The battlefield should be in the Middle East or North Africa, Beagle said, and he explained why.96Given that there was a decent choice of Hitlers: Muammar al-Qaddafi, Hafez al-Assad, Saddam Hussein, Rafsanjani, or—something to be considered—a new ayatollah.
There were lots of potential Polands. Libya invades Chad again, or the Sudan, or Algeria, or even Egypt. Algeria could invade Morocco. Iraq could attack Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or Syria. Iran could cross the Gulf and go after the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Kuwait, even Saudi Arabia. Syria invades Jordan.
“We are going to enter,” Hartman said, addressing himself to the president, “into an arena that requires a Master of Diplomacy. Someone who knows the Heads of State personally.”
“Maggie Thatcher will stand by us,” the president said, thinking out loud. “Mitterrand, I can deal with him. Gorby, tell you the truth, I think he needs us more than we need him. We have a real advantage here, in my having been with the U.N.”
“I’m about to ask you,” Baker said, “how you expect to convince one of these heads of state to play Hitler for your movie. What if they remember that Germany lost and Hitler died in a bunker. It sounds to me like you’re offering them a no-win situation and they are, by God, going to know it.”
“We see Hitler as a villain,” Beagle said. “In the Middle East, a lot of people see him as a hero. They admire strength. They believe in martyrs. And there’s the Jewish thing. Second: It’s a chance at the big time, to play a major role on the world stage. Third: Taking on the United States, even taking on the U.S. and losing, makes someone a hero in the Arab world. So, although it looks like a no-winner from here, from over there it looks like a no-lose proposition. Or it certainly can be made to look that way.”
“Here’s where you’re lucky to have me as your president,” the president said. “I kid you not—how many presidents would have the experience and contacts and judgment to run with this thing? This is a complicated thing you have planned here. I guess a war always is. But this one includes allies and an enemy and you probably have to get the CIA in there somewhere and even the U.N. There’s not another president in America, not one, who could say they’ve been in the U.N., that they know the U.N. Or China for that matter. You see what I mean.” The more he heard, the more Bush liked what these Hollywood fellas had come up with. It gave him something to do. And George was a doer. He liked doing. It was strange that as president, although he did an incredible amount of running around, he didn’t do so much doing. It was in part because he was committed, sort of, politically, to not doing very much. Actually to carrying out the Reagan mandate, which was undoing. But it just wasn’t the same for him as for his predecessor, for several reasons: the undoing had been done, in many cases, overdone, and the consequences were coming due, demonstrating that they probably shouldn’t be any more undone—in fact, probably should be redone, but he couldn’t do that; he didn’t actually believe in undoing; and finally, he didn’t nap nearly as much as Reagan had, so that the absence of constructive, or even destructive, activity weighed pretty heavily on his hands.
“I always make friends. I have good friends everywhere, because people are just people, even foreigners. I truly like people. I want you to know something because people don’t understand this about me—I like Ron. He’s a great guy. And you never met a better storyteller in your life. A lot of people thought he was hard to relate to, but he wasn’t, you just had to tell him jokes. He likes jokes. And Barb likes Nancy. Truly likes her. Still does. We’d have them over for dinner if we had a chance and I’m sure we will. But the point was—friends. We’re talking about a war in the Middle East and I have friends there, and that will make it easier to get them cooperated. I could get on the phone right now and Hosni Mubarak—he’s having some tough times over there, over in Egypt—he would answer even though it’s God knows what time it is in Cairo right now. Does anyone have on one of those watches that tells time in six different zones? What I’m saying, David, is it’s not because I’m president of the United States, but because he knows that George Bush is his friend. Barb has him on our Christmas card list. I know he’s not a Christian, but that’s not what Christmas is about Christmas is something to consider—it would be a good idea if we could do the war over Christmas. There are always a million good stories around the holidays. Servicemen—and women, let’s not forget our women in the service, they do a fine job—far away from home, getting letters. Kids sitting around the table, an empty chair where Dad—or Mom, for that matter—normally sits. Somebody explains why Dad has to do what Dad has to do, so the world can be safe, so our children won’t have to go.”
“There’s something glorious could happen here,” Hartman said. “You’re going to put your mark on a point in history. Jesus, they’re all out there saying the American Century is over. I think we just might be putting the naysayers, the whole world, on notice that the American Century has a long, long way to run. By God, I feel like we’ve just begun.”
James Baker watched George Bush deciding to make video war. If the president went with it, his secretary of state would need to make a decision, whether to be found out front on the war to come, or to be far, far away, in which case his number-one priority would be to make sure that the world knew he had as little to do with it as with the selection of Dan Quayle. “What if the media does to us what they did in Vietnam?” he asked.
“The key is a short war,” Hartman said. “I have several theories about the power of the press and handling the press, but the bottom line is that all the press writes is what they’re told, so if the bulk of what they’re told is what you want them to hear, then that’s what they’ll report. This is not a question of censoring them or keeping them from sources. If you move reasonably quickly, you are the only source.
“The painful truth,” Hartman went on, “is that if the war in Vietnam had lasted a month, the administration would have had total media support.
“I don’t want to be absurd about it, but visualize the Super Bowl. Now imagine that there’s no fourth quarter. In fact, no particular end. Nobody knows when, or if, the game is going to end. They play all day. Then through the night. The next day, next night, all week. More and more players, on both sides, are injured. One side gets ahead. Then the other. There’s no time limit. No maximum score. They just keep slogging through the mud. All of the original guys are out, crippled. Now the substitutes are being crippled. Their substitutes are being crippled. The coaches are grabbing guys off the street, guys who don’t want to play, and forcing them out there. And they’re getting crippled. There’s a lot of mud. Pretty soon America is going to get tired of the Super Bowl.
“Even sports reporters, who are paid cheerleaders, watching that long, are going to get bored, and out of boredom they’ll make up questions: Should so many people get hurt? Should the game be ended? Why are we playing? Maybe the game should be banned? They don’t mean anything malicious by it. They just have nothing else to do with their time.
“The critics didn’t kill Vietnam. It was a lousy movie. It went on too long. People walked out. World War II was a great movie, a perfect story, well played, well paced, and everyone wanted to stay right to the end.”
Now the president was onto something. He stood; he began to pace and gesture as he spoke. “I’m going to let you guys in on a secret. Normally, I wouldn’t do this. I would carry this secret to the grave with me. But I think we’ve gone far enough here, the four of us, that I don’t think they’d hang us separately, they’d hang us together. Not that they’d hang us at all, if they really understood our motivation here. A leadership opportunity. A chance to finally lift America out of the malaise of Vietnam. And to show the world that we are not a crippled giant or tied-up giant, whatever they like to call it we’re no paper tiger.
“Bear with me on this, the guy to play Hitler—Saddam Hussein. He’s a friend of mine. I know this is a casting decision,” the president said in a waggish mode, “and I hope you don’t feel like I’m stepping
on your toes, John. Your friends do call you John? Do they? Or Line?”
“John’ll be fine, Mr. President.”
“You can call me George, that’s OK. If we ever go hunting poon together, you can call me Bushie. Right Jimmy?” When the president enjoyed himself, his jocularity emerged. But then he got back to business. “What I’m trying to tell you here is that I have dealt with all of these people. Who you can do business with and who you can’t I have the experience for judgment there. There’s secret stuff that I can’t tell you about, but Saddam Hussein, over there in Iraq, he could well be the guy to go with, for this Hitler thing.97
“The thing that I like about Saddam is that he plays the game the way the game should be played. He made a deal and by golly he held up his end of it. And you didn’t find him leaking all over the press. Not like those bastards in Iran. They leak and it was our pants that looked wet all up and down the front.98And when he found out that we were aiding Iran against him, did he storm off in a snoot? No. He came right back and you know what he said? He said, ‘Hey, fellas, you do that, you better cut me in for more. Balance things out, you owe me.’ You see what I’m saying here—this is someone we can deal with. We can say to Saddam Hussein, ‘How about invading someplace—you’ll look like a hero to the Arab world, as big as Hitler even.’ Then we’ll have a war, and may the best man win. He likes a good fight.”
“A lot of the images I see here,” Beagle said, growing enthusiastic, and now loose enough with the president to start sharing his feeling and his craft, “is this real low-tech video of high-tech operations. Like infrared night bombing. There’s this one thing that’s absolutely central, imagistically speaking, to the whole production. I’m sure you know I’ve had access to Pentagon film and video, even top-secret stuff, and I want to say thanks, it helped, helped a lot—they have these smart bombs, laser-guided, computer-guided, can drop them on a dime, they say—I want a shot of one of these smart bombs going right down Saddam’s chimney. It goes right down the chimney, then the whole building sort of expands outward and boom! Explodes. Right down his chimney.
“And what that’s going to tell America is that this is surgery, not slaughter. That these are targets we’re hitting, military targets, not women and children. This is not Vietnam. Surgical strikes. And we’re going to show them on every TV set in the country and by satellite, on every TV set in the world, that, goddammit, this is surgery.”
“What I see here,” Bush said, “I want to see a heroic fighter pilot, you know I can relate to that because I had my moments, I don’t have to tell you about that, it’s pretty well known. A fighter-bomber, coming in low, beneath the enemy radar. Do you know they have cameras mounted in the noses of fighter planes? Of course, if it’s a bomber, the camera’s in the belly, that’s how they know you’re not cheating when you claim your score, not that you would expect that the kind of young man that would have the guts and all that, the Right Stuff, to fly one of our megaspeed, top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art jet aircraft, you wouldn’t expect a fine youngster like that to be dishonest. No, you wouldn’t. And he wouldn’t be. In the heat of combat, though, you can’t always be looking back to see where the fallen have fallen, when you’re looking forward to what you have to do next, it’s good to have a record.”
“Of course we can do that, George. I love fighter and fighter-bomber footage. The stuff is so great. The trick to making it seem real—gut-level real—is low-tech. You know when you watch the old WWII movies, whenever they cut in that scratched-up, dirty film, with the spots—everyone knows, everyone gets it—real combat footage.”
Baker still had one thing that bothered him. Big-time. It was the thing that he had been intending to use to blow the whole project out of the water. “How the hell are we going to pay for it? An issue is going to be made of that. Of paying for the war.”
“Mr. Secretary, Mr. President.” David Hartman spoke. This was a question that he was ready for. “In this event, the United States is the Studio. When a Major Studio makes a movie for, say, forty million dollars, they don’t reach into their pocket and take out forty million dollars. That would be insane. Let’s say we’re making Catwoman, the third Batman sequel. To start with, fifteen percent goes back to the studio for studio overhead. Then there’s interest on the full amount from day one. See, I really only have to worry about thirty-one, thirty-two million.
“If I want to, I can cover that with foreign, cable, and cassette sales. Before I start shooting. England, two million, Germany, six million, France, three million, Italy, two million, Scandinavia, another million, Spain, a million. That’s fifteen. I need another sixteen, seventeen. I pick up three in South America, eight in Japan, and I still have Africa, Asia, Australia, HBO, Showtime, Network TV.
“Do you see what I’m driving at? Only the United States can truly produce this picture. Who’s going to pay? That depends on the war. The president says Saddam Hussein. Let’s say he invades Saudi Arabia.
“Let’s say this war is going to cost fifty billion dollars. A lot of that is overhead. We have a standing army and reserves, equipment, the generals and their staffs, and the munitions and tanks, billions of dollars’ worth of stuff that we pay for whether we use it or not. OK, let’s say, conservatively, that fifty percent of the cost of the war is true overhead. But for billing purposes let’s say our overhead is twenty percent, ten billion dollars. Now we have to find forty billion. How much do you think the Saudis will pay to get their country back? Fifty percent of their oil revenues for the next ten years? We would never even ask them for that much. How about fifteen billion. Plus gas. For the planes and tanks and all ships at sea. Let me just jump ahead for a moment. Think about how much armament they are going to buy after this war. ‘Wow! We don’t want to be invaded again. We better double our Air Force!’ Planes. Spare parts. Training.
“Now, let’s get five billion dollars each from Kuwait, the Emirates, Qatar. Now all we need is another ten billion.
“Meanwhile, the day Saddam marches into Riyadh, the price of oil goes from three and a half dollars a barrel to twenty-five dollars a barrel? Thirty-five dollars a barrel? Fifty dollars? The Nikkei index drops two thousand points in a day.99Mr. Secretary Baker picks up the telephone. He says, ‘Mr. Prime Minister, what is it going to cost your country if the price of oil stays over thirty dollars a barrel? My army is willing to go in there, straighten things out, get the price down somewhere reasonable, under ten anyway. What’s that worth to Japan? Is it worth five billion dollars?’
“ ‘Mr. Kohl, how many people are going to drive Mercedes and BMWs, with gas at the pump, in America, at four dollars a gallon? In Europe at fifteen dollars a gallon? What’s that going to do to the German economic miracle?’
“I say,” Hartman concluded, “that before a shot is fired y’all are gonna have this here war paid for.”
“Now correct me if I’m wrong here, but I think I’m very tuned in on this,” the president said. “According to John Lincoln’s scenario—is that the right jargon there? scenario?—according to his idea, this is the invasion of Poland and in this context, Saudi Arabia would be the equivalent of France. Maybe France and England combined. I wouldn’t want things to get out of control, if you see what I mean. So what I think our Hitler should do is conquer some place a little smaller and threaten France. Which would be Saudi Arabia. That would be next, if we didn’t stand up to them. See, that works even if Saddam turns out not to be the one, but say it’s Iran that’s the aggressor nation. Against any one of the little countries there—Qatar, Kuwait, the Emirates. Any one would do, don’t you think?”
“That’s brilliant, Mr. President. That’s what I’m talking about. Exactly it. Let’s say it’s Iraq. They take Kuwait. It looks like the next move will be Saudi Arabia. Just like the Germans took Poland and everyone just knew, just knew, that France was next. In the space, in the waiting, that’s where you build the thing. Perfect, sir, perfect.”
Baker had kept his mouth shut while the presiden
t spoke. But the idea of making war on Other People’s Money demonstrated not just brass balls, but a pair that was downright stylish and freshly spit-shined. Now he spoke. “You are one smart Hollywood Jew,” he said to David Hartman. “Y’all can call me Bubba.”
95 Hartman was pleased that the plan—though Beagle had arrived at it by driving up the opposite side of the mountain—agreed entirely with one of the most important of Sun Tzu’s precepts: While I have heard that a quick though clumsy campaign may pay, I have never seen any merit in a long one. There has never been any country that has benefited from a long war.
96 Beagle thought that what the United States needed, cinematically, militarily, and politically, was a football field: a flat, clear space with lines.
In the jungle—as in Vietnam—or in the mountains—as in Italy and Yugoslavia—you go fight some guys, you win, you turn around and half of them are still there, hiding behind trees, in tunnels, and in caves.
In the desert, on the steppes, on the plains, you drive them out, and they’re out.
Based on terrain alone, the U.S. didn’t want to have a war in South America, Southeast Asia, much of Africa, Indonesia, the Philippines, Korea.
In addition, there were political considerations. No European war. Too expensive. The money people would never stand for it. No nuclear war. That eliminated Russia and China. While parts of black Africa may have been suitable militarily. Beagle’s gut reaction was to stay out: whatever you do you’re a racist, even in a black-black war. The Russo-Mongolian steppes were attractive but inacessible inside of a ring made half of mountains, half of nuclear powers.
The Indian subcontinent was both politically tricky and nuclear. It would certainly be a religious war, but Hindu versus Moslem, not the appealing Christian versus Moslem confrontation. Of course, as it turned out, Moslem versus Moslem must be considered a stroke of genius, real genius.
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