Thursday, May 31, 2007
Opinion
After the war
Generally, print journalists are better in print than in conversation...
| If we leave Iraq in the mangled mess it’s in now, we may be certain that the government that takes over there will be extremely hostile to us. We may also be certain that anyone who supported us will be killed unless they flee that country. |
By Stephanie Ramage
Generally, print journalists are better in print than in conversation. So maybe my attempted interview with a popular, nationally known political columnist last week was just a manifestation of that.
It started out well enough. He’s intelligent. He’s lived an amazing life. Currently, he has one of the best gigs in the country, which he fully deserves, because he’s an extremely clever, entertaining writer, really one of the most insightful voices in media. But when a discussion of Americans’ ideological differences led to my indication that I support the war in Iraq, he reacted as if I had said that I have sex with Kurt Cobain’s corpse.
I should state from the outset that this particular journalist’s identity won’t be revealed here. First, because I said I wouldn’t. Second, because his identity doesn’t matter: The media is replete with journalists like this one. His specific identity is a distraction.
Back to our conversation. He angrily demanded to know how I could support something so bad as the war in Iraq. I tried to explain that there will be a future for Iraq whether we stay or leave, but that, if we leave before we’ve established something that resembles a functioning, peaceful democracy, that country’s future and ours will be entwined in particularly unpleasant ways. But, like so many people who want an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, he didn’t want to talk about the future—which means he’s not really talking about peace.
“What do you think we should do?”
I asked.
“We should get the hell out,” he said. “Tens of thousands of people have been killed.”
“What will happen when we get the hell out?” I asked.
“Why should we give a s**t?” he yelled. “There will be a massacre, a bloodbath, but why should we give a s**t?”
“What will happen, do you think, after the massacre?” I asked.
“They will eventually figure out what they need to do and the local strong man will take over or it will be partitioned or Iran will take it over or Syria will. I don’t know. Why the f**k should we care?”
He was yelling. His voice was shaking. He pushed me there, so there we were, with him screaming and me not knowing how to leave a topic that was clearly upsetting him.
“If it’s partitioned, they’re still going to have a civil war,” I said, recalling that his first argument against the war was that it had cost tens of thousands of lives and yet, if by leaving we precipitate a massacre, the loss of tens of thousands more lives didn’t seem to bother him.
“Why should we give a s**t?” he asked again, his voice raised a notch higher.
There are so many reasons why, and he was so irrational, it was hard to know where to begin. It was intimidating—the guy’s been on “The Colbert Report,” for god’s sake. But I thought of something that might lead him to more interesting ground: the Hezbollah pipeline and how Iraq at least would provide a buffer that would break the supply line of weapons and cash from Iran to Syria to Lebanon and then, in some cases, on to Paraguay.
Moreover, if we leave Iraq in the mangled mess it’s in now, we may be certain that the government that takes over there will be extremely hostile to us. We may also be certain that anyone who supported us will be killed unless they flee that country. But since Syria is unlikely to take them, Jordan has all the refugees it can handle and Europe has virtually locked its doors against Muslim immigrants, they will be coming here, possibly by the hundreds of thousands.
And we should take them.
If we don’t take them, we are the most morally bankrupt country in the world. If we wreck their country and leave there to die those who supported us, then we deserve every bad thing that happens to us. So are you prepared to fling open the doors to hundreds of thousands of people who are mostly illiterate, unskilled and non-English speaking? People who are culturally more different from us than any Hispanic immigrant, legal or illegal, has ever been?
And not all of them will have supported us. Some will just want to find a better life anywhere but there. A few may even be outright terrorists who will use the evacuation as a way of getting into the United States.
If we abandon Iraq, we are morally obligated to take care of those who trusted us and who would, as a result of abandonment, be killed. People like the columnist I spoke with aren’t thinking about that.
“Oh,” he sneered, picking up the Hezbollah lead, “so you’re taking the line that if we leave, it will follow us home?”
“It will follow us home,” I said.
“This is asinine!” he yelled. “I’m not going to continue this conversation!”
And he hung up. SP
Stephanie Ramage is news editor of the Sunday Paper.