War And Peace

By Keith Boykin, in politics
Friday, September 20 2002, 6:00AM

There's an unforgettable line from the 1960s television show "Get Smart" where Don Adams foils a would be murder by holding up a big thick copy of "War and Peace" through which the bullet cannot penetrate. When asked how he knew the book would stop the bullet, Adams replies, "Nobody gets through war and peace."

In today's America, it seems nobody gets through peace at all as we remain in a state of perpetual warfare. In Don Adams's generation, communism was always the enemy. But enemies are harder to find nowadays, although no less important to the American psyche.

As I watched a television movie about Manuel Noriega last night, it occurred to me how little has changed from Bush's father's administration to the present. Noriega, an American-backed general, was cut loose by the Bush Administration when he no longer served Washington's interests.

The media played right along in vilifying him as him as a drug-indicted "thug," "dictator," and "strongman" without seriously questioning the White House. To look at the situation with fresh eyes today, it's hard to believe a two-bit Central American dictator was such a serious threat to national security that it justified a full-scale invasion of a sovereign country. But Americans believed it.

If we have learned anything from Vietnam, Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandal, we should know that our government sometimes lies, and the media are often too timid to tell us until it's patently obvious to everyone.

The case for war with Iraq is another lie. It is a ploy to exploit the legitimate anxiety from the September 11 attacks into a drumbeat for war, and unfortunately, it's working. A few carefully orchestrated speeches, a vote in Congress, a forced UN Security Council resolution, and voila!: the unnecessary war will soon appear to be a "justified war."

As Robert Scheer writes in an article in Salon.com, Iraq's nuclear program "lags far behind that of other unstable extremist nations, including Iran, North Korea and Pakistan. Yet we have lifted sanctions against Pakistan intended to end its nuclear program, are building a nuclear plant for power generation in North Korea and have chosen to ignore Iran's well-documented nuclear weapons program."

Scheer says that if concern over Iraq's nuclear program were truly the issue, "we could destroy any suspicious installations from the air, as the Israelis did two decades ago in demolishing Iraq's French-built nuclear reactor." But that would be too logical for Bush: Damn the facts. Send in the marines.

Unless the American people put the brakes on the war machine in the White House, the U.S. will be at war with Iraq by the end of the year. As Abraham Lincoln said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time."

© Copyright 2002 by Keith Boykin.