"No."
"What about the Senate bipartisan panel that concluded the same thing -- that Bush didn't lie?"
"No."
"What about David Kaye?" I said.
"Who?"
"He's the guy Bush sent to Iraq to find stockpiles of WMD. While he didn't find stockpiles of WMD, he spoke of the possibility that Saddam transferred WMD out of the country during the run up of the war. Perhaps more important, he said that no intelligence analyst -- all of whom, by the way, thought Saddam had stockpiles of WMD -- felt pressured to lie simply to provide a motive for Bush to go to war."
"But, we have been in Iraq longer than we fought the whole World War II. This is crazy," the receptionist replied.
"Crazy?" I said, "I know of no stopwatch for war. During the Civil War, both sides expected it to last just a few weeks, no more than a few months. During the Revolutionary War, Gen. George Washington lost battle after battle such that some wanted him replaced by a more competent general. The early years of World War II seemed particularly gloomy, but President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't say, Well, we've been at this for a bit. Let's call it a day and go home.'"
That was too much for a guy sitting in the waiting room, who chimed in, "But the war has made things worse."
So now, I am getting it from all sides.
Turning to the gentleman, I said, "I guess you assume that everything was going swimmingly until Bush stuck a stick into the hornet's nest. Do you remember the 1979 seizure of American hostages, who were held for over 400 days? Do you remember the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia? Do you remember the attack on the Marine barracks during the Reagan Administration, or the attacks on our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya? What about the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993? Not to mention the attack on 9-11 that killed over 3,000 on U.S. soil. Yeah, if only Bush hadn't ticked off so many people, the Disney Company, by now, would've built a theme park in Pakistan."
And so it went. To paraphrase Osama bin Laden, if we lose the war in Iraq, it will not be lost on the battlefield, but in places like my doctor's office.
"Mr. Elder," said the nurse's assistant, "the doctor will see you now." And not a moment too soon -- for them. |