Wolfie's Fuzzy Math
May 2, 2004
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
This administration is the opposite of "The Sixth Sense."
They don't see any dead people.
Beyond the president's glaring absence at military
funerals; beyond the Pentagon's self-serving ban on
photographing the returning flag-draped coffins at Dover;
beyond playing down the thousands of wounded and maimed
American troops and the thousands of hurt and dead Iraqi
civilians, now comes the cruel arithmetic of Paul
Wolfowitz.
What can you say about a deputy defense secretary so eager
to invade Iraq he was nicknamed Wolfowitz of Arabia, so
bullish to remold the Middle East he froze the State
Department out of the occupation and then mangled it, who
doesn't bother to keep track of the young Americans who
died for his delusion?
Those troops were killed while they were still trying to
fathom the treacherous tribal and religious beehive they
were never prepared for, since they thought they'd be
helping build schools and hospitals for grateful Iraqis.
Asked during a Congressional budget hearing on Thursday how
many American troops had been killed in Iraq, Mr. Wolfowitz
missed by more than 30 percent. "It's approximately 500, of
which - I can get the exact numbers - approximately 350 are
combat deaths," he said.
As of Thursday, there were 722 deaths, 521 in combat. The
No. 2 man at the Pentagon was oblivious in the bloodiest
month of the war, with the number of Americans killed in
April overtaking those killed in the six-week siege of
Baghdad last year.
This is, of course, an administration that refuses to
quantify or acknowledge the cost of its chuckleheaded
empire policies, in bodies, money, credibility in the Arab
world, reputation among our allies or the reinvigoration of
militant Muslims around the globe. Duped themselves, they
duped Americans into thinking it would be easy, paid for
with Iraqi oil. But Donald Rumsfeld's vision of showing off
a slim, agile military was always at odds with the neocons'
vision of infusing enough security into Iraq to turn it
into an instant democratic paradise.
Crushed in the collision of these two grandiose dreams are
all the smaller dreams of fallen soldiers, to raise kids
and watch baseball and grill hot dogs on the Fourth of
July.
Now things have deteriorated to the point that the
administration is pathetically begging for help from the
very people it was trying to roll over - the U.N., Saddam's
Baathist generals and the Iranians.
When Ted Koppel decided to devote his Friday "Nightline" to
showing the faces and reading the names of the men and
women killed in action, Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard
denounced it as "a stupid statement" and the conservative
Sinclair media company, one of the country's largest owners
of local stations, said it would pre-empt the program on
its ABC affiliates. Sinclair, a big Republican donor, felt
Mr. Koppel was undermining the war effort.
Bill O'Reilly suggested that CBS, by breaking the news of
the grotesque pictures of American soldiers gaily
tormenting Iraqi prisoners, had put American lives at risk.
But it's unhealthy to censor the ugly realities of war. The
real danger is when the architects of war refuse to rethink
bad assumptions, wrapping themselves in the blindly
ideological nobility of their mission.
Senator John McCain let Sinclair have it with both barrels,
noting that the public needed "to be reminded of war's
terrible costs, in all their heartbreaking detail" and
calling the pre-emption "unpatriotic." (Shouldn't John
Kerry be running as John McCain's vice president?)
Mr. Koppel told me that he neither wanted to beat the drums
for war nor "encourage flower children to come back." He
said war is "a bitter, bitter business and we need to keep
talking to each other about where the war goes from here."
The tolerance for casualties, he said, shortly before the
start of his wrenching roll call of all those baby-faced
and smiling soldiers and marines, will be in direct
relation to faith in the motivation for war.
The W.M.D. reason vanished. And, with the re-Baathification
of the de-Baathification, the American idealism rational is
not panning out.
Hiding the faces of the war dead makes the motivation seem
like saving face in an election year.
Americans won't take casualties for the credibility of the
Bush administration. That's not a good enough reason for
people to die.
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