Out of My Mind

by Andy Rooney

  The czar looked into the story further and found that Catherine the Great, in a previous century, had planted a rosebush where the patch of grass was and ordered a sentry stationed there to make sure no one stepped on the bush. The rosebush had died fifty years before but no one in charge ever thought to say it didn’t need to be guarded any longer.

  I don’t know what I think, but I know I hope we don’t stand guard in Iraq after the rosebush dies.

  ELECTING A DICTATOR

  It seems likely that if there had been a free and open election in Germany in 1940, Adolf Hitler would have been elected dictator. This is the sort of dilemma that democracies do not anticipate or know how to deal with. Right now in Baghdad, which we like to think we’ve freed of oppressive leadership, it’s possible that given a vote, most residents would indicate their preference for a Shiite Muslim leader, who would bring back all the oppressive strictures against women, among other things, that we consider wrong.

  A lot of the great things we said we were going to do for Iraq are hard to do because Iraqis are behaving differently from the way we anticipated they would. They don’t necessarily want all the things we wanted for them. Many of our boastful predictions of what we were going to do were made for consumption here at home as a way of making our aggression acceptable to Americans.

  One of the few good things about boasting is that subsequent to it, the boaster almost always makes a greater effort to fulfill his promises than he otherwise might.

  Power is almost never innocuous; someone always gets hurt. We have the power in Iraq now but we’re trying to find a way to hand it over to the Iraqis. However, it’s difficult to find the right group or person to hand it to. Governments are always formed by relatively small numbers of people who want power.

  Because of the faith we have in our democracy, we like to think that an inherent goodness always wells up and leads to the election of the right people—but that’s just a dream we have. Most people don’t want power, so don’t seek it. They’d rather be led than lead. Unfortunately, the people who do want power are not necessarily the best ones to give it to.

  The selection of leaders in Baghdad today is like throwing a deck of cards in the air and letting the cards float to the ground at random. There’s no order and the people best able to take over probably aren’t the best people to do the job. If we decide who is best able to run Iraq, it would no longer be the democracy we promised to give them.

  It is apparent that President Bush and his aides are honestly seeking a good solution to the problem. We always try to solve a problem as if there was a good answer, but it’s apparent that very often, there is no good answer.

  That’s all I have to say on this subject now—and it seems like a good thing.

  TALK TO US, GEORGE

  We’ve had forty-two Presidents. Of those, twenty-seven ran for re-election. Fifteen made it for a second term. Twelve were defeated. Lyndon Johnson said, “Gee, thanks, but I don’t want to do this for four more years.”

  Re-election is based partly on luck and partly on performance. Right now, President Bush must be worried that he isn’t doing well in either category. For example, it must be galling for him to have to go back to the UN with his hat in his hand and ask for help after he so cavalierly proceeded without the UN’s approval when he ordered the attack on Iraq.

  To rationalize the war, the President always tries to associate Iraq with terrorism, but there is no evidence that, bad as he was, Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11. It is further embarrassing for the President that no weapons of mass destruction have been found.

  The President’s speech last Sunday night was a speechy speech that didn’t sound at all like George W. Bush. When he talks, the President sounds like a regular guy, but that night he wasn’t talking to us; he was speaking at us.

  If it was the President’s intention to set us all at ease about Iraq, newspapers the next morning didn’t help him. Just about every paper put the emphasis on how much rebuilding and stabilizing Iraq is going to cost us, not what a great job the troops are doing there.

  The Washington Post’s headline was typical: “Bush to double Iraq spending.”

  The New York Times said: “Bush seeks $87 billion and UN help.”

  There simply is no doubt that we’re spending more of our money and manpower on Iraq than it deserves as a problem for the American people. There are half a dozen countries with evil or inept governments that the world would be better off without but we can’t take on all of them and probably shouldn’t have taken on Iraq.

  The original budget for the Iraq war was something like $80 billion. The $87 billion Bush is requesting for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is additional—and we’re all familiar enough with our government to know that spending won’t stop there. If, as seems likely, we spend $200 billion before we’re through, that would amount to more than $800 for each tax-paying American. Not many of us are happy to come up with that.

  President Bush also had the unpleasant job of authorizing an extension in the deployment of Reserve and National Guard troops in Iraq—possibly for up to a year. After this announcement, there were stories on television from Iraq and from the hometowns of those soldiers about how surprised and unhappy they were to hear that the Army was extending their stay. Most of these National Guard soldiers had signed up with the expectation that, in exchange for about $400 a month, they would give up one weekend a month and two weeks once a year. It was a bet they lost and one more bit of bad news that no President running for re-election wants to deliver.

  APOLOGIZING FOR APOLOGIZING

  He didn’t mean to do it, but President Bush has made the United States the most detested nation in the world. He displays what is seen by many countries as an arrogance that transfers to all of us.

  Bush won no friends at the United Nations in 2002 and we need friends.

  We are not all powerful and we ought to get used to it and stop acting as if we were. It’s no longer possible for us to impose our idea of how people ought to govern themselves in a Muslim country—or any country, for that matter. There aren’t weapons enough on earth for us to make everyone else like us.

  There was a time as recently as fifty years ago when we could dominate the world with our military power and money, but those days are lost and gone. The oceans that surround us were moats that once protected us from attack, but with ballistic missiles, supersonic airplanes, chemical and biological weapons, oceans are no more than wet spots on the globe.

  Our Army with all its tanks and infantry, our Air Force with all its bombers and fighter planes, our Navy with all its battleships and submarines, are no match for one terrorist with a suitcase full of anthrax or one suicidal religious fanatic with a truckload of nitroglycerine. We are shadowboxing with an enemy we can’t see or touch. Our West Point graduates are trained to fight a war there will never be.

  It doesn’t matter what I think, but I think like millions of Americans, and they matter. I was opposed to going into Iraq without the approval of the United Nations. When we moved so quickly into Baghdad and seemed to get rid of Saddam Hussein, I decided I’d been wrong and apologized.

  Now I want to apologize again. I want to apologize for apologizing. The people who thought we should not have attacked Iraq without the sanction of the United Nations were right. It wasn’t all President Bush’s fault. UN delegates were sitting on their hands. The French and the Germans were against it basically because we were for it and because they had economic interests in Iraq, but now we have to live with our mistake. We’re living with it and too many of our guys are dying with it.

  The UN has to be a lot smarter than it ever has been to fulfill the promise of the organization. The United Nations has been a nambypamby group and that’s partly because the United States has never supported it with any enthusiasm.

  It’s foolish of us not to put our wholehearted support behind the UN. There simply has to be some power in the world superior to our own—for our own
sake. Iraq is the world’s problem, it isn’t our problem. There are far too many places in the world that have more problems than we can solve.

  I hope we remain the strongest country in the world because we usually do what’s right. It isn’t a sure thing that we will remain as dominant as we are, however. We can’t imagine it any other way, but Great Britain, France and Germany are not the dominant countries they used to be in the world. Japan is fading. It could happen to us—may be happening.

  Something I read in college keeps coming to me and I can’t remember the source. It was that ancient Greece and Rome didn’t go into decline because there was anything wrong with the principles on which their civilizations were based. They went into decline because the people who believed in those principles became a minority and they were overrun by people who didn’t understand those principles at all. There must have been some Greek and Roman George Bushes.

  HEROES DON’T COME WHOLESALE

  The reporting from Iraq has been pretty thin. We don’t learn much about what our soldiers in Iraq are thinking or doing. There’s no Ernie Pyle to tell us and, if there were, the military would make it difficult or impossible for him to let us know.

  It would be interesting to have a reporter ask a group of our soldiers in Iraq to answer five questions and see the results:1. Do you think your country did the right thing sending you into Iraq?

  2. Are you doing what America set out to do to make Iraq a democracy, or have we failed so badly that we should pack up and get out before more of you are killed?

  3. Do the orders you get handed down from one headquarters to another, all far removed from the fighting, seem sensible, or do you think our highest command is out of touch with the reality of your situation?

  4. If you could have a medal, a raise or a trip home, which would you take?

  5. Are you encouraged by all the talk back home about how brave you are and how everyone supports you?

  Treating soldiers fighting their war as brave heroes is an old civilian trick designed to keep the soldiers at it. But you can be sure our soldiers in Iraq are not all brave heroes gladly risking their lives for us sitting comfortably back here at home.

  Our soldiers in Iraq are people, young men and women, and they behave like people—sometimes good and sometimes bad, sometimes brave, sometimes cowardly. It’s disingenuous of the rest of us to encourage them to fight this war by idolizing them. We pin medals on their chests to keep them going. We speak of them as if they volunteered to risk their lives to save ours but there isn’t much voluntary about what most of them have done. A relatively small number are professional soldiers. During the last few years, when millions of jobs disappeared, many young people, desperate for some income, enlisted in the Army. About 40 percent of our soldiers in Iraq enlisted in the National Guard or the Army Reserve to pick up some extra money and never thought they’d be called on to fight. They want to come home.

  One indication that not all soldiers in Iraq are happy warriors is the report released by the Army showing the large number of them who committed suicide there last year. We must support our soldiers in Iraq because it’s our fault they’re risking their lives there. However, we should not bestow the mantle of heroism on all of them for simply being where we sent them. Most are victims, not heroes.

  America’s intentions are honorable. I believe that and we must find a way of making the rest of the world believe it. We want to do the right thing. We care about the rest of the world. President Bush’s intentions were honorable when he took us into Iraq. They were not well thought out but not dishonorable, either.

  President Bush’s determination to make the evidence fit the action he took, which it does not, has made things look worse. We pay lip service to the virtues of openness and honesty, but for some reason we too often act as though there was a better way of handling a bad situation than by being absolutely open and honest.

  GOOD DAYS, BAD DAYS

  If you were going to make a list of the great times in American history, you’d start with the day in 1492 when Columbus got here.

  The Revolution when we won our independence would be on the list.

  Beating Hitler. The unconditional German surrender at Reims on May 8, 1945.

  The day we put Americans on the moon was a special occasion.

  We’ve had a lot of great days.

  Our darkest days up until now have been things like presidential assassinations—four of them. The stock market crash in 1929, Pearl Harbor and 9/11, of course.

  The day the world learned that American soldiers had tortured Iraqi prisoners should be put high on the list of our country’s worst. It’s a black mark on our record that will be in the history books in a hundred languages for a hundred years. It altered the world’s perception of us.

  The image printed in newspapers of one bad woman with a naked man on a leash did more to damage America’s reputation all over the world than all the good things we’ve done ever helped our reputation. Other guards put hoods over the heads of prisoners, stripped them naked, beat them and left them hanging from the bars of their prison cells by their wrists. The hoods made it difficult for them to breathe. Impossible sometimes, and some died of slow asphyxiation.

  What were the secrets they were trying to get from captured Iraqis? What important information did that poor devil on the leash have that he wouldn’t have given to anyone in exchange for a crust of bread or a sip of water?

  One prisoner reported that a guard told him, “I’m going to make you wish you’d die and you’re not going to.”

  Our general in charge said our guards were “untrained.” Untrained at what? Being human beings? Should we excuse the Iraqi who chopped off Nicholas Berg’s head because he was untrained?

  The guards who tortured prisoners are faced with a year in prison. A year for destroying America’s reputation.

  I don’t want them in prison anyway. Take away their right to call themselves American, that’s what I’d do.

  In the history of the world, several great civilizations that seemed immortal have deteriorated and died. I don’t want to be dramatic, but I’ve lived a long while and, for the first time in my life, I have this faint, far-away fear that it could happen to us in America as it happened to the Greek and Roman civilizations. Too many Americans don’t understand what we have here and how hard it is to keep it. I worry for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I want them to have what I’ve had . . . and I sense it could be slipping away from them.

  WE SHOULD LEAVE WHILE WE’RE BEHIND

  Democracy has worked so well and lasted so long for us in the United States of America that we assume popular government is what every country should have. That probably isn’t true in a lot of places, and Iraq maybe one of them.

  The people of Iraq never had what we have. They don’t understand democracy and there’s no great demand for it from the people. The history of the region is hundreds of years of tribal war. Iraq is a disaster state. The people are largely uneducated, any government they’ve had has been corrupt and they produce almost nothing of any value but oil. The women weave some nice rugs but it’s a cottage industry. Their oil is an accident of nature.

  Most Americans are not committed to this war. They are committed to supporting our soldiers, but they don’t know a Shiite from a Sunni and couldn’t care less about the Kurds.

  A democracy like ours, where people decide for themselves what’s best for them, depends on the people who vote knowing what’s going on. That’s why good newspapers and responsible television news are important. Iraq has almost none of that.

  I’ve often thought we should mount a huge advertising campaign in Iraq to convince the people that we’re really nice guys just trying to help them, but I’m dreaming. How would we tell them anything? Few Iraqi homes have a television sets. Fewer than one out of every fifty people read a newspaper. It wouldn’t help if they had a newspaper delivered to their door every morning because something like 50 percent of the people can
’t read. And, of course, you couldn’t deliver a newspaper to their door anyway because a lot of Iraqis don’t have a door to deliver it to.

  What kind of a democracy could you have in a country like that? It’s a sad state of affairs for the 25 million Iraqis because they are human beings like us, but their lives are beyond our ability to improve.

  Before Vietnam, Americans used to enjoy saying we never lost a war. Well, we lost that one and we’re losing this one. I don’t know what promises we’ve made to those Iraqis who have worked with us, but I suppose they’re one big reason Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush haven’t said we should leave. The friends we have will be slaughtered when we leave, and we ought to devote our energies to finding a way to prevent that. Our incursion into this Middle Eastern morass isn’t working. What has it done for us, for the Iraqis, or for the world?

  It would be difficult now for President Bush to tell the Iraqis we’re leaving after killing thousands of their people and laying waste to half a dozen of their major cities. Here at home, the families of several thousand soldiers who’ve been killed might never forgive him. It would otherwise be nothing more than politically embarrassing if Bush came out and admitted he was wrong.

  Admitting we’re wrong has become popular. Everybody is always scoring points by admitting they were wrong. President Bush has got to admit that going to war in Iraq was a serious mistake. He sent our soldiers in there without knowing what they were going to do, or how they were going to get out when they finished doing it.

  NEVER MIND WHO WON

  I have a friend who spent time in Iraq working for the government as an architect. He says of all the Middle Eastern countries, Iraq is closest to being enlightened. It is not enlightened, he said, but it comes closest. For example, women have more rights in Iraq than in many Muslim countries, and I thought of that when I saw how many women voted in the Iraqi election. Iraqis going to vote looked like average, ordinary people and I felt bad about having distanced myself from them in my mind.