21 March 2003

I slept better last night, maybe just weary and maybe just happy it is all happening at last. I woke up a little early, battered but sound. It is Friday, and with luck I can relax around the edges of the weekend if I do the scheduling for the senior staff to cover the weekend without having everyone in at the office just watching TV. This is not a sprint, after all, it is a marathon.

Of course it looks a bit like a spring out of Kuwait. It is an unsettling morning for old warriors, like old war horses who hear a distant trumpet. The game is in play, the adrenaline is flowing and the testosterone is so thick that the air almost cloys with it.

Demonstrators here blocked the 14th St. bridge yesterday morning, the major artery from Virginia into the District. The rage of the commuter trapped is as potent as that of the troops bottled up in their camps in Kuwait. I would not want to be one of those demonstrators, blocking the righteous bureaucrats from the swift completion of their monring memoranda. The demonstrators are liable to suffer the same fate as the poor idealistic young American girl who tried to stop the Israeli bulldozer last week, thinking somehow that optimism and righteousness was enough to stop a giant machine set on its way by implacable policy. I recall seeing the images of her weeping friends, shocked and saddened by the blunt demonstration of the obvious.

Which is what this is about, of course.

I'm listening to the Iraqi Information Minister, Mohammed al Said Sahaff, on the BBC. He is comparing our troops to Al Capone. He claims we are targeting the family of President Hussein, accusing the Americans of monstrous crimes. The Nazi propaganda poster of Winston Churchill cradling a Tommy-gun in a chalk-striped suit and dark fedora comes to me, and the image dances through all the media we launch like soap bubbles across the globe. Our images, our history, a gangster whose best years were lived close to a century ago but whose images dance across the world on the miracle of mass media.

I remember the end of the problems in Serbia not so long ago, though our troops are still there at Camp Bondsteel, still on patrol. We were at a loss in trying to crush the hardheaded Slavs. We had hit bridges and fake tanks and dug great holes in the mud. Nothing worked. Finally the targets people linked together the data to connect the financial apparatus that supported Slobidan Milosovich and started blowing up the factories, banks and dry-cleaning plants owned by the embattled regime's friends. Things ended there shortly.

I think that war was about protecting a Muslim minority from the depredations of an intolerant majority. I think. Oh, hell, I can't keep all the wars straight any more. A learned scientist and physician stuck his head in my office yesterday. He is a national treasure, a pioneer in his field who donates his retirement to the Government. He went out as a Major General from active duty and we looked at the TV screen of the first night's action over Baghdad, trying to put together a picture of what is happening out there where so many friends are serving. The General told me he started his bit in the parade at the end of the Korean War, and that a few of his classmates were killed there.

We listened to the commentary, a couple old guys watching a young person's enterprise. I looked over at him and said: "You remember when people talked about The War? Like it was a bookmark, separating the chapters of life?" He nodded at me and smiled.

"Now they just say which one."

Copright 2003 Vic Socotra