Karl Rove, mastermind of the sweeping Republican victory in the recent election, came up with an interesting bit of math at a lecture in Utah earlier this month. He was asked by an audience member if he was concerned about the possibility of 200,000 Iraqi casualties in the event of a full-scale attack by the U.S.: "I'm more concerned about the 3,000 U.S. lives lost on September 11," he replied. After some head-scratching, I'm still trying to figure out what this means. Does Rove think that the U.S. casualties outweigh the potential Iraqi victims, when you do the proper weighting for national origin? Or is it worth focusing on the Sept. 11 death toll, rather then the potential for mayhem in Iraq, because the U.S. government has a responsibility to avenge the lives of those killed last year? Again, this seems odd, especially since there's not a shred of evidence connecting Saddam to the attacks in Washington and New York.
Rove's real aim, I guess, was to dodge a difficult question by taking refuge in the awfulness of Sept. 11. Any reference to that dreadful day tends toward shutting down a conversation rather than promoting dialogue, because the attacks on New York and Washington were so manifestly appalling that folks are still forced into silence whenever they're invoked. There's one exception: Todd Beamer's "Let's roll," the verbal equivalent of those little stars-and-stripes lapel pins, and a phrase so banally ubiquitous that even Trent Lott uses it to introduce the legislative agenda of the new Republican-controlled Congress. If your brain isn't numbed by the various corruptions of Beamer's words (try Neil Young's "Going after Satan/On the wings of a dove"), then you get hit with Rove's pious retrospective. Should we be more concerned about the dead of Sept. 11, who can't be saved by Trent Lott or Karl Rove, or the prospective casualties of an Iraqi war?
What's going on in Washington is simple: The '9/11 maneuver' is being used to stop people from looking beyond the events of that day. On the one hand, it's extraordinarily difficult to get folks to concentrate on anything that happened before Sept. 11, to search the vast sweep of history (involving America, the Middle East or the rest of the world) both to make sense of the present situation and to avoid the repetition of familiar mistakes. On the other hand, no one in Washington wants to confront the reality of what happens next: the potential for numerous civilian casualties in Iraq, the humanitarian crisis that would surely follow the fighting, the prospect of political instability throughout the Middle East, and a lengthy imperial entanglement for America's occupation force. Rather than engaging with the likelihood of all these undesirable outcomes, Americans are being offered warmed-over versions of their own suffering in an attempt to disguise the ominous consequences of a U.S. attack.
Given Iraq's acceptance of the U.N. resolution mandating new inspections, there is some hope that such an attack may yet be averted. However, the Bush administration cleverly extracted from the Security Council the right not only to bomb Iraq if the inspectors run into any problems, but the determination that Iraq is already in violation of the 1991 ceasefire agreement. Technically, the United States might overlook the 10-year hiatus since the last Gulf War and resume its bombing at any time, regardless of what Hans Blix and his inspectors discover in Iraq. This is even before the inevitable wrangling over the makeup of the inspections team: Last time around, the CIA and Israeli intelligence managed to infiltrate the U.N. body conducting weapons inspections, undermining the entire mission and giving Saddam a pretext to stonewall some of the inspectors' requests. If the same thing happens this time around, a possibility that Hans Blix himself admitted this weekend, expect the Bush administration instantly to declare that Iraq is in "material breach" of U.N. resolutions, and then watch the bombs fly.
Unfortunately, Congress has already given the President all the authority he needs to bomb Iraq, so don't expect much action from your elected representative when the shooting starts. In the meantime, however, it's worth removing the blinkers of Sept. 11 and getting a better sense both of the precedents for and consequences of the impending war in the Middle East. (A good introduction might be this afternoon's lecture on campus by James Fallows, an Atlantic Monthly journalist who's thought a lot about these issues.) If the U.S. does kill large numbers of Iraqis, or if American troops occupy the country and install a pro-U.S. leader, the memory of Sept. 11 will have misled the American public; worse, the same memory — bolstered by the fresh suffering of Iraqis — may direct a new generation of enemies to still greater depths of depravity. Nicholas Guyatt, a graduate student in the history department, is from Bristol, England. He can be reached at nsguyatt@princeton.edu.
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