12 July 2003

Sixteen Words

Whoo, Boy, the skies are opening up all over this summer. Governor Taft has requested emergency status for six counties in northwest Ohio to deal with the foot of rain that fell this week. In the Gulf of Mexico there is a big tropical storm intensifying, swirling, and preparing to assault the shore late Monday or Tuesday. I have no idea what the body count in Iraq is today. I heard there were two more of our kids killed there yesterday. Don't get me wrong, I am totally behind the troops, and totally believe Saddam is a mass murderer whose Baathist Party was a neighborhood threat, bully and all-around bad thing. I am proud of the professionalism and lethality of our war machine, and prouder still to have served my time as part of it. I will not be accused as a mindless listener to the BBC, NPR, the Washington Post or the New York Times.

So you are waiting for me to get to the "Yeah, but…."

Well, I am not going there. I am a fully realized man of the new century. I am prepared to believe that I am actually interested in the fourth test of the Tour de France, in which a team of the United States Postal Service is doing quite well, and I further acknowledge that I should have bought property on the Anacostia waterfront years ago.

I am just a little perplexed the morning. I have arrived at the place where we are supposed to know what is going on, and I find I am lacking a clue. A brick short of the full wheel-barrow, so to speak. It seems to me that, having won the war, we ought to now concentrate on winning the peace. Which is going to be a dicey and expensive proposition. Which we should resource and manage with the same aplomb as we rolled into Baghdad. Instead we seem to be doing one of those Watergate "What did he know, and when did he know it" things. I haven't identified the John Dean character in this drama, but I'm sure some weasel will show up to play the part. In this rendition of the Washington drama, we are parsing sentences again. Like we did with Mr. Clinton. He was a smart guy, and he knew his grammar. He got down to the nuance of a single word. The meaning of the word "is."

Having completed my bit for the lifetime lawyers employment program, I will just leave that to legal counsel. But this morning's tempest, the one here in town, not in the Gulf, takes many more than that. It takes sixteen.

We apparently are going to witness a kabuki dance here over the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Do something for me. Stop reading this deathless prose and go to the "Google" search engine. In the search line type "weapons of mass destruction" in parents. Then, don't hit search. Hit the button on the right, the "I'm feeling lucky" button. See what comes up, and look at it closely. Real closely. Read all of it and then come back and tell me what you thought. God, I love the Internet! All the words in the whole world and all before breakfast!

Oh, but here Baghdad-on-the-Potomac, the search has narrowed in the hunt for the guilty. Who are still standing around, looking innocent, but I bet we are going to see some heads roll on this. In his State of the Union address, Mr. Bush used sixteen ill-advised words. Actually, they were fine words that supported a decision that had already been made. There were several people with very large egos involved, and they were going to war with Saddam Hussein and really needed us to go along with them. They had to borrow our children to topple him as part of the  crusade against Global Terrorism.

Oops. That was an ill-advised word, too. Which would bring it to seventeen. The President had to go back and pick that one up and tuck it away with some of the other forbidden words. We don't do crusades. Those are insensitive pillages of other people's holy places conducted by ill-mannered oafs and thugs who plunder and have the temerity to think that God was on their side. In these more enlightened times we know that he is on everybody's side, and with a little sensitivity and caring we will all get along just fine.

Or that is the theory, anyway. I kind of liked the word "crusade" before, like it the way that Dwight Eisenhower used it in his biography of the great war. "Crusade in Europe" he called it. And it was. The point is here, as I understand it, is that the relativists have decided that the larger Muslim community has sensibilities that should be respected. And I agree with that. It is hard to shred out the radical Islamists from the billion devout. The ones who are stuck with a world view in which Spain is a Islamic Caliphate (it was), and the True Faith is about to devour Austria (within a gnat's whisker).

Of course, if you look at the docks of Marseilles or the homes of the Gastarbieters in Germany you would think that they are right. 9-11 wasn't launched out of Saudi, after all, it came from Hamburg. Which is where I continue to get confused. The sixteen ill-advised words are these. Count along with me:

"The British government," is three words. They provide some credibility, since everyone knows the Brits are very smart. They have both Oxford and Cambridge, if the are not in fact the same place. So far, so good. But there are thirteen more words to go. Consider that for a moment, unlucky number, here they are: "…has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." There they are. Taken as a whole, that sentence seems to mean that a credible source has identified a known bad guy who was  trying to get bad stuff from a discrete place.

But for those of us who read Raymond Chandler, we know better. Remember the famous line about the sign behind the bar?

"Only Genuine Pre-War Scotch Sold Here." I started to count the lies. I stopped at five."

I'm just a working stiff, but I recall we were hysterical a month or so ago about all the uranium that Iraqi civilians were stuffing into their Toyotas at the unsecured Tuwaitha nuclear complex. We were in trouble then because we hadn't done anything about that.  This morning the President says he has full confidence in his CIA Director. "Full" and " confidence" are two useful words which actually mean, "let the bastard dangle in the wind." George Tenet is a team player and a stand-up guy. I really admire him. Of course, the feeling at Langley was that he would never stand up to Rumsfeld or those other true believers down their. I mean, if your budget is ten percent of what the other guys at the table, where do you really stand? Uncle Don Rumsfeld  has close to a half trillion in the annual war chest, and if you include that in the five-year Future Years Defense Plan (the famous FYDP), you are talking about the lifetime GNP of most continents. Like Africa, where the announcements were made, and throw in Brazil.

So George did his bit for the Administration on the sixteen words. I think we can save some of them. I nominate the words "The," "from" and "of," for retention, since we are going to be needing them for everyday business. I also think we are going to need the word "uranium" to describe what is going to happen, sooner or later. We also need to retain the "recently sought significant" three words, since the Personals column in the Post has an almost unending requirement for them. "Government" is a painful necessity. Although we forget about it instantly the second the President leaves, which Al Sharpton in the race for President, I think me need to retain the word "Africa." I think we have already stopped saying the words "Saddam Hussein" although some fellow that looks like him keeps sending tapes from the western desert. We can always change his name to something else.

George's equivalent of taking a bullet for the President was summed up in this terse announcement quoted in the Times. It contained thirty words to cancel the sixteen, an alarming increase. We are already up to nearly fifty words, not an huge number in itself, but remember what Lincoln was able to do with the Gettysburg Address. People actually remember them. "The President had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound. These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president."

I read the words. I counted the lies. I stopped at five.

A delightful young lady loaned me her copy of the new Harry Potter book from Britain. It is not written by the Government, though it is said that J.K. Rowling is now richer than the Queen. My young friend says it is good, and I look forward to curling up by the pool with it. I understand that the arch-villain of the series is back to oppose the young wizard. I understand that he may have the magical equivalent of weapons of mass destruction.

Now that we have gotten rid of the two words, you know what we could call the guy formerly known as "Saddam Hussein?"

Lord Voldemort. Then we could have a crusade.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra