Bedtime Stories

Our sixteen year old daughter came into our room after eleven o’clock last night to ask about the war.

“Is it a war on Iraq or a war on terrorism?” she asked.

In general, we have at least ten times more conversation about volleyball with my daughter than about anything political. Apparently she had been talking about it on the phone with her boyfriend (it’s still hard for me to use that phrase) and they’d gotten in an “argument” about how to define the war. Neither of them supports the war, but I’m not sure that they’d talked much about why they don’t support it.

We took a few minutes to go through the list.

1) It’s not a war on Iraq right now because the United States controls the current Iraqi government.

2) It’s not a war on terrorism in the sense that “terrorism” is a way of pursuing political goals through focused acts of violence without an army controlled by a government.

3) There are terrorists in Iraq, but they’re not the same terrorists who carried out 9/11.

4) We originally invaded Iraq because Saddam was supposed to have weapons of mass destruction that he might share with terrorists.

5) The weapons of mass destruction did not turn up.

6) There’s really no way to fight a conventional war against the concept of terror.

7) The President hinted strongly at the time that Iraq was tied to 9/11, but that was largely to convince America to go to war.

8) Even though North Korea really does have WMD, we haven’t invaded there. This might have something to do with oil or their lack of it.

9) One reason we went to Iraq was to spread democracy through the entire region.


As we talked about the differences between the real reason the U.S. is in Iraq and the nominal reasons given at various times, it occurred to me that it’s not easy to explain. It also occurred to me that a number of things have now been revealed and are well established, e.g. the lack of WMD and the lack of ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda that make the whole thing even harder to understand whether you’re an adult or a teenager. This became even clearer to me when my daughter then asked me the question, “Why do we stay there and what is it that we still expect to accomplish?”

We went down that list.

1) Saddam is out of power.
2) There are no WMD there.
3) There still seem to be a lot of terrorists in the world whether we stay in Iraq or withdraw.
4) Democracy is not spreading in Iraq much less the entire Middle East.
5) Gas costs a lot more than it did before the war.
6) The Pentagon just asked for another 100 billion dollars to continue the war.

She changed her question slightly to “What would it mean to win the war now?”

When I was sixteen years old back in 1971, it occurred to me that I had the same questions about Vietnam. We were just starting to learn that the Tonkin Gulf incident had largely been faked and that official statements about that war didn’t match reality. The question had not so subtly shifted from “Can we win or are we doing enough to win?” to “How do we get out?”

When my daughter was young enough not to have a boyfriend, bedtime stories were supposed to have happy endings. I'm left with a few thoughts. First, how in the hell did we let this happen again? Second, why are the people directly responsible for this still doing in office and making the decisions? Third, why is so much of the truth about the reality on the ground suddenly hitting the media and being acknowledged after the election? Doesn't it mean that the president et al. were simply lying for all of 2006 and much earlier about the state of things in Iraq? Finally, where does all of this leave my daughter when she gets to be our age?


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