WASHINGTON - - The United States is now slowly, but I am convinced surely, preparing to wage war against Iraq.
The cost, both human and financial, could be huge.
In 1991 we sent 467,539 U.S. troops to the Gulf, sustained 760 casualties including 148 battlefield deaths, and spent $7.4 billion of our own money (plus $53.7 billion of our allies' money) to fight Saddam Hussein.
I said it back then and I’ll say it again now: We don’t need an army to take out Saddam. All he need is one guy with a rifle and sniper scope.
I am not being bloodthirsty. On the contrary, I am being a humanitarian.
Consider: We recognize that Iraq is in the grip of a dictatorial madman, a murderous lunatic who has armed his country to the teeth with weapons of mass destruction including chemical, biological, and possibly nuclear devices.
President George. H.W. Bush once compared him to Adolph Hitler and the stated policy of the U.S. government since Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 has been to "destabilize" his government and "topple" him in order to bring about a “regime change.”
Saddam is our target. So why kill a whole bunch of people in order to get just one guy?
Assassination is a terrible word and a terrible deed. Except when the alternatives are worse.
Why spend all that money and risk the lives of our soldiers when all we need is one assassin or a small team of assassins?
Three U.S. presidents - - Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan - - issued executive orders, still in effect, that make assassination illegal for any “person employed or acting on behalf of the United States government.”
We can’t assassinate or “conspire” to assassinate.
On Jan. 3 last year, Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., introduced the Terrorist Elimination Act of 2001 that would nullify those executive orders.
“Our federal government should never put the lives of our troops at risk when there is an alternative method of accomplishing the same goals,” Barr said.
Barr’s bill went nowhere. One president can overturn the executive orders of another president, however. And President Bush should now do so.
The last time the United States seriously tried to kill a head of state was in 1986, the target was Muammar el Kadafi and we attempted it from 1,500 feet. (NATO forces aimed at a few places where Slobodan Milosevic might have been hiding in Belgrade, but it was not a very concerted effort).
President Reagan sent 33 jets on a bombing raid into Libya where they dropped 64,000 pounds of explosives on Kadafi's living quarters. We missed him, but unfortunately killed his 15-month-old daughter. We also lost a U.S. pilot in the raid.
Officially, the raid was not an assassination attempt. Secretary of State George Schultz explained the difference: Because Kadafi was not "a direct target" - - anyone in his living quarters was - - it could not be called an attempt at assassination.
Which is a pretty fine line to draw. If you send in a single shooter, it is assassination. If you send in 33 jets, it is...what? The glories of combat?
What's the difference, except that jets and bombs are far more likely to kill innocent people?
There is no difference. Death is death; killing is killing.
But as Voltaire once wrote: "Killing a man is murder unless you do it to the sound of trumpets."
Planes, ships, tanks and missiles give America that nice sound of trumpets.
But they don't make sense in some situations.
We all know that Saddam Hussein is going to continue to threaten the stability of the middle east and the world unless we do something about him.
But why risk the lives of U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians to do it?
If one guy is the problem, we should take out that one guy.
And I don't mean to dinner.
WASHINGTON - - Good Roger sat in front of the television set, taking notes on all the memorial coverage for his keepsake book. He had already carefully clipped stories from the newspapers.
"'The viewing platform at the World Trade Center site can hold 400 people,'" Good Roger read aloud from USA Today. "'It is 13 feet high and made of wood.'
" '268 marriage licenses were issued in Hawaii Sept. 11 to Sept. 18, down from 732 marriage licenses issued the same week in 2000.
" '29 Oprah shows focused primarily on Sept. 11 subjects.' "
"Aren't those among the most moving things you have ever heard?" Good Roger asked.
Bad Roger sat in his Barcalounger playing Grand Theft Auto III on his Sony PlayStation 2. He was wearing sunglasses and drinking a Colt .45. "I am so moved," he said, "I can barely stand it."
Good Roger ignored him. Good Roger is the decent, caring, warm side of me. He always wears a flag pin on his lapel and lines up early to vote on Election Day.
Bad Roger is the twisted, demented, cynical side of me. He believes everybody is out for himself and never re-cycles his paper or plastic.
"I really don't think you should be drinking alcohol during a Code Orange alert," Good Roger told Bad Roger. "You may be called upon at any moment to be a first responder for your nation."
"Which one is Code Orange?" Bad Roger asked. "Is that the one where Dick Cheney has to put on Kevlar underwear?"
Good Roger began switching through the channels on the TV, absorbing every moving detail.
"I think there is a 'Gilligan's Island' marathon on cable," Bad Roger said. "Or at least switch to Ashleigh Banfield."
"I am delighted you like Ms. Banfield," Good Roger said. "For she is a fine video-journalist and newsperson."
"I think her glasses make her look hot," Bad Roger said. "Aside from that, you could cut off her head and she wouldn't be any dumber. I don't believe anything the media says anyway." (Bad Roger is so bad, he refuses to use a media as a plural noun.)
"The media are our windows to the world!" Good Roger said. "Especially newspapers! For as Thomas Jefferson said in 1787, 'were it left for me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.' "
"Which one was Thomas Jefferson?" Bad Roger asked. "The one who kept slaves or the one with the wooden teeth?"
"Hush up," Good Roger said, boosting the volume on the TV. "Our president is about to address the nation."
Good Roger stood at attention while Bad Roger stayed in his Barcalounger making rude noises.
"Thank goodness we have a real leader who has restored honor and dignity to the Oval Office," Good Roger said. "George W. Bush, I salute you!"
"Liar, liar, pants on fire," Bad Roger chanted at the TV set.
"How dare you!" Good Roger said. "Name one instance in which President Bush has lied!"
"Gosh, how about the urgent need to invade Iraq?" Bad Roger said. "You don't find the timing of that just months before a national election a little suspicious?"
"Iraq is a country with weapons of mass destruction, run by an evil regime, hostile to its neighbors and threatening to the interests of the United States!" Good Roger said.
"So is China," Bad Roger said, "and I don't read about any invasion plans for that country. The threat from Iraq is no greater today than it was a year ago, but today Bush is rattling sabers because he wants voters to focus on his 'war against terrorism' rather than on his lousy economy."
"You are depraved!" Good Roger shouted. "How dare you accuse our Commander in Chief of making life and death decisions based on politics!"
"Yeah," Bad Roger said, "a politician making political decisions. How amazing."
"Our president does not need to play politics!" Good Roger said. "His approval ratings are very strong."
"Let me read you something," Bad Roger replied. " 'The Dow Jones Industrial Average has declined by nearly 2,000 points since he took office; unemployment has risen to 5.7% from 4.2%. In the six quarters of the Bush presidency, growth of the gross domestic product has averaged 1.1%, down from 3.6% in the last six quarters of the Clinton presidency.' Do you know what newspaper that comes from?"
"Some lying, Democratic rag," Good Roger said.
"The Wall Street Journal," Bad Roger said. "So Bush better get political or he is going to end up back in Crawford selling term life insurance door-to-door."
"You are the most disgusting, vile, and reprehensible human being I know," Good Roger said.
Bad Roger went back to his video game. "Thank you," he said. "I try."
WASHINGTON - - After the orgy of news coverage (some good, some excessive) over Sept. 11 subsides, I think there is going to be a real desire "to get back to normal."
And that is fine. Getting back to normal doesn't mean forgetting what happened. But there is also a danger in rushing to normalcy.
"As we approach the Sept.11 anniversary, we remain vulnerable to a terrorist attack," Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., told reporters last week. "There is a danger we will go back to an unjustified sense of security. The enemy is out there."
Lieberman identified who the enemy is: "It is increasingly dangerous that this will be a struggle within the Islamic world between a radical, hateful minority and the mainstream."
Some weeks ago, Lieberman met with reporters in New York and got asked a question about his plans to run for president.
He answered it substantially the same way he always answers it - - he won't run if Al Gore does - - and this led to a flurry of stories.
Just a few days ago, he met with reporters in Washington, talked seriously about national security and this led to hardly any stories at all. Which proves once again the media is enthralled with process to the exclusion of almost everything else.
I am not saying Lieberman is always a fascinating speaker. It has been said of him that he once gave a fireside chat and the fire went out.
But at this particular meeting, Lieberman was being provocative in the good sense of the word: He was provoking thought.
"We made a very serious mistake in not going to Baghdad in '91 and overthrowing Saddam. I said it at the time on the floor of the Senate and I was right," he said.
He said the administration's current decision to go after Saddam now, is a direct result of the Sept. 11 tragedy.
"Osama bin Laden threatened us for years and when he acted, we (wondered) if we shouldn't have done more before hand," he said.
Lieberman also said, however, that the Bush administration has not handled the current situation well: "They've rattled sabers and allowed the current debate to get away from them."
Members of the Bush administration spent this Sunday going on talk shows and making their case for what is presumed to be an upcoming U.S. invasion of Iraq.
"I don't think we should just sit around and wait to see whether or not he does it or not," Secretary of State Colin Powell said about Saddam Hussein's using nuclear weapons. "He has certainly indicated over the years that he wants to move in this direction, and believes it will make him a bigger power than the tin-pot dictator he is now."
"He certainly has chemical and biological weapons," said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "There just is no question about that….The nuclear matter is not knowable from outside the country. But what is knowable is the appetite he has for them and the aggressive manner he has gone about trying to acquire the pieces that are necessary for them."
"There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein's regime is a danger to the United States and to its allies, to our interests," said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. "It is also a danger that is gathering momentum, and it simply makes no sense to wait any longer to do something about the threat that is posed here....We don't what the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
What troubles Lieberman about all this is that it leaves the Bush administration no room for maneuvering. Once you have said Saddam has to go, then you can't back down.
What troubles me about this, is that Bush, himself, has not yet made his case to the American people, let alone to the rest of the world.
When President Kennedy announced that he was taking the extraordinary step of confronting the Soviet Union by blockading Cuba, he went on TV and showed the American people why.
He showed them blow-ups of spy plane pictures showing the Soviet missiles that had been installed in Cuba and explained how the U.S. cities could be destroyed virtually without warning from missiles placed that close.
It was an extremely dangerous thing Kennedy was doing, but it was also a necessary thing. The United States was in imminent danger.
Kennedy nonetheless knew he needed the American people on his side before he acted.
The Bush administration needs to make the same case and for the same reason.
"The central issue is to convince Congress, the American people, and our allies that Saddam is not only dangerous, but has an aggressive program of mass destruction and ongoing contact with terrorists," Lieberman said. "And that we must in the interest of our security and the security of the region to act now. The president has not made the case of why we have to act now."
Lieberman believes that if Bush "has evidence that suggests Saddam is an immediate threat to us and the region," then at least some of our currently-reluctant allies will act with us.
"But the most important case for the administration to make," Lieberman said, "is why and why now?"
President Bush addresses the United Nations on Thursday. It would be a perfect time for him to make both cases.
WASHINGTON - - One year, a single circuit of the sun, is time enough for many things.
It is time enough to bring life into the world and more than time enough to take it. It is time enough to fight great battles and to resolve to win great wars. It is time enough to rebuild, rededicate, and remember.
But some things need the healing balm of time and for the wounds of September 11, one year is not time enough.
We are a nation still unsettled, still coming to grips, still trying to deal with the pain. Few doubt a day of resolution will some day come. Few believe it is at hand.
We know some things: The worst has not happened. There has been no second wave of terror attacks after September 11 and the anthrax mailings that followed.
But the best also has not happened: We have not brought Osama bin Laden to justice "dead or alive," destroyed his terror network, or made ourselves invulnerable to future attack.
And so we find ourselves a nation in between, in flux, in an uneasy search for what "normal" life is going to mean when we get there.
The good news is that Americans now realize they are connected to the rest of the world. The bad news is that they don't like it.
The changes wrought in the last year have been both pervasive and subtle. Increased security has been creeping up slowly on Americans since metal detectors were installed in airports in 1973. (Before then you simply bought a ticket and-hard to believe!-walked onto the plane.)
But the dangling security pass has now become our new fashion accessory; boarding a plane can be a teeth-gnashing, stomach-churning, show-us-the-bottom-of-your-feet experience.
Large objects we never thought about-water reservoirs, power plants, oil pipelines, bridges, tunnels-are now the subject of intense scrutiny. And at the U.S. Capitol, where the grounds are ringed by squat concrete barriers and where the public may no longer wander inside unescorted, 25,000 gas masks have been ordered.
There are other things that require guarding, and civil liberties are among them. America has yet to find its balance point here, too.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer began with the chilling warning that Americans ought to "watch what they say, watch what they do." And in the weeks following September 11, the Bush administration significantly expanded law enforcement's power to detain, investigate and prosecute people in this country.
Civil libertarians charge that the Justice Department has overstepped sensible boundaries in its war on terror, and some judges have ruled against some of the broader tactics.
But nearly four out of five Americans are willing to give up certain freedoms for security, according to a June Gallup poll.
George Bush never thought it was going to be this way. The last election was fought largely over who would be a good steward of our economic prosperity and the huge surpluses that America was wallowing in.
And while Americans did not exactly give Bush a mandate (he lost the popular vote) the president and his advisers were confident that a laser-like focus on the economy and a tax cut would keep the good times rolling.
That the country now finds itself struggling with a bear market, multibillion-dollar deficits, and continuing job layoffs cannot, the White House emphasizes, be laid at the feet of the president. But presidents are elected to solve problems in this country, not merely endure them.
Before September 11, Gallup put Bush's job approval rating at 51 percent. Although it hit 90 percent soon after the attacks and stayed at least in the seventies for the next ten months, in late July the effect of a prolonged stock market plunge and relative complacency over the war on terror had taken its toll: Bush's approval rating slipped into the sixties.
Yet, while pollsters say Americans are feeling better as time passes, there are results in their mountain of statistics that are still heartbreaking: Months after September 11, one out of every five Americans still bursts into tears when thinking about the attacks.
There remains something unquenchable about the American spirit, however, even in the face of terror.
Mary Margaret Frederick, 53, is a New York psychologist whose home and practice are four blocks from where the World Trade Center towers once stood.
She says that while "overall things have gotten better" for most people she sees, a year later she still occasionally cries along with her patients.
But, she says, there have been a couple of "gifts" from the tragedy.
"I used to see a lot of people who suffered from generalized anxiety," she says. "They were afraid to go to a store, go on a date, balance their checkbook. Now, for some, all of their fears of the little things has stopped. They say, 'I can ask that girl out. How bad can it be? It won't kill me.' Because of September 11, they have gotten over their irritating, daily neurotic fears."
The second gift, she says, is that people who had a cavalier attitude toward commitment now feel differently. "They say, 'This relationship may be my last; I better make the best of it,' " she says. "Two or three people I see are getting married. They were unlikely candidates before."
Some might say Frederick's search for "gifts" is merely an attempt to find a silver lining in the hideous black clouds that issued forth from the twin towers.
But others would point out that America has always been a nation of silver linings. "I get excited by turning points," Frederick says. "That is when miracles occur. We are at a turning point. And we can say to ourselves, 'I am scared, but I am taking the next step.' "
A single circuit of the sun is time enough for many things. If not to fully renew, if not to completely resolve, if not to finally restore, then at least to begin.