War Fever
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By Chris Matthews
San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, April 14, 2002
Washington -- The American people are being herded into war. An astounding 81 percent of us now believe it "likely" that U.S. troops will be sent into the Middle East. That's what people are telling the Gallup Poll.
Yet when the same Americans are asked if President Bush has a "well thought out" Mideast policy, the answer comes back 48 percent "yes" and 47 percent "no. "
"And it's one, two, three, what are we fightin' for? Don't ask me. I don't give a damn, next stop is . . ."
OK, what is the next stop?
Do we expect to have our sons and daughters standing on the "green line" separating Israel from the occupied Arab West Bank? How could that be? How could we be going to fight somewhere when we don't have a "well thought out" idea of why or who we're fighting? Will U.S. forces be sent to protect Arabs from Israeli tanks or to protect Israel's pizza parlors and buses from Palestinian suicide bombers?
I can't imagine which would be the dumber, more dangerous assignment. Can you imagine some guy from Arkansas trying to tell the tough-as-nails Israeli Defense Force not to protect its country? Can you imagine some kid from the Bronx trying to figure out which Palestinian might have suicide in mind? They'd have a hard time with that mission even if they spoke both Hebrew and Arabic.
Here's another disturbing Gallup number: 59 percent of Americans favor sending U.S. troops to invade Iraq in order to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
At the very time the United States faces global Islamic hostility for our support of Israel, a strong majority of Americans wants to invade an Arab country. They would be willing to send hundreds of thousands of our troops to Baghdad, thereby establishing a second East-West front. With Israeli tanks rolling through the streets of the West Bank, killing Arabs, American tanks would be rolling through the streets of Baghdad, killing Arabs.
Does anyone seriously think anything would come of this two-front war but more Arab hostility, more anti-Zionist zealotry, more nationalism or more hatred of our country?
Put more bluntly, are the American people seriously thinking?
Are we looking at the consequences of a two-front war in the Middle East: Ariel Sharon smashing Palestinian resistance, America smashing through the gates of Baghdad? Has anyone imagined what those dueling TV pictures will do to the Arab "street" or to the governments in Cairo, Amman, Tripoli and Damascus that must rule those streets?
The only winners in such a scenario are those who dream of a final, all-out conflict between East and West. If Osama bin Laden is still alive, this is his dream. He wants to see the entire Islamic world engaged in a death struggle with the "crusaders." What a perfect recipe for igniting the revolution he has long sought against the Saudi royal family, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Jordan's King Abdullah!
There would be other winners here at home: those neo-conservative hawks who have been beating the drums for war. For months, the op-ed pages of this country's major newspapers have been filled daily with their relentless rants for "Phase Two" or "Regime Change" in Iraq -- or Iran or Syria or Libya or Saudi Arabia or Cairo.
Unable to say a single good word about an Arab country, certainly nothing in print, the hawks also got Bush to include North Korea in his global hit list.
This is meant to suggest, I can only assume, that they are not driven entirely by anti-Arab hostility. They also hate some countries in Asia, including China, countries we should get around to fighting once we have overrun and occupied all of the Middle East. If you don't think it's this bad, you haven't been reading the papers.
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