Untitled Document

03 May 2004

Full Responsibility

Thomas Hamill is free today, and that is the only good news I can think of this morning. I have a new job to start, a new universe of people to meet and remember. I got up earlier than usual to brew the coffee and puzzle my way through a new week.

It rained all night and I am not quite sure how to get where I am going. I have no doubt that my shoe-shine will be ruined.

There are nine more combat deaths reported from the Theater and I can no longer sort out the count from day to day.

Hamill is a 43-year-old dairy farmer from Mississippi who took a job driving a fuel truck in Iraq as a private contractor to pay off the debt on his farm. He had been in the bag almost a month. Reportedly, he heard a U.S. patrol coming and ran away.

It is a chicken-and-egg thing. The troops were there and he was safe. If the troops were not there, he might have been recaptured. But if the troops weren't there, he wouldn't have been either. I don't know. It goes around in circles and is too hard for a simple retiree like me to understand.

I would have to get out my graph paper and track the insurgency like my Dad used to do lap times for the Indianapolis 500 on Memorial Day. He was an organized listener, and I am not.

I have no special knowledge of the inner workings of the great machine anymore, at least not the operational end of it. I am sure there are issues of great peril and muted triumph out there. But we don't hear about the latter until the sources-and-methods have dried up. The bad news comes rapidly and inexorably, and my reaction is to the media, not to sensitive reporting.

The bile is rising everywhere. We are backing away from the former Republican Guard commander we appointed a few days ago to command the southern sector in Falluja. We have apparently replaced him with another former Guard commander who is either more reliable or less tainted.

The Turks rolled up a plot by Anser al Islam, a loosely affiliated franchise of al Qaida. They were collecting explosives to bomb the NATO summit they are going to hold in Istanbul later this month. President Bush is supposed to attend. I think he ought to rethink that. In fact, I am reconsidering a lot about how and where I travel.

When I plunged into the market outside the Red Fort in Delhi two Octobers ago, it occurred to me that I no longer had to go looking for bad guys like the reporter Daniel Pearl. I full expect that all of us who once walked down dark streets in other lands with impunity are as likely to be grabbed as Thomas Hamill. We won't even have to be driving a truck. Somebody scragged three Chinese engineers in Pakistan yesterday. The easier targets must be drying up.

The five engineers killed in the Kingdom over the weekend tells me that we are all just soft targets now, and it is largely because of the way we have squandered our national reputation for fairness and justice.

I got a nasty e-mail from a respected colleague yesterday that ripped into me for being a Washington weenie. I am, of course, and it was a conscious choice a long time ago. Now I am stuck with it.

He said: "It is time for you inside-the-Beltway, special ID-folks to start standing up for some basic professional principles--starting with accountability."

He is right.

Accordingly, I am taking full responsibility right now. I should have gone on to Baghdad after the liberation of Kuwait. I should have supported the Shia insurgents who rose against Saddam two years later and prevented their subsequent slaughter by the Baathist security services.

I should have reformed our human intelligence capability and penetrated the hard target of militant Islam to forestall the series of attacks of which the Embassies and the Cole and the Trade Center and the Pentagon were only way-points.

I should have coordinated the operations of the FBI and the CIA, knocked their heads together, and when I had the chance I should have been stronger in telling the President that his disorganized private life was hurting our ability to mount an effective response to a growing storm.

But the thing I take the most responsibility for is the vote I cast for George Bush.

I should have voted for Mr. Nader and thrown away my vote with conscience. But I thought I was voting for the Grown-ups. I was wrong. Mistakes were made.

But there are clear choices this year. I may go down to the White House and protest. I feel strongly enough about it that I may throw somebody else's medals over the tall iron fence.