Jordan Times, Wednesday, July 2, 2003

ALL THINGS considered, the Bush administration is weathering the WMD heat better than it could have hoped. They and their supporters led off with arrogance in Iraq, scoffing at the sturdy cold war concept of deterrence and equating it with appeasement. But when the war turned out looking like Muhammad Ali taking on a grandmother in a wheelchair, and when granny turned out not to be packing dangerous weapons as alleged, the backlash began against a sanctimonious crowd that believed the rest of us were dangerous fools bent on bringing America to ruin.

Still, President George Bush is surviving the controversy better than British Prime Minister Tony Blair is because, as the Philadelphia Inquirer reported recently, a third of the American public mistakenly believes the US has already found Iraqi WMDs. And they frankly don't seem to want to spend another minute thinking about it.

It helps prove what some have speculated in the past — that the administration benefits from what psychologists call “projection”. In a stressful time such as this, the public subconsciously projects boldness onto rashness and competence onto foolish behaviour, because to see the leaders' mistakes in the harsh light of reality would spark a mass panic.

Still, the experts and neo-con think-tankers must know, somewhere deep inside, that they've lost permanent credibility among those people who've been paying enough attention to be outraged.

They told us that hard, reliable intelligence showed that it was suicidal to do nothing. If there was any WMD material in Iraq, Baath loyalists and bandits may have beaten us to it, despite our hard, reliable intelligence. It's peace time there, but American troops are still being killed. Baghdad citizens who should have looked forward to a more prosperous time have resorted to acts like raiding the Baghdad zoo for animals to sell or eat. And the United States is less respected than before, even among currently “friendly nations”: over 70 per cent of citizens in Turkey, Russia and Pakistan view the US as a military threat, according the Pew Research Centre.

Yes, we've been warring better than many other nations and most past empires, but we've been failing where our own ideals are concerned, with practical consequences.

The American prowar bunch fancies itself to be the lone realist about what needs to be done to keep the country safe. But look closer and you'll see a flat-out comic-book sentimentalism that drives their assumptions about what works and what doesn't. They aspire to be Captain America, going in, knocking some heads together, making things right and walking away while drawing the awe and respect of the conquered. But even in the make-believe world of comic books, Captain America usually ends up getting more headaches than he bargained for in the next issue.

What many of us said before the war remains true: In coming years, we'll have to fight smarter, not faster or louder. Many current friends will some day be threats, as the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations know from their Frankensteinian creation of Saddam. But we can't assassinate every Frankenstein monster or preempt every nutcase or hammer every hapless citizenry into a liberal Western democracy. We're not rich enough or strong enough to pull that off, nor can we live with the unintended consequences such actions prompt.

Most of us who opposed the war in Iraq weren't championing pacifism. Many of us were actually willing to deter Saddam and others with sincere threats of massive retaliation — which, while horrifying in its own right, is an approach more respected by the international community than preemption.

The shock troops of the far right used terms like “wimp” and “traitor” to describe anyone who disagreed with the invade-now-think-later approach. The less rabid members of the Captain America crowd simply shook their heads at us and shuddered. As they now fix their gaze eastwards of Iraq, towards Iran, the rest of us are shuddering.

The writer is a Pakistani-American book editor based in Los Angeles, California. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.