Thoughts on Weapons and Detachment

Living with the constant threat of attack puts one on guard. Against what? Someone or something that can hurt us. Because I have been saving items that seemed to fit the "weapons theme," I promised myself I would return to writing about bombs and bullets. The following item is what started me thinking about the theme of weapons and detachment, in light of the Bush administration's capacity to stay calm, cool and detached, while "revving up" the rest of us.

• Thoughts on the president and guns - a story on 10/11/06 regarding President Bush on (not!) guns in schools. It is from the WaPo:

President Bush has always been a disciplined man, but yesterday he set a new standard for self-control: He moderated an hour-long discussion about the rash of school shootings in the past week without once mentioning the word "guns."
First lady Laura Bush was nearly as good, giving a seven-minute speech at yesterday's White House Conference on School Safety without mentioning guns.

The war in Iraq was "sold" on the assumption that Iraq had weapons - "WMD's"- that were a threat to the U.S. following the attacks of 9/11/01. This was not true. There was nothing behind the doors, nothing of which to be unduly afraid. Nada.

Now several years later, regular, but still lethal, weapons have proliferated all over that beleaguered country. "Skipper," a British blogger, addressed the question of how many Iraqis have been lost in the war.

. . . US-UK forces originally invaded Iraq to do good: to find and eliminate WMD we were told; or to expell the evil Saddam Hussein whose bloody reign had caused mass Iraqi deaths. We all know WMD haven't yet turned up but has the invasion really lifted the Ba-athist yoke of suffering from Iraqis? It seems unlikely.

Read more about the "weapons" sale - The administration's cool-headed run-up to the war is covered brilliantly in a new book, "Hubris: . . ," by Michael Isikoff and David Corn. An appearance by the authors was covered by C-SPAN this past weekend:

Book TV Programs
On Saturday, October 21 at 8:00 pm

Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War
Michael Isikoff and David Corn
Description: In " Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," Michael Isikoff and David Corn discuss the Bush Administration's foreign policy and the invasion of Iraq. The co-authors explain that they wrote the book to analyze how the President and his staff sold the war to Congress and the American public. This event was hosted by Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC.

Members of the current administration apparently have the capacity for detachment AND for being overly exorcised. This dichotomy was the subject of several incidents documented in the book and discussed by Isakoff during the bookstore presentation. He talked about the Dick Armey episode (see reference below), where it is the Vice President who is the one coolly doing the sale. Isikoff also described several incidents of our current president's reportedly bizarre behaviors. There was strange detachment when presented with news of the war's lack of progress (during a briefing by a former CIA operative, an Iraqi general who became Iraq's Director of Intelligence). But alternatively there was his very angry reference to Saddam Hussein as "the one who tried to kill" his father (the John Cornyn incident). I agree with Isikoff's characterization. "Strange." Read the book.
References:

1. New York Times book review: Winds of War - "HUBRIS - The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War." By Michael Isikoff and David Corn.



2. Book exerpt in Newsweek - "Silencing a skeptic - story of Dick Armey's reasons for supporting the war."
   Tags: bush in-the-news iraq security terrorism war book news news and politics hubris