The Daily Grasshopper

In a move that the New York Times called "A Blow to Bush's Plans," the Turkish Parliament voted yesterday to reject the deployment of U.S. troops in that country. Official American reaction to the decision was described as well: "Shocked Over Narrow Defeat, U.S. Officials Are Seeking 'Clarifications' of Result." And here, ladies and gentlemen, is where we will get an unimpeded look at the principles that guide the U.S. government and its purported commitment to bring democracy to the Middle East.

You see, Turkey represents the kind of democracy that Washington likes: the kind that can be bought and sold, if that's what the situation calls for. Maybe the reason the U.S. planners were so surprised by the result is because the same system - one dollar, one vote - seems to produce such flawless results here at home. And so, with some $30 billion in grants, debt cancellation, and low-interest loans being waved in front of their faces, the Turks "stunned" Washington by refusing to pimp out their country. Incredible. Needless to say, I was as convinced that the fix was in as Donald Rumsfeld was. Here's how the Times put it:

"The defeat of the resolution was a stunning political blow as well. Turkey, one of the America's closest allies and a member of NATO, is a secular Muslim democracy whose support in the region the Bush administration has craved. Indeed, American officials have called Turkey a model for the type of system they are hoping an invasion of Iraq would help bring elsewhere in the Middle East.

The defeat seemed to surprise Turkey's leaders, who only hours earlier had predicted that Parliament would approve the measure. Prime Minister Abdullah Gul, and the chief of the governing Justice and Development Party, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had endorsed the resolution, and both men had urged their party, which controls a large majority of the Parliament, to support it.

But the American request had placed Turkey's lawmakers in a difficult position; polls here indicate that as many as 9 of 10 Turks oppose involvement in a war against Iraq. In the end, the resolution failed because nearly 100 members of the governing party appeared to have voted against the measure or to have abstained."

Here's the whole article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/international/europe/02TURK.html

Although the vote was 264 to 251 in favor of the proposal, there were 19 abstentions, meaning the total of "yes" votes didn't constitute a majority of the votes cast, which is the standard that separates a success from a failure in Turkey. And despite a lot of rhetoric from the U.S. Embassy about how they "respect this as a democratic result," anyone who is familiar with U.S. behind-the-scenes machinations to achieve desired results won't be surprised if the Turkish Parliament calls for a "do over" on Tuesday. At least one group was willing to go on record (sort of) to express their wishes for another vote:

"Pentagon officials said they were still hoping that Turkish officials would hold another vote, and there were no signs that the American ships off the Turkish coast had been moved."

Hmm... maybe "regime change" starts in Turkey? You know, all the boats and tanks and soldiers are right there, floating offshore, bored out of their minds. Why not deal with the problem the way the U.S. has been doing it, albeit selectively, for decades? Take out the government if it doesn't acquiesce to U.S. designs? It's worked before...

And speaking of soldiers with time on their hands, there's an article in the New York Times Book Review about "Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles." It's an eye-opening look at the mental state that is cultivated in the young men we're sending to "defend our interests" in the Persian Gulf - although they're more realistic about it than I'd given them credit for, as you'll see. Here's a sample of the article, with an excerpt from the book:

"There are more than 150,000 American soldiers in the deserts around Iraq as these words are written. Swofford remembers back to August 1990, when his unit -- the Surveillance and Target Acquisition Platoon, scout/snipers, of the Second Battalion, Seventh Marines -- is put on standby for deployment to Saudi Arabia after Saddam Hussein's forces rumbled into Kuwait. As far as he and his buddies are concerned, the geopolitics of the situation boil down to fighting and dying for old white guys 'and others who have billions of dollars to gain or lose in the oil fields,' but the perceived injustice is hardly a deterrent. They are gleeful. The news of their impending deployment prompts them to hold a drunken war-movie marathon. They particularly like Vietnam War movies, most of which are purportedly antiwar.

'But actually,' Swofford explains, 'Vietnam War films are all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended... The magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills. Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man.'"

I'll reserve comment. You can read the whole review here, which was written by Mark Bowden, the author of "Black Hawk Down" and "Killing Pablo":

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/books/review/002BOWDET.html

And speaking of conditioning people, how about this little item from the "Week in Review" section of today's New York Times? In the article, "How Americans Link Iraq and Sept. 11," it's revealed that 57 percent of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein "helped the terrorists in the Sept. 11 attacks." The story, written by Tom Zeller, goes to considerable lengths to explain this deep ignorance, conceding that "such findings might reasonably be called discouraging." That's understating it a bit - especially if you're an Iraqi civilian on the business end of Bush's propaganda war, facing the distinct possibility that your future has a lot of cruise missiles in it, and not much else. There's a chart accompanying the story that shows U.S. opinion about the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection, as well as leading statements from some of our leading statesmen. Here's my favorite: "You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror." That's President Bush, on Sept. 27. Maybe you can't, George, but don't assume we're all as confused as you are.

Here's part of the article:

"It might be understandable, then, if some portion of the population picked up only threads of these theories, and missed the later news debunking them. Even the suggested links between the Iraqi government and Al Qaeda operatives, made by the Bush administration since last summer, 'can easily be interpreted to mean that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11,' said Alan Wolfe, a professor of political science and Director for the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.

Americans may be famously ill-informed, Professor Wolfe continued, but 'we ought not to expect that most Americans would know that the Baathists are secular and bin Laden is not, or that Saddam Hussein is too jealous of his power to share it with another person, or that bin Laden has targeted corrupt Arab governments as enemies of Islam.'"

The whole thing is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/weekinreview/02ZELL.html

Well, OK, I'll grant that maybe the average U.S. citizen might not be expected to know these things - after all, they have to keep track of the starting lineups of three or four local sports teams, as well as the odds-on favorite to get kicked off the island next week. But can we ask a little more from the guy who is Commander-in-Chief? The one who will be sending the "Jarheads" into Iraq to consummate the deal if he has his way? I'll leave you with this thought, from the New York Times Magazine's feature story on Iraq called "The Morning After." You can read the whole thing here, and I recommend it, if only because so much of the author's premise is rendered moot by the Turkey vote (but will be "operative" again if the Pentagon succeeds in scheduling one that will have a better outcome, which is very likely):

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/magazine/02IRAQ.html

The author had the article in the can a week or so ago, as far as I can tell. But a lot of it is good, and here's the really scary part (i.e., Bush's deplorable ignorance on matters of foreign policy):

"On the day that Saigon fell in 1975, the British writer James Fenton found a framed quotation on a wall of the looted American embassy: 'Better to let them do it imperfectly than to do it perfectly yourself, for it is their country, their way, and your time is short.' The words are from T.E. Lawrence. Vietnam remains the shadow over every American war, but never more than the one we're poised to fight, for no war since Vietnam has professed greater ambitions: to change the political culture of a country, maybe a whole region. Ever since Woodrow Wilson worked to put democracy and self-determination on the agenda at Versailles, this strain of high-mindedness in the American character has drawn the world's admiration and its scorn. In Graham Greene's novel 'The Quiet American,' which was recently released as a film, the title character is a young idealist sent to Vietnam in the early 1950's to find a democratic 'Third Force' between the French and the Communists. The book's narrator, a jaded British journalist, remarks, 'I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.' Americans have never been very good at imperialism, or much interested in it; we're too innocent, too impatient, too intoxicated with our own sense of selfless purpose. Several Iraqis expressed the wish that their occupiers could be the British again, who took the trouble to know them so much better, who wrote whole books on the Marsh Arabs and the flora and fauna of Kuwait. Afghanistan lost America's attention as soon as Kandahar fell, and it remains unfinished business. As for Iraq, Jessica Mathews of the Carnegie Endowment, says, 'Our country is not remotely prepared for what this is going to take.'

If so, the fault mainly lies with President Bush. His articulation of political aims and postwar plans has been sketchy to the point of empty cliche. He has never discussed the human costs of war, nor its price. The Yale economist William D. Nordhaus estimates the military expenditure between $50 billion and $140 billion; far more daunting, his study finds, the postwar costs to the United States of occupying and rebuilding Iraq, along with the impact on oil markets and the economy, could run as high as $2 trillion. This is a calculation that no one in the administration has dared to make, at least publicly. Privately, some officials suggest that Iraqi oil will pay for it.

More than anything, the president hasn't readied Americans psychologically to commit themselves to a project of such magnitude, nor has he made them understand why they should. He has maintained his spirit of hostility to nation-building while reversing his policy against it. Bush is a man who has never shown much curiosity about the world. When he met with Makiya and two other Iraqis in January, I was told by someone not present, the exiles spent a good portion of the time explaining to the president that there are two kinds of Arabs in Iraq, Sunnis and Shiites. The very notion of an Iraqi opposition appeared to be new to him. War has turned Bush into a foreign-policy president, but democratizing an Arab country will require a subtlety and sophistication that have been less in evidence than the resolve to fight."

It sort of reminds of that interview Bush did in the run up to his "election" where Andy Hiller of 7 News in Boston asked him if he knew the names of the leaders of countries that were hostile to the U.S. Does anyone else remember that interview?

Mark A. Schulman, the president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, has an interesting perspective on the disconnect between reality and how it's perceived in this country in the "How Americans Link Iraq and Sept. 11" article:

"'It's the general thrust of things, the symbolism and the ideas those symbols evoke," Mr. Schulman said. "That's what people take away with them.'

If that's true, then assuming anything less than the worst of Mr. Hussein, particularly with the monthslong buildup toward war, may simply seem unpatriotic to a sizable chunk of the populace.

'To say that there is no involvement of Saddam Hussein in Sept. 11 is implicitly to question what our leaders are saying,' Mr. Schulman said. 'And that is to start down a road toward suspicion and Watergate-like politics that no one wants.'"

What's that, Mr. Schulman? The threat of impeachment? Leaving the White House disgraced in a helicopter rather than face charges of high crimes and misdemeanors? Joining Richard Nixon, whose contempt for democracy (as the dictionary defines it, not under the prevailing conventional wisdom) was legendary, in the ranks of the deposed?

I'm ready to head down that road. And I wouldn't be walking alone. As many of the signs at the February 15 antiwar demonstrations read: "Regime change begins at home."