NOTES FROM THE HINTERLAND
SWATTING HORNETS IN IRAQ
By Laurie Meunier Graves
Spring comes slowly and fitfully to Maine. March often is as cold and as
dreary as February, and the beginning of April brings a soggy bleakness to
the landscape so that, as my friend Barbara puts it, the fields look like
shredded wheat. As I write, in the second week of April, there are still
small clumps of snow on the ground, and the yard is too wet to rake.
Yet, spring is coming. The other day, I swept the patio and the driveway for
the first time since winter and cleaned up fallen branches. Resting from
these early spring endeavors, I sat on the porch, and it seemed to me that I
heard the first clacking of wood frogs. Soon, all the creatures that live in
the ground and the muck would be crawling forth—the frogs, the toads, and
the salamanders. Then, the insects would burst on the scene—the blackflies,
the mosquitoes, and the hornets.
Sitting on the steps, I thought about hornets and the time my brother, when
he was three or four, walked into a ground nest in the field behind our
barn. As he ran crying back to the house, hornets followed him. They bit his
face and his arms, and they even flew into his clothes. My mother sat him on
the kitchen table, and I remember how his fair skin was covered with red
welts. That day, I developed a healthy respect for hornets and what happens
when you disturb them. I expect my brother did, too.
By a strange kind of coincidence, at the 9/11 commission hearings, there has
been a focus on a different kind of insect, not hornets but instead flies.
During her testimony, Condoleezza Rice repeated over and over that President
Bush was tired of “swatting flies” when it came to terrorism. As the New
York Times succinctly put it, President Bush was instead “spoiling for a
real fight with Osama bin Laden.” Well, President Bush got one of his
wishes—he got a real fight. However, he is no longer swatting flies; he is
swatting hornets. Unfortunately, the “hornets” are not in Afghanistan or
Pakistan with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. Rather, they are in Iraq, and
they are biting back.
Right from the start, it seems President Bush and his administration were
itching to get to Iraq. After 9/11, all they had to do was get pesky
Afghanistan out of the way, and then they would be free to roll into Iraq as
conquering heroes. This has been confirmed by former Treasury Secretary Paul
O'Neill as well as former National Coordinator for Counterterrorism Richard
Clarke. Undeterred by objections from the United Nations, the Bush
administration pushed its case for a preemptive war, using faulty
intelligence as proof that, among other things, Saddam Hussein was
developing nuclear weapons. Did the Bush administration believe this
intelligence? Only they can say. However, once it was proved wrong, they did
not change their point of view. Saddam Hussein must go. Democracy must be
brought to Iraq. After all, the United States was on moral high ground. How
could they fail? Why wouldn’t the Iraqis be overjoyed to see American tanks
rolling into Baghdad? Who wouldn’t want to be liberated from a cruel tyrant?
Who indeed? Unfortunately, the situation was more complicated than the Bush
administration realized. In the documentary The Fog of War, former
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s first lesson of war is “Empathize with
Your Enemy.” This means using empathetic imagination in dealing with
enemies, and it involves an accurate grasp of the situation rather than
wishful, willful thinking. And, as Robert Wright wrote in the New York
Times, “the effect of [Rice’s] defense—and of her testimony in
general—was to raise questions about this administration’s grasp of reality.
The many grim surprises Iraq has brought over the past year seem to have had
no effect on official thinking about terrorism.”
What, exactly, did this administration fail to grasp? First and foremost is
the whole notion of preemptive war, which, to me, set a dangerous precedent.
While war at times might be necessary, it should be a matter of defense
rather than offence. Saddam Hussein was not an immediate threat to the
United States, and all the evidence collected after our “preemptive war”
supports this point of view. There were no weapons of mass destruction, no
nuclear missiles, and no clear connection between the Iraqi regime and Osama
bin Laden. In fact, there was time for inspections and for further
intelligence gathering. The Bush administration’s assessment of the
situation was completely wrong, yet they blithely charge forward as though
no mistakes were made. Any hint of criticism is at best brushed aside or at
worst considered anti-American.
Second, and nearly as bad, the Bush administration did not have the faintest
idea what was roiling beneath the surface of the Iraqi culture. Saddam
Hussein, for all his faults, managed to keep ethnic and religious strife
under control. He did it in a brutal, bloody way, but he did it. From a
distance, Iraq under Hussein looked repressed but relatively tranquil. But
how deceiving appearances can be! We only have to look at Yugoslavia after
Tito to see a perfect example of how quickly a civil war can begin.
According to Vanity Fair, France warned the Bush administration that
this might happen in Iraq, but of course they didn’t listen. With Saddam
gone, old feuds and grudges, along with a grasping for power, have sprung to
the surface, like, well, hornets from a nest. And for the people involved,
Iraqis as well as Americans, the bites are deadly.
Third, few countries want to be invaded. Things might be rotten on the home
front, but as soon as an occupying force comes in, no matter how good their
intentions, there is resentment and animosity. Wouldn’t we feel the same
way? How would we feel if another country told us it was time for a “regime
change” and their tanks started rolling down the streets of Washington,
D.C., and New York City? We would fight. We know we would. The final irony
is that by occupying Iraq, we might just succeed in uniting the various
ethnic and religious groups, but unfortunately they will be united against
us.
So here we are, once again in an unnecessary and dangerous war, while the
real culprits in Afghanistan and Pakistan have regrouped and are spreading
forth. Average citizens, perhaps, are only beginning to grasp the situation
and the implications. From our leaders, we expect something better. While it
is true that leaders are human and therefore fallible, it is also true that
they should have insight, intelligence, imagination, and even compassion
that go beyond what ordinary people have. We hold our leaders to higher
standards than we do average citizens and rightly so. In a dangerous
world, we need wise guidance. Without those higher standards, to paraphrase
a line from the movie Cold Mountain, "Our leaders step in hornets’
nests and then cry, 'Why are the hornets biting us?'”
