Remember Michael Ignatieff’s “Getting Iraq Wrong,” the New York Times Sunday Magazine essay in which he explained that he supported the war in Iraq because he was a sensitive academic prone to big dreams? Ignatieff managed to admit that he had been wrong while attacking the people who’d been right all along: “Many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology,” he wrote. “They opposed the invasion because they believed the President was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong.” Not very gracious, that.
Personally, I have no idea why we went to war in Iraq. Even at the time it seemed insane. After all, the Bush Administration knew everything war opponents knew: that Saddam hadn’t been involved in 9/11, didn’t have WMD, wasn’t a mighty military force about to pounce on the world. Cruel as the regime was, I never bought the view that the war was a humanitarian rescue mission, either. There are too many harsh dictatorships, too many places full of horror — Congo, Darfur, Burma — that the US basically ignored. As for bringing democracy to the Mdidle East, where would that leave our good friend Saudi Arabia? I basically figured the decision to invade was one of those overdetermined situations, a murky confluence of motives and actors and schemes, like most wars. We’d have to wait for the historians to sort it all out in fifty years.
Or maybe not. In his new book Alan Greenspan ,no lefty peacenik, writes, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
Oh. I wonder how Michael Ignatieff would respond to that.
*****
While we’re on the subject of war, here’s a poem that arrived in my inbox this morning from VoicesinWartime.org. Dunya Mikhail is a Baghdad-born poet currently living in Michigan. She has written four volumes of poetry in Arabic and one in English. This poem was translated by Elizabeth Winslow. (Note added later: Apparently this is an abridged version. You can read the whole poem here. )
The War Works Hard
by Dunya Mikhail
How magnificent the war is!
How eager
and efficient!
. . .
The war continues working, day and night.
It inspires tyrants
to deliver long speeches,
awards medals to generals
and themes to poets.
It contributes to the industry
of artificial limbs,
provides food for flies,
adds pages to the history books,
achieves equality
between killer and killed,
teaches lovers to write letters,
accustoms young women to waiting,
fills the newspapers
with articles and pictures,
builds new houses
for the orphans,
invigorates the coffin makers,
gives grave diggers
a pat on the back
and paints a smile on the leader’s face.
The war works with unparalleled diligence!
Yet no one gives it
a word of praise.
****
Katha Pollitt’s collection of personal essays, Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories, is just out from Random House. These are not Nation columns; in fact, most are previously unpublished. “Watching Pollitt level her incisive wit at targets as disparate as Marxism and motherhood makes “Learning to Drive” a rewarding and entertaining read.”–San Francisco Chronicle
For upcoming readings and appearances, click here.
