Over a bloody rainbow
IAN BROWN reflects on the strange mental merry-go-round of the first full
week of war, for those of us watching transfixed from the supposed security
of home
By IAN BROWN
Saturday, March 29, 2003 - Page F5 Globe & Mail
To disconnect from the hot wire of the war, from the green-tinted thrill
of the embedded TV coverage and the non-stop natter on the radio and the
hourly updates of the on-line newspaper, I've been going downtown.
Down there I don't know anyone, except by sight -- the immigration lawyers
and the B-list stockbrokers in the coffee shop, for instance, who say
things like, "He wants to be the hero, but the goalie's never the
hero until he's been in the Stanley Cup."
Since the war started -- even here in disobedient Canada, we call it "the
war" -- they haven't shown up. So instead I walk across the street
to check in with Teodorus and Mulu, who run the parking lot next to the
King Edward Hotel. They sit in the attendant's booth and listen to the
war on the radio all day long.
They figure Saddam Hussein's a goner. "No one likes Saddam,"
Mulu, the shorter one, assures me every time I drop by. "He is a
bad man." Mulu and Teodorus are Ethiopian Christians, so they have
no great love for a Muslim, however irreligious Saddam actually is.
"Friday, the Americans will be in Baghdad," Teodorus adds. "The
people, the Iraqis, some fight for him, but it is because he threatens
them. They are mostly emotional people, Iraqis. Then, a few weeks, maybe
a month, and there will be peace."
Unlikely as that scenario is, I find it reassuring, because I want to
be reassured. Ever since George W. Bush declared he would invade Iraq
without the permission of the United Nations Security Council, and especially
since his 48-hour ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, waves of numb panic roll
over me at unexpected moments. It's as if an invisible butler is draping
a cloak of despair around my shoulders.
The last time it happened was Monday, the day coalition forces accidentally
killed five Syrians. Syria rattled its war sword just as Turkey moved
into Iraq from the north, and for a moment the war looked like it might
go global. I actually had to get up and walk around the kitchen. When
the newspaper comes, I long to know what's happening, but I'm afraid to
look. I feel like I've been holding my breath for a long time.
People are arguing about the war all the time. Half the people I call
in the first week of the war admit they have had at least one argument
where someone stomped out of a room. I myself have had two. The arguments
begin with fast assertions and counter-assertions; they stay at a simmer,
until a glass of wine gets the high boil steaming.
But, with the exception of professional opinionizers and people with ties
to human-rights organizations, very few people I know have a clear, uncomplicated
opinion on the rightness or wrongness of the war. For every chemical weapon
Saddam has deployed, for every human right he has abused, there is an
equal and opposite example of American belligerence and self-interest
that makes the respectable case for the invasion harder to support.
Eventually the arguments cancel each other, and we're left to judge the
war on its possible outcomes: the safety of Iraqis versus the future safety
of my children. Even if I'm being manipulated, the safety of my children
always wins. I am not proud of this.
We tell ourselves it would have been easier if the Americans had waited
for the approval of the UN's Security Council. Even K. agrees with that.
K. is a government official I know, one so well-informed he has to stay
anonymous. "I would rather someone had dropped a bomb on America,
and many had died, than they had moved without the world's sanction,"
he told me the other day. "Because by going into Iraq this way, America
has lost its moral authority in the world.
"And we need America, because we need a policeman for 100 years,
the way we needed Britain. To take care of terrorism, you need not only
military supremacy, but moral supremacy. Anyway, I'm still hoping Saddam
will use some form of weapon of mass destruction to give credence to American
interests."
To my surprise, this makes terrible sense.
I try to read to take my attention off the war, but nothing holds. I started
Karen Armstrong's short history of Islam, but abandoned it after I looked
up Iraq in the index and read those bits. Proust (Proust!) hit the dust
after 12 pages. I even cruised the Anglican Hymnary, which was interesting
enough until I found Hymn 143: "Awake our souls! Away our fears!/Let
every trembling thought be gone!/Awake and run the heavenly race!/And
put a cheerful courage on."
I was more lastingly waylaid by Winston Churchill's 1946 essay The Dream,
in which he has a conversation with the ghost of his long-dead father,
who had been Britain's secretary of state at the end of the 19th century.
Churchill Sr. is amazed to discover there is a Socialist government in
power, and is shocked there have been wars. "That's what has happened
all the time," Winston tells his Papa. "Wars and rumours of
war ever since you died."
He explains that about 30 million men died in battle in each of the last
two big ones. "It may well be that an even worse war is drawing near,"
he continues. "A war of the East against the West. A war of liberal
civilization against the Mongol hordes. Far gone are the days of Queen
Victoria and a settled world order."
For the first two days of the war, no one seemed to want to laugh. Even
now, a week in, people can be touchy. The other night, three women of
my acquaintance went out for drinks and chat. "Instead of complaining
about our husbands, we talked about the war for two hours," one reported
in the morning. "Are we ever going to be able to talk about our hair
again?"
The furrow that creased the brow of the world after the World Trade Center
disaster is being creased again. Of course, this sounds superficial, the
way it sounded superficial to say one of the best responses to the destruction
of the Twin Towers was to go shopping.
But the point is serious: Our lives, which were calm if superficial, which
were calm because they were superficial, have now been snatched away by
war. The Americans have put the world at risk, allegedly to keep it free
from risk. It used to be one might hope to make a mark on history. As
of a week ago Thursday, it is far more likely history will leave at least
a mark on you.
It seems that everyone's opinion of the justness of the war wavers with
the success of the war, as if we were all young palm trees in one of Baghdad's
dusky sandstorms. At first, I dread the invasion, but I am instantly more
hopeful in the early days, when it looks as if the Iraqis won't resist
the coalition. But as soon as the coalition meets resistance, so does
my approval of the invasion.
At least we know we're ambivalent. I'd like to think it's a virtue, but
many Americans don't think so. According to Thursday's paper, 35 per cent
of them are "less favourable or somewhat less favourable" to
Canadians as a result of Jean Chrétien's refusal to join the coalition.
But what do they know? In a January poll, cited in the magazine Editor
and Publisher, 44 per cent of Americans thought "most" or "some"
of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers were Iraqi citizens, though in fact none
were. Fully 41 per cent of Americans think Iraq has nuclear weapons, which
is also untrue. But 66 per cent claim they have a "good understanding"
of the arguments for and against going to war with Iraq!
I'm so familiar with the TV anchors now, they've become regulars in my
life, like the guy at the store and the women at the dry cleaner, like
actors in what seems to be a real-time performance piece being staged
in my living room, in which a man falls apart watching the world fall
apart on TV.
CNN's Aaron Brown smiles at all the wrong things. He'd clearly prefer
to be introducing a kicky musical number. On CBS, the corn-fed ham Dan
Rather actually bows his head for 10 seconds at a time when he fields
what he thinks is an appropriately sombre scrap of news. Just up the dial
on ABC, perky Peter Jennings resembles an antic hostess making sure all
her guests have "interesting" conversation to go with their
gin. Ted Koppel in a battle helmet looks like a bobble doll. But he's
over there, and I'm not.
I'm not the only one who finds the TV war bizarre. Vivian Rakoff, a Toronto
psychiatrist, has been ambivalent about what he sees as a disturbing but
probably necessary war. The TV coverage, on the other hand, he plain doesn't
like.
"The terrible thing is that TV is associated with fiction, not war,"
he said over the telephone when I called. "With sitcoms and dramas
that come out of the box. But now terrible things, even 9/11 and more,
come out of it. Which seems wrong, because it's traditionally a distancing
device, a scrim. You 'know' it's not real.
"You don't jump up on the stage and say to Hamlet, 'Don't do it!
The cup's poisoned!' because you know it's a play on a stage. But with
war on TV, part of you knows that it is real, but part of you thinks,
or believes at one level, that it's just a picture story."
He paused, and seemed to be thinking. "The other thing is,"
he continued, "the quality of the pictures, remarkable as they are,
is still terrible. They're distorted and fractured and often don't work.
And that perpetual picture of night in Baghdad, tinted green, with dots
of phosphorescent light in the sky: It could be my aquarium with a dead
fish in the bottom. I don't have an aquarium with a dead fish in the bottom,
but you know what I mean. And the actual pictures are always the same
pictures, the same guns going off over and over again. And so the picture
assimilates the reality."
"That's why watching the war on TV is so draining and addictive,"
a Toronto Jungian analyst named Bruce Barnes told me a few days later.
"The images go straight into the unconscious."
All week, Mr. Barnes said, his clients and colleagues had been reporting
headaches and dreams. "Last week, it was bloodbath dreams,"
he said. "This week, it's all invasions."
Whether or not we're in the war, the war is already in us.
Strange details stick after a day of pouring war into my head: Michael
Moore's Web site received 20 million hits after his speech at the Oscar
ceremony Sunday night. The Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb -- the Mother
of All Bombs, of which the coalition appeared to drop at least two on
Baghdad last Friday night -- weighs 9,500 kilos, is satellite-guided and
emits a blast that is a 15th the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Baghdad means Founded by God, and for centuries was known as the City
of Peace.
The M16-A2 rifle a Marine carries can fire three rounds per trigger pull.
Each soldier carries 100 pounds of gear, including seven 30-round magazines
for his gun, and four hand grenades. His Outer Tactical Vest alone weighs
8.3 pounds, and 15 pounds with the groin and throat protectors inserted.
The coalition launched 6,000 bombing missions in six days, or about one
sortie every 45 seconds. Saddam Hussein was given his first gun at the
age of 10, and is alleged to have committed his first murder at the age
of 12.
One morning, trying to feed my greed for war facts, I came across a U.S.
military Web site devoted to close street-fighting of the kind the coalition
is about to engage in on the avenues of Baghdad. The site listed the Ten
Fundamentals of Close Quarter Combat. Fundamental No. 2 was "Arrive
undetected." Fundamental No. 4 was "Eliminate all enemy."
Today, President Bush claims he needs $80-billion for the war, a sum that
stuns my friends. "Eighty billion?" P. mutters. "I mean,
you could give every Iraqi some of that, and create more of an uprising
against Saddam than this war will." There are 22 million Iraqis.
That's $3,600 each.
But $80-billion -- and the final bill will be three to five times that
-- is a drop in the cavernous American bucket. Eighty billion dollars
is less than 1 per cent of America's annual output, less than 4 per cent
of the federal government's annual spending. Bush can afford to keep this
up for years.
The cost over the next 20 years of George Bush's tax cuts, on the other
hand -- which in their latest form will enrich the wealthiest 5 per cent
of Americans most of all -- will be nearly $14-trillion, according to
a study by Washington's Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities. In other
words, the United States could finance Social Security and Medicare for
the next 20 years, and still have about $4-trillion, or about $182,000
per Iraqi, left over. That's a weapon even Saddam would have a hard time
ignoring.
On Sunday, as I made my dinner and prepared to watch the Oscars, my neighbour
came to the door. He had seen a British commando on CNN, wearing a bandana
in place of his helmet, blasting away at an Iraqi position in Umm Qasr
with an SA-80 light machine gun, capable of cycling 610 rounds a minute.
My neighbour was clearly electrified by the sight. "He was Rambo,
in a firefight," he said. "These guys are really doing it. Canada
should be there."
I could see the commando in my mind's eye. (I later saw him again on TV,
in Green-O-Vision, and he was exactly as I imagined him.) What sickened
me was that he was there, fighting, and I was here, sitting. I knew this
would give him, or his representatives, a right to a voice in the future,
a right to be heard that I didn't have. His was the right of the brave.
Later I figured out it wasn't my not fighting that was at issue, but that
Britain was fighting and Canada wasn't. By then, everyone from retirees
in Florida to Brian Mulroney and Paul Cellucci, the U.S. ambassador to
Canada, were up in arms at Jean Chrétien's refusal to join the
American coalition. We had dropped out of what was suddenly being called
"the Anglo sphere." We had, we were told, abandoned our closest
friend.
Two nights later, I was sitting in my car, listening to Over the Rainbow
as performed by the late, great, overweight Hawaiian guitarist and singer
Israel Kamakawiwo'ole. He flubs the words and changes the tune, but somehow
he makes it a sweeter but less sentimental song; somehow he makes you
think of all the things you should have hoped for in life, and all the
things you overlook.
Right then, I remembered something Vivian Rakoff had said at the end of
our conversation: "Everything that makes a good soldier -- brute
courage, exaltation in victory -- needs to be controlled in a civilized
society. The military virtues are not the virtues of a political society."
It was Plato's old admonition: Praise the warriors, drape them in glory,
but don't let them run things, because they can't control their passions.
Mr. Bush can be the bully, but he shouldn't be allowed to drive the bus.
"And there," Mr. Rakoff added, "Chrétien has been
brilliant. Because he has left that option open. In that way, the rest
of the world can show its concern for Iraq too, in the reconstruction
of a better country."
That possibility was the only ideal I glimpsed in a week of watching the
war. At the very least, it is the only saving grace left to us. I put
my head back and played
Over the Rainbow again. Until this is over, I plan to sit very still,
and pay attention.
Ian Brown is a Toronto-based writer and broadcaster.
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