by Jane Smiley
Elena scowled, and Zoe glanced at Paul, evidently sorry she’d brought anything up, but Isabel didn’t care whether they talked about the war or not. It was not a subject she thought should be avoided, actually, which is what they all seemed to be doing.
Cassie went on: “‘At high noon on March 12, 1945, just eight weeks before the capitulation of Germany to the Allied forces, 1,000 American planes attacked the city of Swinemuende on the Baltic coast of Germany. The city, crammed with refugees from eastern Germany who had been ethnically cleansed and raped by the Red Army, was bombed mercilessly and sprayed by machine gun fire from American dive bombers, which chased people through the city. Of the city’s 25,000 civilians, 23,000 were killed that night.’” She cleared her throat.
Cassie glanced down the page. “I think he’s objecting to any analogy between the bombing of Iraq and the bombing of Germany at the end of the war. Someone must have made the comparison.”
“On TV,” said Simon.
“Do you want me to keep reading?” said Cassie.
Elena coughed. No one said anything. Finally, Isabel herself said, “I think it’s interesting,” and she did.
“I’ll skip down. ‘Never before in history had a civilian population endured such a military assault. One and a half million bombs were dropped on 161 German cities and 800 villages over five years, leaving half a million civilians dead, including 75,000 children. An additional 78,000 of Hitler’s slave workers and prisoners of war were killed. No one was ever punished for these acts. The winners, not surprisingly, didn’t indict themselves for war crimes. And, in fact, there was nothing technically illegal about their actions. According to Telford Taylor, the chief U.S. prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials, there was no international agreement limiting aerial bombardment to military targets—so, technically, the bombing was legal. Nevertheless, it was unprecedented and beyond any of the customs of war. The war itself was just, but the means by which it was conducted were unjust and unimaginable.’”
“What about the Blitz?” said Delphine. “And the way they bombed Coventry and Southampton and all those other cities?”
“What about six million Jews?” said Isabel, who only said it because she knew Stoney would have, but as she said it, she thought, Yeah, what about that?
Cassie nodded and went on: “‘And worst of all, the bombing was an unmitigated failure. It simply didn’t work….’”
“What does that mean?” said Simon. “It destroyed the cities, right?”
“‘…It weakened Hitler but didn’t lead to his overthrow. It didn’t destroy morale or incite rebellion; 75,000 children killed and it didn’t do anything except, perhaps, strengthen the resolve of the German people against the Allies.’”
“It sounds like he’s on your side,” Max said to Elena.
“That’s what they do, though,” said Elena. “They put the reasonable part first. They concede something. That’s what he’s conceding—that bombing doesn’t work. He’s going to twist it around by the end. They wouldn’t have him on the editorial page if he didn’t support the war.”
“I think he’s just having his say,” remarked Paul. “This has been on his mind for years, and now he gets the chance to express it. It doesn’t really matter if it fits the circumstances or not.”
“You know what I just remembered?” said Max. “Once, my eighth-grade Latin teacher told us about the firebombing of Dresden, which we, of course, had never heard of, and how his mother or his aunt or his grandmother, maybe it was, would huddle in the basement and shake her fist at the Allied bombers as they flew over. I wonder if I went home and asked about it, or if I just filed it away until now. My uncle Walter was a photographer in the belly of one of those bombers. His job was to lie flat and take pictures of the devastation as they flew their missions. I knew all about Uncle Walter, but I never made the connection between the old lady shaking her fist and my uncle in the belly of the plane until now.”
“What about my uncle Freddie?’ said Charlie. “He was in the Engineer Corps, and it was his company that landed secretly the night before D-Day and made their way up Omaha Beach, disarming land mines in the dark. Not only didn’t they want to get blown up, they couldn’t reveal that they were there by letting any of the mines explode. By the time the GIs landed, according to Uncle Freddie, he and his men were ten miles inland. But he never talked about it, either. But the war wasn’t all bad. Freddie’s brother Tom went into the army band as a French-horn player. In the Battle of the Bulge, the German pincer action was so sudden that they had to drop their instruments and run. But they ran east. Pretty soon they came upon the spot where the German band had dropped their instruments, so they picked them up. And they were much better instruments than the ones they had lost. I guess Tom came home with three French horns, and when his own son needed a violin twenty years later, he sold one of them and bought the kid a Stradivarius.”
“I had a cousin in the Battle of the Bulge,” said Cassie. “His whole unit was wiped out, and the only way he survived was to crawl into the rotting carcass of a horse.”
“What happened to him?” said Elena.
“Well, he came home and went into the meat business.”
Charlie and Delphine laughed, as did Cassie. Then she said, “But of course he had problems. I don’t know that he consciously made the connection between the horse and the meat business.”
“What did your dad do?” said Isabel to Max. She was used to Cassie, but did wonder if she knew what she sounded like.
“Well, he always said he wanted to be a flyer, but he was too tall, so he ended up working for the newspaper.”
Cassie went on: “‘At a press conference last week, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld noted comparisons had been made between the current campaign and the bombings of Germany. It’s a laughable comparison. You cannot compare the mass destruction of incendiary warfare—aimed at killing civilians in extraordinary numbers—with the noisy but relatively precise and targeted attacks on Baghdad. Such comparisons are far too kind to Arthur “Bomber” Harris, the British leader of the Allied campaign….’”
“But you could compare it to the Blitz,” said Zoe. “I think.”
Isabel saw Elena cast her mother a startled glance, but Zoe had that look she always did—“Who, me? I’m not trying to say anything, I just happen to be talking.” As far as Isabel was concerned, the fact that she saw her mother’s point, or, maybe, agreed with her, didn’t make up for that look, so fake.
“‘The difference is this: In Baghdad today, civilian deaths would constitute failure. In World War II Germany, they meant success. The U.S. would be a pariah in world opinion today if it targeted even one Iraqi city the way it attacked German cities relentlessly for five years.’”
“The U.S. is a pariah in world opinion today,” said Elena.
Charlie stared at her.
Cassie folded the paper and flipped it over. She said, “Last paragraph. ‘A better comparison is to Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. If the Iraqi leader…’”
Elena dropped the butter knife and picked it up again.
“‘…were to use chemical or biological weapons—which strike civilian and military targets indiscriminately over a large territory—that would be comparable. Then Hussein would be the true heir of “Bomber” Harris.’”
“I told you,” said Elena. “I told you he was in support of the war.”
“Most people are,” said Charlie.
“Most Americans may be,” said Elena. “That’s not the same as most people. Most people are not in support of the war, and view Americans as a greater danger to the world than Saddam Hussein. Americans have biological and chemical and nuclear weapons and have used them. Most people think they could use them again. A couple of months ago, there was an article in some paper about how the Pentagon was trying to decide on possible nuclear targets in Iraq.”
“I can’t believe that,” said Paul.
“She showed me the article,” said M
ax. “It said that the Pentagon has changed the classification of nuclear weapons so that they are now considered ‘conventional’ rather than ‘special.’”
“It’s not like she’s making it sound,” said Charlie. “There might be targets—”
“Like Nagasaki,” said Elena. “There was a good target. Hiroshima, too.”
“Now you’re bitching about the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima? They were military cities! It’s not like they bombed temples or something like that—”
“Well, they firebombed Tokyo and Kobe. Kobe was full of temples. When they firebombed Tokyo, they killed a hundred thousand civilians.”
“I saw this anime movie a couple of years ago about that,” said Simon. “It was called The Grave of the Fireflies. It was a cartoon about these kids who were orphaned in the firebombing of Kobe. The guy I was with couldn’t stop crying. We thought it was going to be like My Neighbor Totoro or something like that.”
“What is wrong with you?” exclaimed Charlie, jumping up from the table. “The Japs attacked first. They attacked Pearl Harbor!”
“They didn’t attack Honolulu, did they? They didn’t attack, oh, Lihue?”
“But they attacked Nanking! What they did in Nanking makes Rwanda look like a walk in the park! Are you saying that the U.S. should just stand by?” Charlie walked around the table, waving his spoon.
“Well,” said Zoe, “the U.S. did stand by and not do anything about Nanking. I don’t think the bombing of Tokyo, Kobe, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki had anything to do with Nanking.” She glanced at Paul, who was gazing at her—encouragingly, Isabel thought. It was a little irritating.
“I can’t believe you said that, Mom,” said Isabel.
“Why not?” exclaimed Zoe. “There was a five-year time lag between Nanking and Pearl—”
“No. I mean, I can’t believe you know anything about it.”
“Well, Mom read that book. Didn’t you read that book, Delphine, by that girl?”
“The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang. I read most of it. It was pretty hard going.”
“Well, I read some of it, too,” said Zoe. “I picked up the main points. You always treat me as if I were a total ditz.”
“Oh,” said Isabel. But she thought, Just a ditz, not a total ditz. There’s a difference in degree that should be noted.
“That book was on the best-seller list for weeks and weeks,” said Delphine.
Charlie opened the front door and went outside. The door slammed behind him. Simon rubbed his hands over his head and said, “Don’t come back in.” Isabel, and, she assumed, everyone else, could hear Charlie striding around on the deck, and then the door opened again. Simon said, “Whoops. Came back in.”
Charlie’s face was red. He looked at Max, but he clearly was talking to Elena. He said, evenly and clearly, as if explaining this one more time, but this was going to be the last time, so help him God, “Where were you on 9/11? Did you not see what happened? Did you not see those towers fall and those people die? Is that why you propose that we sit around waiting until it happens again?”
“Charlie, they weren’t Ira—” said Elena.
“Who do you think the ‘great Satan’ is?”
“Those were Ira—”
“What’s the difference? Nobody has been able to explain to me the difference. This extremist mullah comes from Iran, this extremist mullah comes from Egypt, this extremist mullah lives in Saudi Arabia, this one moved from Pakistan to England twenty years ago. But they are all calling for the end to America. You want to go down without a fight? You want to say, Oh well, you’re entitled to your point of view? They want you dead. Why don’t you want them dead?”
“Saddam isn’t a mullah.”
“But he’s funneling them money and weapons.”
“He says he’s not. Lots of people say he’s not, because the mullahs hate him and he hates them.”
“You believe that? You hate Tom DeLay and Randall Terry on religious grounds, I’m sure, but if it came time for one of them to call out the Air Force and the Coast Guard to defend the country from attack, wouldn’t your religious differences fall by the wayside?”
“How can he prove a negative? No one can prove a negative. You’ve got him in a position where you have made an accusation, and because he has to prove a negative, your accusation automatically becomes a conviction. The inspectors are going around doing their job, but the administration doesn’t want them to do their job.”
“You’re giving Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt? After he gassed the Kurds? After he’s purged his own population?”
“He used American gas to gas them! Rumsfeld was shaking his hand. He did what they wanted him to do!”
“I don’t believe that. I believe that he was like a rogue or a renegade. He did not do what they wanted him to do, and now they have to take him out.”
“I think,” said Delphine, “that we’ve gotten away from Nanking and Nagasaki and the Germans.”
“What does that mean?” said Zoe.
“The people being bombed aren’t Saddam Hussein. He’s in a bunker somewhere. They might catch him and they might not—”
“Exactly,” said Elena. “We know Al Qaeda people blew up the Twin Towers, but we’re punishing Saddam Hussein. That’s like I have two kids who are cousins and who hate each other, and I know that one of them blew up the kitchen, so I say to that one, ‘Jimmy, you blew up the kitchen, so, just to teach you not to do that anymore, I’m going to give Johnny here, who had nothing to do with it, a whipping.’ It makes no sense. Jimmy hates Johnny. Jimmy’s glad Johnny gets a whipping. He won! He manipulated me and he got back at the hated cousin.”
Simon said, “Go, Mom!”
“That’s not what I was getting at,” said Delphine. “What I was getting at was the idea of whether there are actually any innocent civilians or not. Are you an innocent civilian, Elena?”
Elena looked at her, a little nonplussed. Then she said, “Well, no. We’re all implicated in what the administration is doing. That’s what makes me so mad.”
“So, if you’re implicated, that means, in an extreme case, that firebombing you is justified, because if it turns out that your government is seen by someone else as a rogue government that needs to be stopped at all costs, all costs may include your life.”
“Well, I—Yes. I agree with that.”
“So what about the Iraqis? Lots of them have left. That means that lots of them had a chance to leave and decided to stay and accommodate Saddam in some way. Most of them have reasons. Let’s say one reason is trying to change the regime from within. That’s what you’ve been doing.”
Isabel had to admit that she found this line of reasoning a little shocking, but she suspected that Delphine was just making a point.
“Yes,” said Elena, nodding.
“So—the Iraqi population, like the German population and the Japanese population and the American population, is not made up of innocent civilians. It’s made up of people who saw more or less what was happening and decided for various reasons to take their chances.”
“Yes, but—” said Zoe.
“Yes, but what about the children? That’s what you’re going to say,” said Delphine. Isabel did not think Zoe was going to mention the children, but Isabel herself might have. “That’s what I was wondering about when I read that piece about Germany. Five hundred thousand casualties and only about fifteen percent of them children. That seems low to me. Where were the children? It must have been like in England during the Blitz. The children got sent away because the parents knew something was going to happen. I don’t think that, in terms of guilt and innocence, you can factor the children in or factor them out. They share their parents’ conditions even of guilt and innocence until they are, say, fifteen or so. Then they can make their own choices. Anyway, whenever you decide to take your chances, you have to live with chance, and chance might be that you’ll get firebombed. So I disagree with the tone of that article, about the poor Ge
rmans. Didn’t they see Triumph of the Will? Couldn’t they tell that Adolf Hitler was up to something? Why didn’t they stop him? And when the soldiers came home on leave from Nanking, wasn’t anyone horrified at what they reported? And if they didn’t report anything, wasn’t that because they knew they’d committed crimes?”
“Exactly,” said Charlie.
Now Delphine turned to him. “I guess you consider yourself an innocent civilian,” she said.
“Uh-oh,” said Simon. “Run for the hills.”
Isabel smiled. She saw that Max was smiling, too. Paul was eating kiwifruit.
“Welllll,” said Charlie, recognizing a potential trick, “no one is innocent. But I suppose I consider myself a not-guilty civilian. My guilt has not been proved beyond the shadow of a doubt, and so I am at liberty.” He smiled at his own cleverness, and Zoe said, “I see that.”
“But you voted for Bush in 2000,” said Delphine.
“Of course, but I didn’t expect him to start a war. I voted for him for other reasons.”
“But are you on board for all of his policies, and in addition to that, do you agree with all or most of them?”
“Yeah, I would say so.”
This answer sounded honest to Isabel, like the sort of cocky answer a detainee might unwittingly make to his interrogators early in the questioning process.
“But a lot of his policies are pretty risky. Like this tax-cut thing. Big tax cuts are going to raise the deficit, and if he makes them permanent, some economists think that could put the U.S. in danger of having something happen here like has happened in Argentina and those places, where the economy has collapsed and the middle class has disappeared. What if that happened?”
“Well, I would hope that wouldn’t happen. Lots of economists say—”
“But they disagree. It’s a risky thing to do, and the gamble could fail, right?”
“Well, I guess. Yeah. For the sake of argument.”
“So, if the economy failed, and you were implicated in its failure by voting for and agreeing to administration policies, what would that mean for you?”