Rob Reiner on Iraq
nytimes.com
November 13, 2005
The Way We Live Now
Beverly Hills Coup?
By MATT BAI / NY Times
…I sat with Reiner, who is often mentioned as a California gubernatorial candidate, and his political consultant, Chad Griffin, in an office lined with posters from Reiner's movies: "When Harry Met Sally," "This Is Spinal Tap," "A Few Good Men." "To send people off to die for a lie - I swear I never thought I'd see that again in my lifetime," Reiner told me. "We went through it in Vietnam. To me, it's the most unconscionable thing you can do. It's beyond impeachable. If we had just one house of Congress, this man would be impeached." By "we," he meant the Democratic Party.
Reiner talked authoritatively about weapons inspectors and the National Intelligence Estimate, and he made reference, with evident satisfaction, to a poll showing that just 38 percent of the public thought the country was now headed in the right direction. The decibel level of his voice began to rise in anger, as if it were not I sitting across from Reiner on his couch but the president himself. "To me, the death of people at somebody's hands over the stupidity of this man is astounding!" he shouted at me. "When I hear that on the weekend of the Super Bowl an Iraqi expatriate was explaining to him the difference between Kurds and Sunnis and Shiites, it makes me want to cry. I want to cry!" (Reiner said he recalled hearing this anecdote on cable news or talk radio, though I wasn't able to find any reference to it subsequently.) "How do you send people into a region, the most powerful superpower in the world, when you have no idea what's going on there?.... |
