Date:   8/19/2003 7:16:15 PM ( 21 y ago)
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TOWARD A WORLD TORWARD A WORLD SERVING AMERICA
Sun Aug 17,12:48 PM ET

By Richard Reeves

NEW YORK -- When I turn on my computer these days, I get a pop-up ad that
shows four "Friends"-like young men and women grinning and cheering on the
beach. They're all wearing tan camouflage hats under the words: "Get the Desert
Hat ... Worn by our Combat Troops in Iraq (news - web sites) ... Great for the
Summer! ... Click Here Now."

Behind the vivid happy campers is a ghost-like photo of
seven other young people, soldiers wearing the same hat --
and bulletproof vests. They are not smiling. They look
grim, perhaps scared. If you follow the clicks, you find out
the price of the hat is $24.95 and this: "These extremely
durable hats were designed to keep you cool in the hottest
weather. ... Use the soldiers' trick: Soak the hat in water,
wring it once, and wear it!"

The pictures are from separate orbits, and I wonder what the soldiers and the
beautiful ones have to do with each other. Are the beach people laughing at the
soldiers? What does this war have to do with us? Why are the grim young ones
out there, with people they don't know taking potshots at them? By now, whether
or not we think the war was necessary, it seems farther and farther away, irrational
to many.

Are we doing this for oil? That's too simple. All rational explanations -- our own
national security? Israel? justice? getting the bad guys? -- fail and are fading, like
the photos of the grim soldiers. The only answer that makes sense now is
ideology. Capturing, calming, controlling the Middle East is part of a vision of
what the world should be, of a planet serving America, of peoples yearning to be
all American.

This does make sense to those who share the vision, beginning with the president
of the United States. His national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice (news - web
sites), says that this war is linked to the American civil rights movement of her
youth; she calls it "the moral mission of our time." She shares the vision, but I
have my doubts about whoever is buying the hats.

I don't think the beautiful hat buyers or the stars-and-stripers selling the hats give
much of a damn one way or the other. I'm not sure I believe most Americans care.
You have to understand to care. And only the nucleus of war-lovers seem to
understand, for instance, why the White House leaked, on Thursday, the news
that the president has, at least for now, rejected plans to go to the United Nations
(news - web sites) to ask for some badly needed help in rounding up troops from
other countries and experienced nation-building types to help make Iraq into a
more decent and livable place.

We have won the war, some might say, and the world has accepted our regency,
so why not thank them and ask for a little postwar help? (Making one-on-one
deals to rent Bulgarians or Hondurans is a little too little, I'm afraid.) The reason,
even against the administration's own best political interests, is that destroying or
marginalizing the United Nations is part of the mission of this band of ideologues,
led, it seems, by the vice president, the secretary of defense and a few in-house
intellectuals.

This is a tough bunch, organized and led by a tough, narrow-minded president.
Right now they are, at home, in the process of knocking down potential
"democratic" (with a small "d") barriers to their big ideas. That is how I would
interpret efforts to remove the governor of California or to redistrict the states of
Texas and Colorado without benefit of a new census. The ideologues think this is
their time to make a new world, and that their real and potential opponents are
nothing more than near-sighted weaklings and petty compromisers.

And so far the tough guys, the true believers, are pretty much alone in the field,
doing what they believe is the work of God and history. The real problem for the
rest of us, including the so-called loyal opposition, the Democratic Party, is that
potential opponents are too confused or cowardly to make their opposition real
enough to matter.
 

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