Thrown Under the Omnibus, page 81
At about the same time, aided by the Internet, there was a cheerful realization nationwide that “Taliban” scans perfectly in “The Banana Boat Song”:
Come Mr. Taliban, rid me of Osama.
Air Force come and it flatten me home.
Cruise missile,
Tomahawk,
Half-ton bomb.
Air Force come and it flatten me home.
On October 16, in Austin, Texas, local TV reported that the Austin fire department had responded to a call from a household concerning a “suspicious package.” The sole suspicious thing about the package was that it had been mailed from New York City.
On October 19 a chipper announcer for KFWB radio, in southern California, said, “Anthrax news certainly has Orange County people talking …” Later that day, at a lunch in Simi Valley, I was sitting next to someone from the Ventura County district attorney’s office. He said anthrax alarms were coming in at a rate of one every three minutes, and that the only practical decontamination response would be to have people get naked and be hosed down. That evening, on the set of a public-television book show, T. C. Boyle talked about how he had a certain admiration for acts of “ecotage,” but in his fiction he tried to show both sides of the story. He managed never to mention September 11.
I can remember when powdery white substances of sinister origin were doing a lot more damage to America than anthrax had done so far. Circa 1980 America’s elite was suffering “nasaltage.” It emptied bank accounts, wrecked marriages, ruined thousands of careers, and brought the nation to its knees (with a soda straw over a glass coffee table). But Attorney General John Ashcroft was very firm in stating that anthrax threats are no laughing matter. Pranks and jests concerning anthrax would be treated as serious criminal actions. Thus various larval jokes with “You’ve got mail” punch lines had to be allowed to die before maturation. And the heavy metal band Anthrax was said to be considering changing its name—presumably to Chicken Pox.
Were we as a nation forgetting what our international critics have been saying about us for years? Aren’t we supposed to be a big, terrifying country, a Godzilla of capitalism wrecking the globe? Since when did Godzilla flip out because he might have brushed against something in the mail room while he was devouring Trenton, New Jersey? Since when did Godzilla turn (devastating) tail and scamper to Mexico to buy Cipro over the counter? I trusted this was a momentary lapse. And I hoped that Osama bin Laden was discovering, amid smart bombs and Delta Forces in Afghanistan, that America isn’t scared, America is scary. The members of al Qaeda had gotten dressed up in their holy-warrior costumes and gone trick-or-treating at the wrong house.
November 26, 2001
Lo! The intrepid Afghan Taliban fighter of warrior lineage ancient. He who had vanquished countless foes, unassailable in his mountain redoubts, imbued with fanatical resolve, possessed by suicidal courage—and who was now running around Mazar-e-Sharif getting his beard shaved, playing Uzbecki pop music on his boom box, and using Mrs. Afghan Warrior’s burka for a bedspread in the guest room, soon to be rented to foreign aid workers.
The fighting in Afghanistan was so brief that CNN Headline News had to delete three bars from its “Target: Terror” score to keep the theme music from outlasting the hostilities. The Soviet Union fought the Afghans for ten years and gave up in ignominious defeat in 1989. What were the Soviets using for weapons—cafeteria buns and rolled-up locker room towels? The United States dropped a lot of cafeteria buns—or emergency food aid that is very like cafeteria buns—on Taliban-controlled areas. Exposure to American school-lunch fare may have been the deciding factor in the radical Muslim demoralization. A country that can make something that dreadful from mere flour, yeast, and water is a country not to be defied.
However it was that we achieved victory, achieve it we did, although to what end remains to be seen. One effect of victory (though very temporary) was to make America’s elite even more sanguine about armed conflict than they had been during the 1999 air war on Serbia. SURPRISE: WAR WORKS AFTER ALL, read the headline on the Week in Review section of the New York Times for Sunday, November 18, 2001. That same day the Boston Globe Magazine ran a cover story titled “The New Patriots: College students support a country at war—and so do their Vietnam-era parents.” Of course, there was the possibility that the revived fighting spirit among America’s elite had nothing to do with Afghanistan but was a collateral result of Harvard’s first undefeated football season since 1913. I believe Harvard played Mount Holyoke, Smith, Li’l Dickens Day Care Center, and several Pop Warner League teams, but I didn’t check that.
Meanwhile, what next for our nation? Would we do, after the Afghan war, as we did after the Gulf War and just go home, have a recession, and elect some creepy Democratic governor of an obscure state as the next president? Or would we finish the War on Terrorism? The U.S. Department of State publication Patterns of Global Terrorism 2000 seemed to offer ample opportunities for pursuing the latter goal.
Iran remained the most active state sponsor of terrorism … It provided increasing support to numerous terrorist groups, including the Lebanese Hizballah, HAMAS, and the Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) … Iraq continued to serve as a safe haven and support to a variety of Palestinian rejectionist groups … Syria continued to provide safehaven and support to several terrorist groups … Sudan continued to serve as a safehaven for members of al-Qaida, the Lebanese Hizballah … Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the PIJ, and HAMAS …
We mustn’t forget that this was not a war between Western civilization and the Muslim world. The Washington Post certainly hadn’t forgotten. The Post made absolutely no comment about the real or apparent ethnicity of the person quoted in the following item about anthrax, which ran in the Post’s November 1, 2001, issue.
“In hindsight, this has been an escalating event,” said Mohammad Akhter, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “We will continue to see new cases of anthrax disease.”
I was proud of the Washington Post and meant to write a complimentary letter to the editor, but I was too busy phoning in my tip to the FBI.
This was not a war between Western civilization and the Muslim world. There was, nonetheless, interesting reading to be done in Freedom in the World, a survey of political rights and civil liberties issued annually since 1955 by the nonpartisan organization Freedom House. Among countries whose populations are predominately (60 percent or more) Muslim, only remote Mali and tiny Benin were rated as “Free.” On a scale of 1 (Canada) to 7 (god-awful), no other Muslim country received a score better than 3 in political rights and 4 in civil liberties.
Would we have to fight all those countries? Or could we just give them a hug? A peace vigil was being held each Saturday at noon outside the town offices in Peterborough, New Hampshire, a few miles from the house we own there.
According to the November 15, 2001, edition of the local newspaper, the Monadnock Ledger, “One week, when it was rumored that CBS might cover the protestors, 45 people showed up.” By Saturday, November 17, the peace protest had, in effect, turned into a victory protest, and eight people were present. There was one sweet-faced, white-haired old lady, and then another who was so much older that she looked as if she might have been doing this sort of thing since the Hitler-Stalin Pact. There was a middle-aged man with hair that was both very long and gone from the top half of his head, a middle-aged woman upon whose features smugness had made an extensive and permanent settlement, a young man whose devil-may-care sideburns clashed with his go-to-hell golf pants, and a tweedy professor type who spent the whole vigil reading The Nation. Plus there was a mom in hand-knits trying to keep an eye on a rapidly fidgeting eight-year-old, and an Asian woman of college age who carried a sign reading RETALIATE WITH WORLD PEACE. Considering how world peace has gone for people in many places since the end of the Cold War, that’s a harsh sentiment. After a while, the Asian woman wandered off to window-shop.
Most local New Englanders were ignoring the vigil with the perfect obliviousness to all incongruity that has been a New England hallmark since Henry David Thoreau went off to live a hermit’s life at Walden Pond but continued to have his mother do his laundry. Only one fellow, flannel-clad, stopped to argue with the pacifists. “What do you do,” the fellow asked, “when they strike the homeland? What if they roll right in here with tanks?” I was about to think “Good for you” when the fellow went on to say, “But I’ll tell you one thing, I’ve refused to get the anthrax shots they’re trying to give everybody.”
So we see at what level debate about a just war and the natural right of self-defense was being conducted. The next morning, in a further sign of the times, Boston’s WBZ Radio played a recorded segment by Martha Stewart detailing the intricacies of flag etiquette. The New York Times Sunday Styles section could not resist a bow to the New Seriousness—or an Afghanistan hook—even when reviewing the stupidest possible television show.
First, network news programs broadcast images of Afghan women removing their burkas … A few hours later … models had peeled away their clothing and were showing off thong panties as ABC broadcast the Victoria’s Secret fashion show …
And the November 20, 2001, issue of the National Enquirer had a feature headed “EVEN PETS ARE STRESSED OUT FROM TERRORIST ATTACKS.” Here are some of the signs that your dog, cat, or hamster was suffering from the after-effects of 9/11:
• Sadness or glumness.
• Constant fighting with other pets.
• Lapses in toilet training.
• Pet is more needy and constantly seeks attention.
Speaking of constantly seeking attention, Bill Clinton showed up to give a talk at Harvard on November 19, perhaps to share anecdotes about his being a star quarterback on the undefeated Crimson gridiron squad of warrior lineage ancient. The Boston Globe didn’t mention his football heroics but did give Bill two fulsome stories and a teaser: “Fans flock to Clinton in Hub visit.” According to the Globe, Bill “blamed himself for not building stronger ties with the Muslim world during the 1990’s … He said he should have worked harder … to support overseas ‘nation building.’” In those days of flux and transformation there was comfort in knowing that some things stayed the same. It was still all about Bill. “America can exert influence, he said, by admitting its own faults.” Interesting source for that advice. “We cannot engage in this debate,” Bill was quoted as saying, “without admitting that there are excesses in our contemporary culture.”
During a question-and-answer period Clinton said that he supported the creation of a Palestinian state. It’s a good idea. Islamic fundamentalists will need someplace to go. Having them all in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would allow the War on Terror to be conducted in a compact area with well-mapped terrain and an excellent road system. As long as the Israelis don’t get involved. We wouldn’t want anybody on our side who was guilty of premature antiterrorism.
Kuwait and Iraq
March and April 2003
Why is Iraq so easy to harm and so hard to help? After eight days of war, U.S. troops had arrived at Karbala, sixty miles from Baghdad. Misery had arrived everywhere. But humanitarian relief had gotten only as far as Safwan and Umm Qasr, just across the border from Kuwait.
I could see one reason that relief had gone no farther. I was on the outskirts of Safwan on March 28, on the roof of a Kuwait Red Crescent tractor-trailer full of food donations. Below, a couple of hundred shoving, shouldering, kneeing, kicking Iraqi men and boys were grabbing at boxes of food.
Red Crescent volunteers provided the boxes, gingerly, to the mob. Each white carton would be grasped by three or four or five belligerents and pulled in three or four or five directions—tug-of-Congolese-civil-war.
Every person in the mob seemed to be arguing with every other person. Giving in to conflicting impulses to push themselves forward and pull others away, shouting Iraqis were propelled in circles. A short, plump, bald man sank in the roil. A small boy, red-faced and crying, was crushed between two bellowing fat men. An old man was trampled trying to join the fray.
The Iraqis were snatching the food as if they were starving, but they couldn’t have been starving or they wouldn’t have been able to snatch so well. Most looked fully fed. Some were too fit and active. Everyone behind the trailer was expending a lot of calories at noon on a ninety-degree day.
Looking out, I saw irrigated patches in the desert, at about the same density as the patches on the uniform of a mildly diligent Boy Scout. The tomatoes were ripe. Nannies, billies, and kids browsed between garden plots. Goat Bolognese was on offer, at least for some locals.
There was no reason for people to clobber one another. Even assuming that each man in the riot—and each boy—was the head of a family, and assuming the family was huge, there was enough food in the truck. Mohammed al-Kandari, a doctor from the Kuwait Red Crescent Society, had explained this to the Iraqis when the trailer arrived. Al-Kandari was a forceful explainer. He resembled a beneficent version of Bluto in the Popeye comics, or Bluto in Animal House.
Al-Kandari had persuaded the Iraqis to form ranks. They looked patient and grateful, the way we privately imagine the recipients of food donations looking when we’re writing checks to charities. Then the trailer was opened, and everything went to hell.
Al-Kandari marched through the donnybrook and slammed the trailer doors shut. He harangued the Iraqis. They lined up again. The trailer was opened, and everything went to hell.
Al-Kandari waded in and closed the trailer doors again. He swung his large arms in parallel arcs at the Iraqis. “Line up!” he boomed. “Queue!” he thundered—the Arabic-speaking doctor speaking to Arabic speakers in English, as if no Arabic word existed for the action.
Al-Kandari took a pad of Post-it notes and a marker pen from his labcoat pocket. “Numbers!” he said, still speaking English. “I will give you all numbers!” A couple of hundred shouldering, shoving Iraqi men and boys grabbed at the Post-it notes.
The doctor gave up and opened the trailer doors. I climbed the ladder behind the truck cab to get a better view.
Aid seekers in England would queue automatically by needs, disabled war vets and nursing mothers first. Americans would bring lawn chairs and sleeping bags, camp out the night before, and sell their places to the highest bidders. The Japanese would text-message one another, creating virtual formations, getting in line to get in line. Germans would await commands from a local official, such as the undersupervisor of the town clock. Even Italians know how to line up, albeit in an ebullient wedge. The happier parts of the world have capacities for self-organization so fundamental and obvious that they appear to be the pillars of civilization. But here—on the road to Ur, in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, where civilization has obtained for five thousand years longer than it has, for example, at a Libertarian Party confab in Phoenix—nothing was supporting the roof.
What I saw, however, wasn’t anarchy. British soldiers stood nearby, emirs of everything within rifle shot. The Iraqis did not use weapons or even fists in the aid scramble. Later a British soldier said, “We try to stay out of crowd control, because it looks like we’re trying to stop the aid distribution. But we can’t let them start fighting.” They did start fighting. A few Iraqis hit each other with sticks. They fought, however, at the front end of the truck. British soldiers broke it up.
The Iraqis didn’t try to climb into the tractor-trailer or break through its side doors. Red Crescent volunteers, coming and going from the back of the truck, were unmolested. Once an aid box was fully in an Iraqi’s control and had been pulled free from the commotion, no one tried to take it. I saw four boxes being guarded by a seven-year-old boy.
I watched a confident gray-haired man push toward the trailer gate. He had wire-rimmed glasses on the end of his nose and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He dove for a box, his glasses flying, the cigarette embers burning various gutra headdresses and dishdasha skirts. He disappeared for the better part of a minute. Then he came out on the other side of the throng, box under one arm and glasses somehow back on his face (but minus the cigarette). The gray-haired man looked around and delivered an open-handed whack to someone who, I guess, had indulged in a late hit.
I stared at the scrum for an hour. Now and then I’d be noticed on the trailer roof. Whenever I caught someone’s eye, I was greeted with a big, happy smile. The Iraqis were having fun.
Worse fun was to follow. We were out in the countryside because the first aid convoy to Safwan, two days before, had gone into the center of town and had been looted in a less orderly riot. I left the truck roof and interviewed al-Kandari, or tried to. The doctor was still being importuned for worthless numbers on Post-it notes. “We almost get organized,” he overstated, “but then some gangs will come from downtown, by running or by truck.” They were arriving already, in anything they could get to move—taxis, pickups, ancient Toyota Land Cruisers, bicycles, Russian Belarus tractors, a forklift, a dump truck.
The men from town promptly climbed into the Red Crescent truck. They threw boxes to their buddies. The volunteers fled. In a few minutes one squad of looters had seventeen aid boxes. The box throwers were dancing and singing in the back of the tractor-trailer. A reporter who’d covered the previous convoy said, “I saw these same guys.” He pointed to a wolfish-looking fellow who was pulling the tail of his gutra across his face. “You can tell the really bad ones,” the reporter said. “They have shoes.”
Al-Kandari ordered the driver to start the truck. The British troops cleared the highway. The truck drove back to Safwan with the trailer doors open and looters still inside. The other looters, in their miscellany of rides, gave chase. Men stood on car hoods and in pickup beds, trying to catch boxes being thrown from inside the trailer. Boxes fell, spraying fruit, rice, and powdered milk across the pavement. A flatbed truck passed us, piled with scores of aid boxes. The men standing on the bumpers had shoes. Horn honking, chanting, and other noises of celebration could be heard in the distance.
