Category: Current Affairs

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It Was 9/11, Stupid

I just got around to reading a New Yorker piece from the December 6 issue; which is pretty good for me, actually; I usually don’t open New Yorker issues for a month or so after they arrive. There’s a post-mortem piece on election polling by Louis Menand called “Permanent Fatal Errors: Did the voters send a message?” (unfortunately, it’s not posted on The New Yorker site; a Google search turns up a doubtless unauthorized copy of it here). Menand sat in on a meeting of “political scientists and polling experts” at Stanford a week after the election.

The piece talks briefly about how far the exit polls were off in a bunch of key states (not just Ohio and Florida), but doesn’t get into anyone’s thinking about why that happened.

Two interesting take-aways from the article, though. Even a Bush pollster concluded that voters’ concern about “moral issues,” supposedly such a driving force for so many Bush voters, was way overblown in post-election reporting. More important was one pollster’s conclusions about the issue that really locked things up for Bush:

“Why did President Bush win this election?” Gary Langer, the director of polling at ABC News, said at the Stanford conference. “I would suggest that the answer can be expressed in a single phrase: 9/11.” No one there disagreed. “Fifty-four per cent of voters on Election Day said that the country was safer now than it was before September 11, 2001,” Langer pointed out. “And perhaps, I would suggest, more important, forty-nine per cent of voters said they trusted only President Bush to handle terrorism, eighteen points more than said they trusted only John Kerry.” He went on, “Among those who trust only Bush to handle terrorism, ninety-seven per cent, quite logically, voted for him. Now, right there, if forty-nine per cent of Americans trust only Bush to handle terrorism and ninety-seven per cent of them voted for him, those are forty-eight of his total fifty-one percentage points in this election. Throw in a few more votes on ancillary issues and that’s all she wrote.” Langer thinks that a key statistic is the change in the votes of married women. Gore won the women’s vote by eleven per cent; Kerry won by only three per cent, and he lost most of those votes among married women. Bush got forty-nine per cent of the votes of married women in 2000; he got fifty-five per cent this year. And when you ask married women whom they trust to keep the country safe from terrorists fifty-three per cent say “only Bush.” (The really salient demographic statistic from the election is one that most Democrats probably don’t even want to think about: If white men could not vote, Kerry would have defeated Bush by seven million votes.

I know this isn’t news so much anymore. I’m just trying to keep track of how we got where we’ve gotten.

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Those Crazy Americans

You’ve got to love those crazy Americans. Wait, that’s me, too. Change that to “us crazy Americans.” Just seven weeks ago, we had a chance to fire the guy who decided that the single most important thing to do in the whole wide world, just couldn’t wait to get it done, was to bust world-class bad guy and former U.S. ally (those crazy Americans!) Saddam Hussein.

But no. For reasons still inadequately explained (and no, I’m not buying fraud as the answer, or the “morality” thing, either) and perhaps irretrievably buried in the minds of tens of millions of voters, the guy was re-elected.

Now, the Washington Post and ABC News are out with a new poll: A majority of us crazy Americans now think the war’s, like, a mistake:

“Most Americans now believe the war with Iraq was not worth fighting and more than half want to fire embattled Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the chief architect of that conflict, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

“The survey found that 56 percent of the country now believes that the cost of the conflict in Iraq outweighs the benefits, while 42 percent disagreed. It marked the first time since the war began that a clear majority of Americans have judged the war to have been a mistake.

“Barely a third of the country approves of the job that Rumsfeld is doing as defense secretary, and 52 percent said President Bush should sack Rumsfeld, a view shared by a big majority of Democrats and political independents.”

But then comes the number that probably partly explains the way we crazy Americans voted last month: “… Nearly six in 10 — 58 percent — said the United States should keep its military forces in Iraq rather than withdraw them, a proportion that has not changed in seven months.”

OK — that’s honorable. Let’s not cut and run and leave those nice Iraqis in the lurch. The thing you have to question about that sort of thinking, though, is the assumption that our indefinite presence is a stabilizing, positive influence. I mean, we sure can’t imagine anyplace in the world that doesn’t benefit from our warm attention, but at some point you have to consider the possibility that Iraq could be better off with some different kind of foreign oversight, or regime, than what we’re trying to impose.

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The Always-On Military

Monday’s New York Times features a long story on how the military’s speeded-up schedule of war-zone deployments and redeployments is affecting troops and their families. One thing comes through in so many of these stories: the lack of enthusiasm so many of the interviewed service members have for the job that’s been dumped in their lap. They come off as stoic and steadfast, determined to carry through on their military commitment and to stand up for their buddies. But you don’t read about any of the lower-rung troops who get quoted in these stories to talk about the “march of freedom” or “transformative power of liberty” or any of the other catch-phrases that Bush and his crowd throw around. Maybe the reporters just leave out those quotes and focus on the doubts and dissatisfactions they’re hearing. Or maybe the ones who have to go and face the reality of this war aren’t really seeing or feeling the nobility of the cause. Or hell, maybe even in World War II, which my generation and those following see at a great distance, the men sent to fight saw it just as a job. Maybe, even then, there was no explicit talk about the bigger issues and forces involved.

Anyway, you feel for these people and their families, so many of whom are now subject to constant upheaval in their lives, not knowing when the next deployment will happen of what it will bring when it comes. The story ends:

“In Tucson, Elena Zurheide is preparing Christmas for her 7-and-a-half-month-old son, Robert III. ‘I hate Christmas,’ Ms. Zurheide said. ‘I hate holidays. I hate everything right now.’

“Her husband, Robert Jr., was a lance corporal in the Marines. He was killed in Falluja this spring, a few weeks before their son was born. He was on his second tour to Iraq.

” ‘I never wanted him to go a second time,’ she said. ‘I just started having the feeling that we were pushing our luck too far, and he thought so, too.’

“She said she wrote to Corporal Zurheide’s commander before he left, asking that her huband be permitted to stay behind – or that he at least be allowed to wait for the birth of their son. She said she never heard back.

” ‘I should have broken his arm to keep him here,’ she said. “‘ knew it was too much to go again.’

“Her son, Ms. Zurheide said, looks just like his father.”

The story says that 100 of the 1,300 U.S. military fatalities in Iraq have occurred among soldiers and Marines on their second tours. Times columnist Bob Herbert’s Monday column, talks a little more bluntly about the effects of the repeat deployments.

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Blogsex! Sexblog!

Tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine is publishing a feature on blogging. The focus is on personal blogs — very personal blogs, with lots of sex and gossip and carrying on. The most interesting aspect is how blogging opens people’s lives to public inspection in a new way. Especially in relationship to their sex lives. And another thing: You wouldn’t believe all the sex and gossip and carrying on you find on all these blogs. Lots of sex. S-E-X. Sex, sex, sex. And gossip. And carrying on.

Actually, it’s a fairly entertaining piece, but a little in the vein of, hey, I just went on that Internet thing and look what I found!

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The Verdict

Sure, you’ve got the victim’s family and the family of the defendant. You’ve got jurors who handed over six months of their lives to hear testimony and see evidence and make a tough call. You’ve got the prosecutors and defense lawyers. But in the end, the people I really feel for in the Scott Peterson case are the spectators. No more titillation. No more rage on behalf of someone they didn’t know and would never have cared about save for her dreadful fate. No more hatred for a suspect they likewise didn’t know. No more poring over testimony and gossip. No more jockeying for what one news outlet called “the 27 coveted public seats inside the courtroom,” where they could see the monster himself, or the grieving mothers, or the juror with the orange hair. No more booing and cursing the suspect’s family. No more cameras to show off for or reporters to impress.

But it’s not the end of the world. There’s always the execution to look forward to.

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Portraits of Crazyworld

The New York Times has a fine story on an artist, Steve Mumford, who’s gotten himself embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq as a combat artist. He’s been working for Artnet, which has posted a 15-part Baghdad Journal featuring Mumford’s drawings, paintings and dispatches. I’ve only looked at a couple of the more recent installments. I think they’re frank and human in a way you don’t often see in the mainstream press. In the Times story, he says his view of the war has changed. When he first went to Iraq, he thought the whole operation was a “huge blunder.” But he says he’s been won over to the view that the U.S. mission could succeed, partly by talking to Iraqis, partly by seeing firsthand what U.S. troops have been doing to fix things in Baghdad (which one Army officer he quotes calls “crazyworld”).

Despite his expressed optimism, his picture of Iraq — the violence, the apparent distrust of anything American, at this point — looks anything but hopeful. His most recent dispatch ends:

“When I get back to my hotel the following week Baghdad’s streets feel more dangerous than ever. A rocket has hit the nearby Sheraton; reporters are largely confined to their hotel rooms amid a rash of kidnappings. Only five other people are staying at the Al Fanar: an American contractor, his Iraqi wife and a British colleague, a rather mysterious Japanese woman who tells me she runs a massage parlor in the Green Zone, and a reporter, a young French woman who I occasionally spot in a headscarf, in the lobby.

“Drivers and hotel staff, with little work to do, hang out there, watching TV, while a lone macaque monkey in a small cage stares quietly out the lobby window at the street. In an effort to salvage something from this depressing scene I’d tried to arrange for this monkey to be transferred to Baghdad’s zoo, but the hotel owner refused to sell.

“For several days I stay within the confines of the security zone around the hotels, while my friends Esam and Ahmed come to visit. I’m quite sure my movements are being watched, and when I’m finally ready to leave Iraq I tell the hotel staff I’m going to visit a friend for a day before leaving town.

“However, the hotel driver, Farouk, looks not in the least surprised when I ask him to take me directly to the airport. We drive past the blighted landscape of palm tree stumps next to the highway, cut down and bulldozed to lessen the danger of ambushes. After 30 minutes we pass the first military checkpoint at the airport’s outskirts, and I breathe a sigh of relief.”

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Gary Webb

Something I missed over the weekend: Gary Webb, the San Jose Mercury News reporter who wrote a series of articles linking the CIA, Nicaragua’s anti-government contra rebels, cocaine traffickers, and the crack epidemic in Los Angeles, was found dead in suburban Sacramento on Friday, December 10. The cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head, and the sheriff’s and coroner’s offices up there are quoted as saying Webb appears to have committed suicide. (Un-shockingly, some in the parallel conspiracy-driven universe have revealed his death was a “suicide,” in quotation marks, meaning that he was rubbed out as someone who knew too much about the “Bush Crime Family.”)

Right here I’ll say I would need to go back and read what he wrote, how other media responded, and the substance of government investigations to offer an informed opinion about Webb’s stories. What’s clear was that as an investigative reporter, Webb was the real thing, sharing a Pulitzer Prize at one point and getting lots of other recognition for his work before the contra cocaine story.

In saying he had evidence that the CIA was in bed with people who had helped trigger a disaster of epic proportions in the second-biggest U.S. city and beyond, he was suggesting something that most people would reject as fantastic, too evil to be true, to byzantine to really hold together. That was my own reaction. And like most messengers bearing such tidings, he paid a price: others in the journalistic establishment worked to discredit his work, his own paper wound up repudiating the stories, he was transferred to a bureau office 100 miles from where he lived. Sixteen months after the series ran, he quit the Merc. And continued to pursue the story, eventually expanding his investigation into a book, from outside a big-city paper.

Conclusion: I don’t have any. The guy was 49. He believed passionately, and apparently sincerely and without cynicism, in the integrity of his journalism. He had three kids and had been pushed outside the professional realm he loved (his former wife is quoted as saying, “All he ever wanted to do was write”). And he apparently shot himself. It’s a tragedy, that’s all.

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Caring for the Wounded

The New England Journal of Medicine is running a photo essay in this week’s edition entitled “Caring for the Wounded in Iraq.” Like the photojournalistic work I mentioned a few days ago, “Purple Hearts: Back from Iraq,” it’s a glimpse at the reality that hides behind statistics like the number of U.S. troops wounded in action (nearly 10,000).

You can find the photo essay here (or go here for a PDF version). The photographs are mostly unsparing clinical images of soldiers who have suffered severe trauma. “High-energy gunshot wound passing through knee” is one of the typically dispassionate captions. To me, the pictures testify to two things: the extraordinary destructive power of modern weapons, even the improvised ones wielded by the Iraqi guerrillas; and the near-miraculous capacities of medical technology. The doctors and nurses you see in the pictures are using every means at their disposal to save bodies torn apart by explosives and shrapnel. In many cases, they’re succeeding. (As “Purple Hearts” testifies, though, it’s not as easy to put the people back together.)

Once again, I’m reminded of one of Walt Whitman’s Civil War poems, “The Wound-Dresser.” The hospital scene and means of treatment he depicts are primitive by our standards. But the sense of heartbreaking destruction of lives is the same:

“The crush’d head I dress (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage away),

The neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and through I examine,

Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life struggles hard

(Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death!

In mercy come quickly).

“From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand,

I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood,

Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv’d neck and side-falling head,

His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the bloody stump,

And has not yet look’d on it.

“I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep,

But a day or two more, for see the frame all wasted and sinking,

And the yellow-blue countenance see.

I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound,

Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so offensive,

While the attendant stands behind aside me holding the tray and pail.

“I am faithful, I do not give out,

The fractur’d thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen,

These and more I dress with impassive hand (yet deep in my breast a fire, a burning flame).”

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1941

Because the “Spigot is the ‘Spigot, let’s note before the calendar changes that today is December 7, the anniversary (on this side of the International Date Line) of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the event that finally dragged the United States into the global conflict that had already cost millions of lives in Europe and Asia. The same week of the attack on the U.S. fleet in Hawaii, the Soviets stopped the German advance on Moscow — German units made it into outlying areas of the capital –and threw the invaders into a retreat that nearly became a rout.

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The Wounded

Purplehearts_cover_1

Found this listed on Kottke.org: The Purple Hearts Gallery. Portraits of American troops seriously wounded in Iraq, with brief accounts from each about what happened, how they feel about it, and what their lives are like now. Another aspect of the war that most of us know exists but never see.

"But like here in California, nobody really knows what the soldiers are going through, what’s happening to them. They see on TV, oh yeah, two soldiers got wounded today and they think, yeah, he’ll be alright. But that soldier is scarred for life both physically and mentally, but like they don’t understand. They see one soldier wounded and they’ll forget about it like as soon as they change the channel, you know." (Army Specialist Robert Acosta, Santa Ana, California)

(Note: The gallery contains selections from "Purple Hearts: Back from Iraq," a book of pictures and essays on Iraq.)