Peace Kills

by P. J. O'Rourke

  One bunch began a skit involving a boy in a Halloween skull mask spraying an aerosol can at girls carrying primitive paintings that depicted agricultural endeavors. Then they all dropped dead and yelled something about Colombia.

  The marchers trampled the grass on the Ellipse, MORE GARDENS, a sign read. Other posters and banners declared GIVE COMMUNISM A CHANCE; PEACE IS PATRIOTIC; END ASHCROFT’S POLICE STATE; REPUBLICANS FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE FOR ALL; STOP CALLING PALESTINIANS TERRORISTS; REAL PROFITS FROM PEACE; CORPORATIONS ARE KILLING THE WORLD; THE U.S. STARTED IT ALL; DOWN WITH ALGERIAN FASCIST REGIME; PEACE TREATY IN KOREA; LEAVE CHAVEZ ALONE; and FOCUS YOUR DISCONTENT. Indeed.

  Many of the signs were wordy: AIDS TREATMENT NOW/COKE’S NEGLECT = DEATH FOR WORKERS IN SOUTH AFRICA. Another began, BUSH’S POX AMERICANA MADE US THE AXIS OF IGNORANCE & A GLOBAL STUPID POWER, THANKS DUBYA… and continued in that vein. Some signs were touchingly simple: PLEASE STOP KILLING EVERYBODY. Others had an air of hopelessness: THE ONLY WEAPON A “TERRORIST” NEEDS IS PURPOSE. THEIR PURPOSE GROWS WITH EACH DAY OF THE WAR ON TERROR. One sign, I think, misspoke itself: GOLIATH LOST. David, after all, was an Israeli. The middle-aged “Vermonters for Peace” looked like they gave themselves their own haircuts.

  A young lady handed me a square of posterboard washed in pink watercolor with a brighter pink star painted on it and PEACE painstakingly lettered across the front. A family displayed a photograph of Afghan women, labeled “Our Afghan Sister Family.” They gave me a printed handout stating that the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan had “condemned the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance for a ‘record of human rights violations as bad as that of the Taliban’s.’” The handout ended with the sad and deflated sentence: “This statement has apparently been ignored by George Bush and his associates.”

  A young man wore a T-shirt saying, I USED TO BE A WHITE AMERICAN BUT I GAVE IT UP IN THE INTEREST OF HUMANITY. But another demonstrator wore one of the Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts that recently had been withdrawn from stores following accusations of racial insensitivity. A fat, slant-eyed bodhisattva appeared above the slogan “Get your Buddha on the Floor.” Nearby was a banner from the Buddhist Peace Fellowship.

  The four rallies had now joined together, a total of about seventy-five thousand people. They trooped down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Mall with the Palestinian Solidarity marchers in the lead. Many young Arab-American women had cell phones pressed to their head scarves and were saying things like “You wouldn’t believe it, I’m right here on the Mall.” Scores of Palestinian flags, and a variety of flags from other Arab nations, were being waved.

  “What’s that flag?” asked another coed being interviewed by Max.

  “Lebanon,” Max said.

  “But why are they waving a flag from Lebanon?” she said.

  In among the Arab-American families—some of whom had brought coolers and lawn chairs—were college students with a sign reading IF QUEER SOLDIERS UNDERMINE THE MILITARY, SIGN US UP. An exhausted-looking teenager wearing anarchist symbols sat on a curb with a piece of cardboard on which he had lettered BURN ME I’M OLD AND IN THE WAY. Appearing, without intended irony, near the scores of charter buses that had been hired by the demonstrators was VISUALIZE FUEL-EFFICIENT VEHICLES/IT’S A NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUE. Some placards were strangely verbless: HEMP and INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT. I sent Max to find out why someone was holding up a swath of hot-pink synthetic-mohair cloth. “It’s a rallying point for Wesleyan students,” said a Wesley an student in a DEVIANT QUEER T-shirt. At the front of the crowd a banner was being waved—either wholly apposite or completely out of place: SHAME ON DUAL LOYALISTS.

  A truck with loudspeakers carried children singing songs of peace. The music was drowned out by young men on another truck with loudspeakers. First they intoned, “The Muslims united / Will never be defeated,” and then “Stop the killing / Stop the war.” A middle-aged woman dressed as a fairy godmother Rollerbladed between the trucks with a bullhorn. She warbled, “Money for justice, not for bombs. / Money for schools, not guns. / Money for Social Security, too, / When we stop the war,” more or less to the tune of “Bibbidity-Bobbidy-Boo” from the Disney cartoon Cinderella.

  What united these people, other than a general loserish quality? Or maybe it was only that. They’ve made every question a political question, because in politics—as this political demonstration proved—there is no quality control. But the Arab-Americans didn’t look like losers. That’s all right. Staking a claim to victimhood has value for even the most successful Americans. Witness Oprah, Rosie, the recent steel tariffs, a farm subsidy bill benefiting vast wheat and cotton plantations, and the complaints of the “sandwich generation” moms pressed in their upper-middle-class lives between the demands of spoiled young children and those of crabby affluent parents. Property rights are to be had in victimhood. Then there is the charm of a good tantrum—familiar to those of us with a three-year-old in the house. The less meliorable the cause of tears, the better the tantrum is. Also, blame negates responsibility. “Who spilled Coca-Cola all over the Third World and crayoned on its walls?” “The World Bank did!” The wonder is not that seventy-five thousand people showed up on April 20, 2002. The wonder is that we all didn’t.

  The demonstration was fully assembled. Marchers from every participating organization had arrived on the Mall. It was time for the stirring orations. The speakers’ platform was ready by the Reflecting Pool, where Martin Luther King, Jr., once stood. But thirty-nine years later it was Cynthia McKinney who strode to the podium. She is the Georgia congresswoman who apologized to Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal for Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s refusal of the prince’s $10 million check for terrorist victims. She also issued a statement saying, “I am not aware of any evidence showing that President Bush or members of his administration have personally profited from the attacks of 9/11. A complete investigation might reveal that to be the case.” And in a speech on recycling she said, “Paper continues to be made from trees.”

  Representative McKinney called on “people from all walks of life—students, union members, union members on strike, homeless veterans.” These were all the walks of life she named. She called on the people in them to do something that I could not hear. The members of the crowd had turned away and begun chatting loudly among themselves. Max and I walked to the Metro. We saw a man who had been on the fringes of various demonstrations all day. He had a sign of his own: GOD PLEASE EVERYONE.

  8

  THOUGHTS ON THE EVE OF WAR

  Not that I disagreed with everything said by the people who opposed the war with Iraq. As a casus belli, weapons of mass destruction did seem like a pair of pants cut to the size of North Korea and into which Iraq was being stuffed. And claims that Saddam Hussein was cooperating with Osama bin Laden smelled of something found on the Internet late at night along with proof that the Jews and the Rotary Club control the World Bank. What President Bush should have said was “Here’s a man who’s been murdering everyone he could get his hands on for twenty-five years. We don’t need a reason. We’re going to do to Iraq’s dictator what Hollywood does to its has-beens at the Academy Awards ceremony. We’re giving Saddam Hussein a Lifetime Achievement Award.”

  And I don’t blame most nations for not supporting the United States. The world is full of loathsome governments run by criminals, thugs, and beasts. When President Bush mentioned “regime change,” hairy little ears pricked up all over the earth. Beads of sweat broke out on low, sloping brows. Bloodstained, grasping hands began to tremble. Poor Colin Powell had to get on the phone to various hyenas in high office and explain to them that America itself was in need of regime change from 1992 to 2000, and we didn’t precision-bomb the fellow who was responsible, and we only impeached him a little. Kim Jong II, Robert Mugabe, and Jacques Chirac should quit worrying. They should look upon Bill Clinton and know the fate that awaits them is a lucrative lecture tour, a big book contract, and many willing, plump young women.

 
The United Nations Security Council offered a weak and vacillating response to Iraqi provocations. This timidity undermined the power and prestige of the UN—to the profound relief of all thinking people. A potent and esteemed United Nations would be in danger of evolving into a true world government. The individual nations of the earth could become the political equivalents of the individual states of America. Upholding the dignity of the Senate, in these United States of Earth, would be the solons of Turkmenistan, Libya, Sudan, and such, each wielding tremendous power of seniority (since election opponents all conveniently died). Meanwhile, the House of Global Representatives would be given over to debate between rioting Hindus from the Subcontinental delegation and, across the aisle, mainland Chinese chanting in perfect-unison praise of free markets (and the Great Helmsman). The world would have a North Korean secretary of agriculture; a head of the DEA from Calí, Colombia; nine Palestinian suicide bombers on its Supreme Court; an Albanian chairman of the SEC; a dozen warring Liberian joint chiefs of staff; and a French surgeon general telling us we’re using too much soap for our health.

  We owe a debt of gratitude to the nonaligned countries that opposed the Iraq war. And we owe a debt of gratitude, as well, to our erstwhile allies. We should understand the white-feathered, clucking German response to the prospect of combat in Iraq—understand it for the good thing it is. Germans have turned into poultry with BMWs. What caused this is a mystery, but a splendid mystery given the behavior of Germany in the last century (and, for that matter, since the time of Tacitus). We witness with relief the Boche squawking behind the Rhine, henpecked by even the French. When Germany asks for peace, we are obliged to say, “Yes! Yes! The Versailles Treaty kind!”

  And France is a treasure to mankind. French ideas, French beliefs, and French actions form a sort of lodestone for humanity. A moral compass needle needs a butt end. Whatever direction France is pointing—toward collaboration with Nazis, accommodation with communists, existentialism, Jerry Lewis, or UN resolution veto—we can go the other way with a quiet conscience.

  9

  KUWAIT AND IRAQ

  March and April 2003

  Why is Iraq so easy to harm and so hard to help? After eight days of war, U.S. troops had arrived at Karbala, sixty miles from Baghdad. Misery had arrived everywhere. But humanitarian relief had gotten only as far as Safwan and Umm Qasr, just across the border from Kuwait.

  I could see one reason that relief had gone no farther. I was outside Safwan on March 28, on the roof of a Kuwait Red Crescent tractor-trailer full of food donations. Below, a couple of hundred shoving, shouldering, kneeing, kicking Iraqi men and boys were grabbing at boxes of food.

  Red Crescent volunteers provided the boxes, gingerly, to the mob. Each white carton would be grasped by three or four or five belligerents and pulled in three or four or five directions—tug-of-Congolese-civil-war.

  Every person in the mob seemed to be arguing with every other person. Giving in to conflicting impulses to push themselves forward and pull others away, shouting Iraqis were propelled in circles. A short, plump, bald man sank in the roil. A small boy, red-faced and crying, was crushed between two bellowing fat men. An old man was trampled trying to join the fray.

  The Iraqis were snatching the food as if they were starving, but they couldn’t have been starving or they wouldn’t have been able to snatch so well. Most looked fully fed. Some were too fit and active. Everyone behind the trailer was expending a lot of calories at noon on a ninety-degree day.

  Looking out, I saw irrigated patches in the desert, at about the same density as the patches on the uniform of a mildly diligent Boy Scout. The tomatoes were ripe. Nannies, billies, and kids browsed between garden plots. Goat Bolognese was on offer, at least for some locals.

  There was no reason for people to clobber one another. Even assuming that each man in the riot—and each boy—was the head of a family, and assuming the family was huge, there was enough food in the truck. Mohammed al-Kandari, a doctor from the Kuwait Red Crescent Society, had explained this to the Iraqis when the trailer arrived. Al-Kandari was a forceful explainer. He resembled a beneficent version of Bluto in the Popeye comics, or Bluto in Animal House.

  Al-Kandari had persuaded the Iraqis to form ranks. They looked patient and grateful, the way we privately imagine the recipients of food donations looking when we’re writing checks to charities. Then the trailer was opened, and everything went to hell.

  Al-Kandari marched through the donnybrook and slammed the trailer doors shut. He harangued the Iraqis. They lined up again. The trailer was opened, and everything went to hell.

  Al-Kandari waded in and closed the trailer doors again. He swung his large arms in parallel arcs at the Iraqis. “Line up!” he boomed; “Queue!” he thundered—the Arabic-speaking doctor speaking to Arabic speakers in English, as if no Arabic word existed for the action.

  Al-Kandari took a pad of Post-it notes and a marker pen from his lab-coat pocket. “Numbers!” he said, still speaking English. “I will give you all numbers!” A couple of hundred shouldering, shoving Iraqi men and boys grabbed at the Post-it notes.

  The doctor gave up and opened the trailer doors. I climbed the ladder behind the truck cab to get a better view.

  Aid-seekers in England would queue automatically by needs, disabled war vets and nursing mothers first. Americans would bring lawn chairs and sleeping bags, camp out the night before, and sell their places to the highest bidders. The Japanese would text-message one another, creating virtual formations, getting in line to get in line. Germans would await commands from a local official, such as the undersupervisor of the town clock. Even Italians know how to line up, albeit in an ebullient wedge. The happier parts of the world have capacities for self-organization so fundamental and obvious that they appear to be the pillars of civilization. But here—on the road to Ur, in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, where civilization has obtained for five thousand years longer than it has, for example, at a Libertarian Party confab in Phoenix—nothing was supporting the roof.

  What I saw, however, wasn’t anarchy. British soldiers stood nearby, emirs of everything within rifle shot. The Iraqis did not use weapons or even fists in the aid scramble. Later a British soldier said, “We try to stay out of crowd control, because it looks like we’re trying to stop the aid distribution. But we can’t let them start fighting.” They did start fighting. A few Iraqis hit each other with sticks. They fought, however, at the front end of the truck. British soldiers broke it up.

  The Iraqis didn’t try to climb into the tractor-trailer or break through its side doors. Red Crescent volunteers, coming and going from the back of the truck, were unmolested. Once an aid box was fully in an Iraqi’s control and had been pulled free from the commotion, no one tried to take it. I saw four boxes being guarded by a seven-year-old boy.

  I watched a confident gray-haired man push toward the trailer gate. He had wire-rimmed glasses on the end of his nose and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He dove for a box, his glasses flying, the cigarette embers burning various gutra headdresses and dishdashah skirts. He disappeared for the better part of a minute. Then he came out on the other side of the throng, box under one arm and glasses somehow back on his face (but minus the cigarette). The gray-haired man looked around and delivered an open-handed whack to someone who, I guess, had indulged in a late hit.

  I stared at the rampage for an hour. Now and then I’d be noticed on the trailer roof. Whenever I caught someone’s eye, I was greeted with a big, happy smile. The Iraqis were having fun.

  Worse fun was to follow. We were out in the countryside because the first aid convoy to Safwan, two days before, had gone into the center of town and had been looted in a less orderly riot. I left the truck roof and interviewed al-Kandari, or tried to. The doctor was still being importuned for worthless numbers on Post-it notes. “We almost get organized,” he overstated, “but then some gangs will come from downtown, by running or by truck.” They were arriving already, in anything they coul
d get to move—taxis, pickups, ancient Toyota Land Cruisers, bicycles, Russian Belarus tractors, a forklift, a dump truck.

  The men from town promptly climbed into the Red Crescent truck. They threw boxes to their buddies. The volunteers fled. In a few minutes one squad of looters had seventeen aid boxes. The box throwers were dancing and singing in the back of the tractor-trailer. A reporter who’d covered the previous convoy said, “I saw these same guys.” He pointed to a wolfish-looking fellow who was pulling the tail of his gutra across his face. “You can tell the really bad ones,” the reporter said. “They have shoes.”

  Al-Kandari ordered the driver to start the truck. The British troops cleared the highway. The truck drove back to Safwan with the trailer doors open and looters still inside. The other looters, in their miscellany of rides, gave chase. Men stood on car hoods and in pickup beds, trying to catch boxes being thrown from inside the trailer. Boxes fell, spraying fruit, rice, and powdered milk across the pavement. A flatbed truck passed us, piled with scores of aid boxes. The men standing on the bumpers had shoes. Hom-honking, chanting, and other noises of celebration could be heard in the distance.

  We drove through Safwan. Boys ran alongside our convoy, managing, with deft coordination of purposes, to jeer and beg at the same time. A reporter tossed a bottle of water to a boy. The boy picked it up and threw it at the reporter.

  Safwan’s houses, placed higgledy-piggledy, were built of tumbling-down mud brick. The other buildings were squat and lumpish, their walls formed of concrete with too much aggregate in the mix—Baath Party adobe. Signs of economic activity were nil. In the one park, playground equipment was rusty and broken. Trash was everywhere. Hundreds of black plastic shopping sacks blew along the streets, snagging in the rest of the rubbish. The people of Iraq may have had nothing, but they had the bag it came in.