthirsty state. It's not hard to imagine that he thinks of Saddam Hussein in the same way he thought of those men and women on Death Row. They are bad people; evil people, indeed, evil to him not being a nebulous or relative construct by a thing easily grasped and spelled out in unambiguous detail by his religious faith. They are people who have done terrible things, and people who have done terrible things must be punished -- and punished with the ultimate sanction the law can provide: a merciless death. It scarcely matters that people protest the punishment; democracy is a wonderful thing, but we must never let it get in the way of doing what must be done. Let the protestors protest and the preachers preach; we'll just stand here and pull the switch with a look of defiant resolve. And as for the allegations that maybe the person isn't guilty of the crime of which he or she is accused, well...who makes the decisions around here anyway?

Diplomacy, you see, is like the legal system. It's a bunch of worrisome paperwork that needs to be sorted through in order to do what you have to do. In the end, all that matters is getting the bad man where you want him and then getting rid of him. And when he's gone, there's plenty more just like him, plenty more undesirables who need to be given a taste of Texas justice and American pride. And as for the people of Iraq, as for the Muslim millions in their far-off caves? For them Bush has the same answer as he had for the murderous Jezebel Karla Faye Tucker, with her highfalutin talk of regret and repentence: for them he puts his balled-up fists to his eye, scrunches up his face, and pretends to cry, and in that sturdy voice, that voice of everyone's bad boss, that voice of Texas oil and New England millions, mockingly squeaks: "Please don't kill me."