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Tuesday, March 11, 2003
Triumphalism at the Marriott crepe bar.
Michael Kelly, all decked out in his bush jacket and elastic-waist Dockers, reports from Kuwait City where he is making short work on the mini-bar in his room:
KUWAIT CITY -- Monday morning, at breakfast in the Marriott hotel here, a man at the table next to mine was talking on his cell phone in one of those brisk executive cell-phone voices. He was not in uniform, but from his neat, straight, clipped look he was military of some sort. He was saying that he was calling on behalf of Capt. So-and-So, following up on a call from yesterday, trying to make clear exactly what the captain needed.
What does this all mean? Why war is just around the corner and Uncle Sam is spreading Social Security dollars to a favored few as part of Operation Bush’s Manhood.
But America’s manhood, as exemplified by the sweaty, conference room-bound Kelly is at stake too:
The historian Paul Kennedy wrote awhile back that the immense disparity of power between the United States and the rest of the world, unique in degree in history, was remarkable enough, but that what was really extraordinary was that the United States was able to achieve this by spending less than 3 percent of gross domestic product annually. A similar sense strikes an observer here.
It is remarkable enough that the United States is setting out to undertake the invasion of a nation, the destruction of a regime and the liberation of a people. But to do this with only one real military ally, with much of the world against it, with a war plan that is still, by necessity, in flux days before the advent, with an invasion force that contains only one fully deployed heavy armored division -- and to have, under these circumstances, the division's commander sleeping pretty good at night: Well, that is extraordinary.
A victory on these terms will change the power dynamics of the world. And there will be a victory on these terms.
USA! USA! USA!
.........until a suicide bomber blows up a Starbucks in Georgetown and then even smug curbside flag-wavers like Kelly might realize that the war has come home because a group of neo-con chickenhawks handed a baseball bat to a simpleton and told him that the hornets nest in the backyard was a piñata.
Where's the victory in that?
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