27 March 2003

Face to Face

Daniel Patrick Moyanhan is dead. He was a shoeshine boy in his time and a four-time senator and one of the most original thinkers who ever tinkered with social policy. He was a lot o other things, too, but we will let that go and celebrate his life. We joked about that in our Harvard policy seminars, remembering the adage that it was always better to approach him before lunch if you wanted a good answer to the question. There is a danger of knowing too much sometimes, when you get face to face with someone. So we will hold the Senator at arm's length, and remember his legacy of telling the truth, even when it was unpopular.

We need to hold a lot of things at arm's length this morning. People in Baghdad are stocking up for the last dance in the capital. We are coming face to face with that. And we are coming uncomfortably close to other things as well, looking over our shoulders for belt-bombers and wondering about a new super virus that is spreading silently around the world. They call it SARS- severe acute respiratory syndrome-and it appears to be traveling in airliners across the time zones. We don't want to be face to face with a stranger's cough in the seat beside us.

The news this morning just demonstrates this is all as nasty as a spray of virus. Saddam and his minions have vowed to fight on. His officers out in the field are shooting those unwilling to engage the Americans. It is low level, irritating, keeping our kids nervous. The Iraqis are not wearing uniforms, making target selection difficult. They are tired and will be living on the jagged edge of their nerves. They are finding that the southern ports are mined, making it difficult to bring in the relief supplies that the battered civilians of Um Qasr and Basra need.

This is the fruit of giving Saddam months and years to prepare nasty little surprises. Which is what his legacy to his nation will be. A series of brutish little tricks. The rocket that fell in the Baghdad market is typical of these. The President had to talk to Mr. Puten about the sale of Russian Global Positioning Jammers to the Iraqis. The product interferes with the signal that the "smart" weapons use to home in on preprogrammed targets. The net effect of their use is to bring the weapons down, not on regime targets, but on the innocent. The people we are trying to liberate, the people who are part of the police state that will not release its death grip on them.

Some morning will come when they will awake and know that there is no hooded group to come in the night for them. But it is not tomorrow and not the day after. No good answers here, none at all, and I expect there is more nastiness to come.

That is the outcome of being face to face with the evil of the regime, and the mirror effect of fatigue and anger at the loss of comrades on our own. But we keep coming, dropping from the sky and disembarking from helicopters. It is just a matter of time until we are face to face, north and west and south.

I wish I was rising on a morning that glittered only with promise. A day that stretches wide and bright like a western highway, the vista beckoning, calling out to get a start on it, ride down high and happy towards the noontime brilliance. Days like that are coming, I promise. But there is some business to get through before they come. Because in order to confront that happy future with our faces glowing, we have to live through being face to face with something else.