| Monday, June 16, 2003 |
23:38 - Doin' What You're Paid To
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I've often been vaguely worried whenever I find that some comedian or musician or other entertainment figure is also a lucid, well-spoken political voice. Every time some entertainer goes on a talk show or releases a statement or interview that shows him or her to be not just a freaky controversial headliner, but also someone with good ideas about some thorny issue or other, I find myself looking nervously over my shoulder. Because it means that these people quite often are eminently qualified to hold some kind of political office or other decision-making position, but-- because they had the talent for it-- they decided to do stand-up comedy or music instead. After all, being a star pays more and earns you more brownie points among the public than being a politician, right? And what does that say for the people who do end up in public office?
I'm put in mind of the fact that I could probably name twenty colleagues who would each and every one make the best IT techs in the industry. They could revolutionize the whole field of IT service and infrastructure, bringing a level of UNIX and Windows knowledge and security expertise and customer-friendliness to the job that is so often sadly lacking in IT departments. The only problem is that these people are also programmers, and so are they going to take the less-glamorous, lower-paying IT job if they can program for a living? Hell no. So we end up with IT departments staffed not by the people who are best at IT, but by those who aren't any better at anything else.
So it was with a certain degree of relief that I heard today's Fresh Air show on NPR, in which Terry Gross interviewed Colin Quinn of Tough Crowd fame. After some patter about Colin's war humor during the Iraq "episode", Terry asked him the following rather pointed questions:
TG: Were you in favor of the war in Iraq?
CQ: [tautly] Yes.
TG: Tell me-- have you had a change of heart at all, regarding your support for the war, now that it's being put forward that the weapons of mass destruction that Iraq was supposed to have had have turned out to be... not as numerous as we'd thought, and that the Bush administration deliberately used misleading intelligence reports and exaggerated items so as to drum up support for the war?
Upon which Colin gave an insipid, stammering, rambling answer that amounted more or less to: Well, my support for the war doesn't mean I can't be proven wrong by later events. And I guess the way I feel is that while our motives in pushing for the war may not have been particularly "pure", I figure that, you know, we're the lesser of two evils here.
Got that? Between Saddam remaining in power and us removing Saddam, we're the lesser of two evils. He supported the war all the way, but it was the lesser of two evils. Children's prisons and mass graves are being opened and sculptors are raising new pieces of populist art and rejoicing in their newfound lives, and it's the lesser of two evils.
Even worse, though: the "evil" of the war was not based on the civilian casualties, of which there were ridiculously few, but on the idea that our information on Iraq's destructive capabilities was oversold. See, that's what's evil. The benefits of having fought the war pale compared to the possibility that it was fought under false pretenses.
I'd love to see the hearing, wouldn't you? This joint session of Congress finds that the war in Iraq was fought on the basis of false information; therefore, we have resolved on this date to remove all US and coalition military forces from Iraq, reinstall the rightful leadership of the Ba'ath party, and in the absence of the sovereign ruler Saddam Hussein (who we now consider to have been wrongfully executed in an unlawful incursion by our own armed forces), place the nation of Iraq under the governance of the highest-ranking Ba'ath official who can be found, perhaps Tariq Aziz or Mohammad Saeed al-Sahhaf. Furthermore, we resolve to offer the aid of our military in rounding up all political prisoners who had been freed in the unwarranted invasion, and return them to the prisons where they had been serving their rightful terms; we will confiscate and reinter the remains of Iraqis that had been collected by family members from unearthed mass graves; and we will assist in the restoration of the hundreds of thousands of portaits and statues of Saddam Hussein that were so wantonly destroyed by our military forces during the incursion. We humbly seek the Iraqi people's forgiveness for our inexcusable actions, and we hope that time and our genuine wish to make amends for our wrongdoing can one day heal the terrible wound we have inflicted upon the Middle East. In our defense we can only say that we had considered ourselves the "lesser of two evils", but our inability to prove concretely that Saddam Hussein had the alleged weapons of mass destruction makes the US the greater evil after all.
As has been pointed out in numerous other places, if we can't find the WMDs, it's not just egg on Bush's face, if egg it is indeed. It's egg on the faces of Chirac, Schröder, Putin, Daschle, Hans Blix, Bill Clinton, and everybody else over the past twelve years who has known that Iraq had been in possession of WMDs-- and, because Saddam had failed to account for the destruction of said WMDs, that we had every reason to believe he still had them. He even threatened to use them on our troops. Wasn't that even one of the reasons advanced by anti-war leftists as to why we shouldn't invade? That our troops would be subjected to chem/bio/nuke attack? Well? What of that risk, eh?
Charles Osgood suggested the other day that perhaps the reason why Saddam kept giving every impression that he was armed to the teeth was not that he had WMDs and was trying to hide it-- but that he didn't have WMDs, and was trying to hide that. It was his only deterrent, the impression that he still had weapons, even if they'd all been sold to Yemeni taxi drivers by now. Maybe Saddam didn't even know his shorts were down, because his underlings could only safely comment on the beauty of his missing clothes.
But be that as it may, I'd come to expect comedians in positions like the one Colin Quinn is in to understand enough human psychology to understand what the WMD charge was all about: a saleable pretext for the war. Not, mind you, that without the pretext, the war was a bad thing; or, notably, that pretext automatically implies lie; just that the war needed to happen, but that it would never have gotten the approval it did under a different sale slogan. Even if Iraq had WMDs, that in itself was hardly sufficient reason to invade; North Korea very likely has nukes by now, but we're not invading. So may Iran, but we're not invading. Why? Because WMDs are things we can manage one way or another; but Saddam himself was not, by any means short of war. And just you try getting UN approval for the removal of a dictator, for the removal's own sake.
The reverberations of our stroke in Iraq are being felt throughout the Arab world exactly as we'd hoped: the US can no longer be dismissed as a bunch of pansies who are afraid of blood and unwilling to strike back, strike hard, and strike perhaps irrationally. We're not, perhaps, nuking the moon; but the principle is the same. Ever hear of Nixon's "madman" theory? Let the Russkies think Nixon had gone mad and would push the button at the slightest provocation, without thought for whether the US would get destroyed in a nuclear exchange; that way the Soviets wouldn't launch an attack on their own, because they knew he'd scorch the earth in response? Well, this is that on a much smaller scale. We're not just lashing out randomly; we're taking the opportunity to clean house. Suddenly everyone's scrambling to get their shit together.
Whether we find the weapons or we don't, it really doesn't matter. Sure, it would be extremely nice to know where they ended up; it'd be very reassuring to find them, intact, and not sold to terrorists or kindergarteners. But it doesn't invalidate the war, make its outcome any more or less honorable, or make us "good" or "evil" depending on whether they turn up or not. I'm not saying "the ends justify the means," here; in our case the means of the war were also unprecedently benign. What I'm saying is that the whole WMD thing is a herring that's so red that those who treat it with earth-shaking massive-scandal-of-the-century significance are only making themselves look even more foolish than the people in San Francisco who still drive around with bumper stickers that say ATTACK IRAQ? NO!
Colin Quinn may be part of a beleaguered breed, a pro-war figure in Hollywood. But it seems to me he could have made a stronger case, with the opportunity handed to him as it was on a silver platter to behead Ms. Gross on live radio. Instead, he seemed more eager to sycophantically back down and cover his head with his arms and squirm away from her Glower Power, in the interest of keeping from being excused early from the show.
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