Peace Kills (2 page)

Thanks also to Alex Vogel, who did his best to repair a faltering ABC Land Rover in Iraq by phone from New Hampshire.
Looting was rife in Iraq at the time and Alex asked—amid discussion of diesel compression loss due to piston scoring from desert grit—“If New York is ever freed from oppression by liberals, will there be looting in Manhattan?” I believe, Alex, that Manhattanites have been doing that all along, on Wall Street. But there
will
be plenty of sniping from
The New York Review of Books
.

Max Blumenfeld, from the Department of Defense, managed to get me to Baghdad, where Major William Dean Thurmond made me at home. Dean, you are an officer, a gentleman, and damn handy at making coffee in plastic sacks using the chemical heater packs from the Meals Ready to Eat. Additional thanks to Major Mike Birmingham, of the Third Infantry Division, and a tip o' the pants to Derek and Ski (they'll know what I mean).

At the Baghdad airport I was billeted with good friends of mine, the courageous and beautiful Alisha Ryu from Voice of America and the equally courageous if not quite so good-looking Steve Kamarow of
USA Today
. With us was
The Philadelphia Inquirer's
Andrea Gerlin, fresh from combat coverage with a brilliant idea for selling American women a fitness and weight-loss program based on sleeping in holes, getting shot at, and eating MREs. James Kitfield from
The Atlantic's
sister publication,
The National Journal
, was there as well. Kitfield is fluent in the language of the military, which is harder to translate than Arabic. Were it not for James, I would still be pondering what it means to be in a part of town that was “controlled but not secured” and thus I would be blown to bits.

We had, as I mentioned, a good time in Baghdad. Chaos is interesting. Reporters would rather be interested than comfortable. Put that way, it sounds noble enough. Put another
way, we would rather be interested than well paid, worthwhile, responsible, or smart.

Fifty-nine years ago Iwo Jima might have been a little
too
interesting for this reporter. At least it's still uncomfortable. It was the idea of Tim Baney to take me to Iwo. Please use Baney Media Incorporated for all your television programming needs. (Except Tim doesn't do weddings, although for a price …) We traveled with ace cameraman Pat Anderson—three Irishmen again, but this time only one of us was short. Transport from Okinawa was arranged through the kind offices of Kim Newberry and Captain Chris Perrine, USMC. On the island battlefield we were entertained (if that verb ever can be used in connection with war) and instructed (a verb not used in connection with war often enough) by Sergeant Major Mike McClure, USMC, and Sergeant Major Suwa, Japanese Self-Defense Forces.

There are many other people to whom I owe thanks. My thanks credit is woefully overextended. I am in gratitude Chapter 11. Any number of debts of obligation doubtless will go unpaid as I attempt to settle my accounts. For years Max Pappas was my invaluable research assistant. I know he misses sitting in the kitchen trying to extract
Dora the Explorer
from the disk drive while dog and children gnaw on his pants cuffs. And I'm sure he's much less happy and fulfilled in his present position as policy analyst at Citizens for a Sound Economy, no matter what he says to the contrary.

Likewise, sisters Caitlin and Megan Rhodes escaped the same kitchen computer post to, respectively, go to college and pursue a career in Chicago. They are probably, this minute, sprinkling dog hair and Froot Loops onto their laptop keyboards for nostalgia's sake.

Dr. William Hughes has kept me healthy through years of Third World travel. He carefully researches the hideous diseases that rage in the places I'm about to visit, gives me a bottle of pills, and says, “Take these if you begin to bleed from the ears and maybe you'll live to be medevaced.”

For all questions on military matters, I go to Lieutenant Colonel Mike Schellhammer, who introduced me to my wife and who, therefore, she tells me, cannot be wrong about anything. If there are errors about military-type things in the following pages, it's because Mike, an intelligence officer, is very tight-lipped. “I could tell you what I do,” Mike says, “but I'd have to bore you to death.”

Don Epstein and his colleagues at Greater Talent Network continue to find lectures for me to give and lecture audiences who do not throw things that are large or rotten.

My literary agent, Bob Dattila, maintains his remarkable ability to extract money from people in return for work that accidentally got erased in the hard drive; was lost by UPS; just needs a slight final polish; was e-mailed yesterday, honest, but the attachment probably couldn't be opened because of that computer virus that's going around; and is really, truly, completely finished in my head—and I just need to write it down.

The Atlantic
is the only magazine in America with a readership and staff who are sitting, clothed, and in their right minds. Writing for
The Atlantic
is an honor I don't deserve, and you'd think Cullen Murphy would be able to tell that from my spelling, grammar, and punctuation. But when I read what I've written in
The Atlantic
, I find that it's, mirabile dictu, in good English. (Or, if the occasion warrants, as it does with mirabile dictu, it's in good Latin. The phrase is Virgil's—as if
I'd
know.) This is the work of
The Atlantic's
deputy managing
editors Toby Lester and Martha Spaulding, of senior editor Yvonne Rolhausen, and of staff editors Elizabeth Shelburne, Joshua Friedman, and Jessica Murphy. Bless you all, and you, David Bradley, for buying
The Atlantic
and saving it from a dusty fate in library stacks next to bundles of
Transition, New Directions
, and
The Dial
, or a fate worse than dusty, running features such as “The Most Important One or Two Books I've Ever Read” by Charlize Theron.

Historically, Grove/Atlantic, Inc., branched from
The Atlantic Monthly
, although a cutting was made and transplanted into the rich mud of the New York literary scene, which, combined with a graft to the sturdy root of Grove Press, caused this metaphor to badly need pruning. Grove/Atlantic is a great publishing house, and I would say that even if it hadn't published all my books. Grove/Atlantic chief, Morgan Entrekin, is a true aristocrat among publishers, and I would say that even if I didn't owe him money. Go buy a lot of Grove/Atlantic books, no matter what the subject, and maybe Morgan will let me off the hook for that advance on my proposed Howard Dean presidential biography. You'll be doing a favor not just to me but to every person at Grove/Atlantic. They are all true aristocrats of publishing, albeit impoverished aristocrats due to—let's be blunt—you, negligent reader, spending your money on DVDs and video games. A prostration, a curtsy, a bow, and a yank on the forelock to Charles Rue Woods, archduke of art design; Judy Hottensen, maharani of marketing; Scott Manning, prince regent of public relations; Debra Wenger, caliph of copyediting; and Michael Hornburg and Muriel Jorgensen, potentates of production. Even if this book gets remaindered, it will be a royal flush.

There is one more performer of thankless tasks to thank. Tina O'Rourke provides sage editorial advice, pays the bills,
keeps the books, raises the children, runs the household … But there are not trees enough to make the paper to give me the space to list all the things my wife does. I will be ecologically conscious and eschew sprawl by listing, rather, the things Tina does
not
do. She doesn't stare disconsolately at a blank page all day and come home reeking of cigar smoke and snarl at the kids and drink gin. And for these, and many other things, we love you, dear.

Let me close by acknowledging the inspiration I received from that now nearly forgotten deep thinker about foreign policy issues, General Wesley Clark. Addressing an audience in Keene, New Hampshire, during the 2004 presidential primary campaign, General Clark said, “I came into the Army because I believe in public service, not because I want to kill people.” How surprised Saddam Hussein would have been to see General Clark in public, coming across the Kuwait border with a napkin over his arm, carrying a tray of bratwurst and beer.

Next year we are to bring the soldiers home

For lack of money, and it is all right.

Places they guarded, or kept orderly,

Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly.

We want the money for ourselves at home

Instead of working. And this is all right.

It's hard to say who wanted it to happen,

But now it's been decided nobody minds.

The places are a long way off, not here,

Which is all right, and from what we hear

The soldiers there only made trouble happen.

Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a country

That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.

The statues will be standing in the same

Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.

Our children will not know it's a different country.

All we can hope to leave them now is money.

—Philip Larkin

“Homage to a Government”

England, 1969

I was in Berlin in November 1989, the weekend the wall opened. The Cold War was over. The ICBMs weren't going to fly. The world wouldn't melt in a fusion fireball or freeze in a nuclear winter. Everybody was happy and relieved. And me, too, although I'm not one of those children of the 1950s who was traumatized by the A-bomb. Getting under a school desk during duck-and-cover was more interesting and less scary than the part of the multiplication table that came after “times seven.” Still, the notion that, at any time, the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. might blow up the whole world—my neighborhood included—was in the back of my mind. A little mushroom-shaped cloud marred the sunny horizon of my future as an internationally renowned junior high school football player. If
On the Beach
was for real, I'd never
get tall enough to date Ava Gardner. What's more, whenever I was apprehended in youthful hijinks, Mutually Assured Destruction failed to happen before Dad got home from work. Then, in the fall of 1962, when I was fifteen, Armageddon really did seem to arrive. I made an earnest plea to my blond, freckled biology-class lab partner (for whom, worshipfully, I had undertaken all frog dissection duties). “The Cuban missile crisis,” I said, “means we probably won't live long. Let's
do it
before we die.” She demurred. All in all the Cold War was a bad thing.

Twenty-seven years later, wandering through previously sinister Checkpoint Charlie with beer in hand, I felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I remember thinking just those words: “I feel like a weight has been lifted …” A wiser person would have been thinking, “I feel like I took a big dump.”

Nastiness was already reaccumulating. I reported on some of it in ex-Soviet Georgia, ex-Yugoslav Yugoslavia, the West Bank, Somalia, and Iraq-ravaged Kuwait. The relatively simple, if costive, process of digesting the Communist bloc was complete. America needed to reconstitute its foreign policy with—so to speak—a proper balance of fruit and fiber. The serious people who ponder these things seriously said the new American foreign policy must include:

• Nation-building;

• A different approach to national security;

• Universal tenets of democracy.

This didn't occur to me. Frankly, nothing concerning foreign policy had ever occurred to me. I'd been writing about foreign countries and foreign affairs and foreigners for years. But you can own dogs all your life and not have “dog policy.”
You have rules, yes—Get off the couch!—and training, sure. We want the dumb creatures to be well behaved and friendly. So we feed foreigners, take care of them, give them treats, and, when absolutely necessary, whack them with a rolled-up newspaper. That was as far as my foreign policy thinking went until the middle 1990s, when I realized America's foreign policy thinking hadn't gone that far.

In the fall of 1996, I traveled to Bosnia to visit a friend whom I'll call Major Tom. Major Tom was in Banja Luka serving with the NATO-led international peacekeeping force, IFOR. From 1992 to 1995 Bosnian Serbs had fought Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims in an attempt to split Bosnia into two hostile territories. In 1995 the U.S.-brokered Dayton Agreement ended the war by splitting Bosnia into two hostile territories. The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina was run by Croats and Muslims. The Republika Srpska was run by Serbs. IFOR's job was to “implement and monitor the Dayton Agreement.” Major Tom's job was to sit in an office where Croat and Muslim residents of Republika Srpska went to report Dayton Agreement violations.

“They come to me,” said Major Tom, “and they say, ‘The Serbs stole my car.' And I say, ‘I'm writing that in my report.' They say, ‘The Serbs burned my house.' And I say, ‘I'm writing that in my report.' They say, ‘The Serbs raped my daughter.' And I say, ‘I'm writing that in my report.'”

“Then what happens?” I said.

“I put my report in a file cabinet.”

Major Tom had fought in the Gulf War. He'd been deployed to Haiti during the American reinstatement of President Aristide (which preceded the recent American unreinstatement). He was on his second tour of duty in Bosnia and would go on to fight in the Iraq war. That night we got drunk.

“Please, no nation building,” said Major Tom. “We're the Army. We kill people and break things. They didn't teach nation building in infantry school.”

Or in journalism school, either. The night before I left to cover the Iraq war I got drunk with another friend, who works in TV news. We were talking about how—as an approach to national security—invading Iraq was … different. I'd moved my family from Washington to New Hampshire. My friend was considering getting his family out of New York. “Don't you hope,” my friend said, “that all this has been thought through by someone who is smarter than we are?” It is, however, a universal tenet of democracy that no one is.