Untitled Document

02 May 2004

Billions and Billions

The big revolving door continues to turn. It is a comfort, since there is so much that looks like it is just going south on us. Four more of our kids are dead in Iraq, but I am listening to the early news.

The publicity debacle over the treatment of Iraqi detainees is still resonating in the press. Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski is back home, relieved from command of the 800 Military Police Brigade that was responsible for Saddam's former abattoir at Abu Ghraib.

She is covering her ass, big time, saying it was military intelligence and the Company guys who were responsible for the abuses. She is a reservist, and she thinks the active duty side of the house is hanging her out to dry. She has got a point.

But the abuse should not be coming as a great surprise. Mark Bowden, the guy who wrote "Black Hawk Down," among other pieces, talked about it in the Altantic Monthly last year in his article "The Art of Interrogation: A Survey of the Landscape of Persuasion."

He is a prescient guy. He talked about the impact of the corpse-dragging and defilement that has become a theme in this war of cultures, and he was frank about the nature of interrogation. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do to make people do your bidding.

But it is a thoroughly sickening business. The Vietnamese pioneered used some of the techniques used by the folks in Cellblock 1A, whoever they were. One of my squadron buddies from years ago had been a POW in Vietnam. He had been held at the experimental camp our guys called The Farm. The stories he told still make me squirm.

Don't get captured is an important safety tip. Because this is an awful business.

They say that General Bobby Lee looked out on the field after a victory and saw its awful harvest. He is quoted as saying: "It's good war is so terrible, for we should become fond of it."

I don't know about that. But I wish I could vote for John McCain this year. He is the only one who has the perspective of one who has been held in something like Cellblock 1A. He told the broadcasters to go to hell when some rebelled at Ted Koppel's reading of the names of the American dead on his show Nightline.

Senator McCain wrote the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, saying in part: "Every American has a responsibility to understand fully the terrible costs of war and the extraordinary sacrifices it requires of those brave men and women who volunteer to defend the rest of us…"

So the revolving door continues to turn, tit-for-tat, ying-for-yang and birth-for-death.

Leonardo da Vinci, the greatest humanist of them all and crafter of fantastic war machines he intended to make war impossible died on this day. "Tailgunner' Joe McCarthy passed away at the Naval hospital at Bethesda where I go sometimes when the pain to too great, and J. Edgar Hoover gave up the directorship of the FBI permanently.

I visit him sometimes where he rests at Congressional Cemetery. It is peaceful there by the river.

It is something to contemplate those who lived to have a life. The tragedy is in the loss of the young. 'Freiherr' Manfred von Richthofen was born today, the bookend anniversary of his death only a week ago. It was either ground fire that got him, since he was chasing Flight Lieutenant Wilfred May, on his first mission and likely to be the Red Baron's eight-first kill. Captain Roy Brown of the Royal Canadian Air Corps was determined not to let that happen, and gave pursuit, emerging from a wild melee of Fokkers and Sopwith Camels over the battlefield.

He was twenty-five. He lived all that in just under a quarter century. But he was a soldier, after all, and was paid for what he did. The word from Saudi Arabia this morning gives us the vantage of the new world war.

Five western oil engineers were murdered by four formerly faithful employees. One was dragged behind the escape car, living out Mark Bowden's image of this phase of Jihad.

Remember Carl Sagan? I thought about him this morning, along with the other famous people. He was an astronomer, educator, author, pioneer in exobiology, Director for Planetary Studies, and the David Duncan Professor at Cornell University. He passed in 1996 after a two-year battle with bone marrow disease.

His biggest popular bit of science was the Public Broadcasting series "Cosmos," in which he attempted to convey the magnificence of the universe in terms approachable to the lay audience. The concepts that he advanced were so mind-boggling, the distances so vast, the numbers so enormous, that the trademark line of the show became his nasal uttering of the phrase "Beeellions and beeelions."

The numbers were really big. Billions and billions big.

So when I opened the e-mail queue this morning a young friend of mine sent me a link to a great site on the web. It is simple, but really effective. It shows the dollar count for the war. It is quite striking. The numbers over on the right side flip buy in a blur. The ones to the right change more slowly. But the count this morning is billions and billions. I wrote her back immediately, my fingers numb from sleep:

"It is sobering to think how much these things cost, Annie"

But of course, the reason we get into these things is expensive, too.

The World Trade Centers cost billions and billions when the insurance was paid off. The feeling in the Administration was that spending the money- regardless of how much- would prevent such things happening again.

That assumption is, of course, open to honest debate. But there wasn't anyone evil in this story except Osama, and maybe a few generations of oil men, and it was Osama who declared war on us a long time ago.

He is a complex man, and no fool. The fact to keep in mind is that he thinks he has brought Islam to a historic moment. He actually believes his Mujahaeen defeated the Soviet Union- not just in Afghanistan, but everywhere- and when that was done, he turned his attention on defeating us.

I completely agree about the staggering nature of the cost of war, in lives and dollars and dignity. The inhuman nature of this sometimes makes me think it is the most human of all behaviors. I wish I had been permitted to run the War on Terror without necessarily occupying Baghdad. But the clicking dollars are as valid as the counter on the billboard that stands next to the freeway going into Detroit that tells you how many cars have been built in this model year.

Even if they do not really build them there anymore.

I am old enough to remember when they had a counter in front of all the McDonalds restaurants, too. The hamburgers clicked away for years. I saw them click over a million, and then two and so on. Inexorable. Boundless, hamburgers stacked toward the Moon and beyond.

Astronomical numbers. They stopped changing the sign, finally. "Billions and Billions Sold" is all it says now. Timeless.

But they could talk to the people at http://www.costofwar.com/ and they could keep an accurate tally, right to the last cheesburger.

Of course, that would be scary, too.