Washington — As I estimated, this war will take about a week,
perhaps a few days more. Then the mopping up begins. I stand by my
original hunch.
Our forces have performed superbly. Our weaponry really is as
precise and devastating as we were told it would be. And Saddam
Hussein is as evil as reported. Moreover his regime and its
supporters are equally evil. Their dominance of Iraq for so many
years is probably the malign consequence that will be the most
difficult to overcome in the months and years ahead. The honorable
values of our coalition forces are easy to overlook. We take them
for granted. Others, the trendy and the progressive, dismiss them
as antiquated or a sham. Yet, when we see our troops adhering so
scrupulously to the international conventions of warfare that they
place themselves in danger; and when we see Saddam’s animals rely
on our troops’ scrupulosity to ambush them, the contrast should
enlighten. There is a radiant difference between honor and
evil.
In the German army during World War II, there were many soldiers
and officers who took pride in being fine soldiers, for instance,
those who took part in the bomb plot against Hitler. Not all German
soldiers were of the sort who herded the helpless into
concentration camps and gas chambers. In the Iraqi army there may
be some honorable soldiers, but I do not see any evidence as yet.
They all seem to be either pathetic wretches or Saddam’s automatons
with an inexhaustible taste for cruelty. In the German army there
had been a venerable tradition of soldiership. In Iraq there has
only been thuggery. It is going to take time to create a civic
sense in a country run by such primitives.
That the community of Hollywood “artists,” as they called
themselves during the Academy Awards the other night, is so
obviously unmindful of the dispendious evil of the Iraqi regime is
notable but perhaps not all that surprising. The level of intellect
and of sophistication displayed by Hollywood’s assembled artists
was pretty pedestrian. Mediocre “artists” miss important marks of
distinction in politics and history all the time. In 1938 Gertrude
Stein and a circle of her “artists” had what we might now call the
“innovative” idea of awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Adolf
Hitler, or was it the Nobel Prize for literature that they had in
mind? After the war two other mediocre “artists” Jean-Paul Sartre
and Simone de Beauvoir became very famous international heralds of
peace and progress. Subsequent research has revealed that these
renowned opponents of the West’s prosecution of the Cold War were
virtual Nazi collaborators, as they lolled around Paris Café
Flore during the Nazi occupation. Their works of “art” were
published without impediment from the authorities. They flourished
as nicely under Nazis as under French democrats.
Still, the less arty among us thought Sunday night might be a
time when all might agree that Saddam is deserving of Mussolini’s
final act, to wit, being hung by his heels from a lamp post. By the
night of the Academy Awards it was apparent that his so-called
soldiers were using women and children as human shields. Others
were dressing in civilian clothes to take advantage of our
military’s respect for the rules of warfare to ambush them. I
wonder how many of Saddam’s thugs dressed in women’s clothes. Did
they wear burkhas? Did they dress as old ladies?
Some members of the press were temporarily rendered almost
defeatist by the ambushes of Sunday. They talked of our young
soldiers and Marines as if they were distressed kids. Actually the
Marines and the members of our volunteer army have proved
themselves to be splendid fighters. Many are right where they want
to be, in the middle of a tremendous fight. While some in the press
were turning weepy Sunday I thought of a Marine I knew named Dutch,
who died in Vietnam. He was on the swim team with me at
Indiana.
He joined the Marines in the middle 1960s and went to Vietnam.
The last I heard he died there. Then in the middle 1980s after a
handball game, my opponent, a former Marine, told me he had written
an unpublished novel about a battle he was in somewhere in the
Mekong Delta. He had just set out to relieve a guy named Dutch from
a position under fire. Artillery hit the position, and when he went
down a hill to get Dutch, Dutch was dead. We compared notes. Over
twenty years what we both remembered about Dutch was that he loved
a good fight. My handball buddy knew him in the service. I knew him
in college. Like a lot of young men he was, shall we say, a
fighter. The Iraqi animals who while dressed as civilians ambushed
our forces are going to meet a lot of Dutches in the days
ahead.
