Counting bodies before they’re bagged

With the president due at a Bangor hangar Tuesday, how do we feel about his adventure-to-be in Iraq? Congress is giving him a scarcely qualified go-ahead. The polls, when simplistically phrased, make it hard for pols to say No. We the People, however, now signal growing reservations about going it alone. Albeit still in small numbers, folks have started to march.

Rattled at such uppity criticism, the White House counters with airport stump speeches and absurd comparisons. Another Cuban Missile Crisis? Get real. Iraq lacks even a fraction of Soviet firepower, and Baghdad lies rather more than 90 miles from Key West. Better, in search of analogies, to remember Vietnam.

Like the current Iraq “crisis,” things started slowly and escalated by phases. Involvement began piecemeal under Eisenhower and Kennedy. Then came that era’s congressional green light, the 1964 Tonkin Gulf resolution. Then came the massive U.S. buildup under Lyndon Johnson.

Main difference between presidents 36 and 43? LBJ, for all his Lone Star clownishness, was a man whose first-hand experience with suffering had given him depth. As declassified documents now reveal, he understood risk and proceeded with a sense of tragedy rather than hegemony.

And then, inevitably, came the body bags. They too began in small numbers, but by war’s end 58,178 of our military personnel had died in Southeast Asia. Not to mention far, far more Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians. Lives wasted in a war that should never have been.

The casualty count went beyond dead, wounded and (still) missing in action. Vietnam itself was rendered a landscape of poisoned, defoliated bomb craters: its infrastructure in ruins, its children (many of them fathered by Americans) orphaned, only its resilient soul intact.

And America? We’d been torn apart: our youth radicalized, our loyal military despised, our trust in the presidency undermined, our economy shifted from Great Society butter to hyper-inflationary guns, and our credibility worldwide sorely compromised. America’s soul, when that awful war ended, was much less intact than Vietnam’s. Some would say that it’s never quite recovered, that triumphalism is needed to bring it back. Others say that post-9-11 flag-waving, at least in the bellicose style of Fox News, will make soul recovery harder than ever.

What casualties can we expect from a more or less unilateral, more or less immediate U.S. attack on Iraq? What bodies, literal and figurative, would likely get bagged and sent home? Four kinds come to mind.

1. Let’s start with literal bodies. Last decade’s Gulf War killed lots of Iraqis but far fewer Americans. Our strikes took place mostly from the air and in the desert. Reason: We didn’t go after Saddam and thus could proceed from afar. This time the aim would be regime change, located in downtown Baghdad. For a preview, rent the video of “Black Hawk Down.” Some Iraqis will, as Bush people promise, welcome us as liberators. Many others, heavily armed, will not. They’ll get down and dirty, fighting from house to house in cramped Middle Eastern alleys, with nowhere else to go but some putative Paradise. Who’s going to go after them? American troops, once on the ground, could find Baghdad another Mogadishu.

Unfazed by the prospect of conventional losses? Add the possibility of chemical and biological weapons, certainly in Saddam’s arsenal but kept in abeyance last time. Will he hold back, this time, with his back to the wall? And, as our own military laboratory personnel are well aware, these hideous devices of death don’t stop at lines on maps. Once released, gases and germs don’t need passports. They won’t drift as far as Bangor – unless via cargo container (another story) – but what about Amman or Ankara or Tel Aviv?

2. From literal to figurative bodies. We begin with the still war-torn carcass of Afghanistan, our self-declared first theater in the War on Terror. A year and two weeks into that drama, it remains very much a work in progress. The fat lady hasn’t sung yet. Indeed, if anything, she’s gotten thinner since June’s Loya Jirga. Less security on the ground. More opposition to mostly ineffective U.S. bombing from the air. Still no widely realized benefits from reconstruction.

Afghans and Afghan groupies (like me) are notorious for their disagreements, but on this much all of us – except muzzled U.S. officials – agree: The Bush Iraq ruckus will divert resources from work still to be done in Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai has said so repeatedly. So have U.N. leaders. The suspicion lurks that Iraq is foregrounded, pre-November election, in part to distract voter attention from negative momentum in Afghanistan.

3. What about the once and future war-torn carcass of Iraq itself? Latest morning-after plan from the administration: a post-World War II Japan-style occupation with Tommy Franks playing Douglas MacArthur. If that bit of casting seems somehow mis-scaled, let’s give Gen. Franks his due. He and CENTCOM have served well in unprecedented circumstances. Hopelessly un-squared away myself, I admire the resolve, discipline and capacity for focus of the uniformed men who’ve helped me understand Operation Enduring Freedom. Trouble is, Iraq is not Japan.

Japan is one of the world’s real nations. It has been real – geographically and ethnically – for centuries. Its government had to be restructured almost from scratch in 1945, but at least MacArthur started with a real polity.

Franks would start with a fantasy, a fictive state composed of (at least) three nations which, until the 1920s, were autonomous provinces of the Ottoman Empire and quite independent of each other. “Iraq” began as a British-French colonialist brainstorm, a way to deter native control over oil reserves. Eight decades of blowhard Iraqi propaganda may have convinced Baghdad, but the Kurdish North and the Shi’ite South have quite different self-identities. If anything, Frank’s political task would be more difficult than Karzai’s.

And if “things fall apart”? If “the center does not hold”? William Butler Yeats’ early 20th century cultural/moral vision could have concrete, political implications in the early 21st: destabilizing Turkey, Iran, Syria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan – all of which border on Iraq and half of which (the last three) are themselves fictive states.

4. Last and most important is the body of worldwide momentum known as multilateralism. Football stadium chants of “U-S-A” and “We’re Number One” may be good for egos, but – long term – they’re bad for souls, both individual and collective. Unless, of course, by “We” we mean “We inhabitants of this Earth.” What will become of the slow, awkward, painful, and sometime feckless momentum towards multilateralism if one country, by far the world’s most materially powerful, moves drastically in the other direction?

Respectful invitation to President Bush: Sir, you’re correct to confront Saddam Hussein. Most Americans agree with that need. The question is how, when, and with whom. Here’s an idea.

On Tuesday, ditch the hangar and come to downtown Bangor. I happen, finally and proudly, to be here. Sir, it’s a great place.

Come downtown, say, to the parking lot of the Bangor Daily News. Bring your party’s worthy candidates – that’s fine – but stick around after the stump speech. Talk with the folks. Tell them your ideas. Let them tell you theirs. Let’s keep the body bags to a minimum.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. He was last in Afghanistan in May on a U.S. government contract.