CASSANDRA

November 20th, 2003

Cassandra was the daughter of King Priam of Troy. She had been given the gift of prophecy and then been cursed so that her prophecies, thought always true, would never be believed. Homer reports in the Iliad that she warned against accepting the Trojan horse, but the Trojans were unable to look a gift horse in the mouth and took the horse inside the city gates. At night the horse opened up and let out Greek warriors and by the next day the city had fallen.

Cassandras are never very popular. Being right, even in retrospect, makes Cassandras seem like wise guys. Moreover, most people simply don’t want to hear about bad news to come. It is easier to proceed on one’s merry way in the hopes, as it were, that the Trojan War will not take place.

For reasons that pass my understanding, except for the curse of Cassandra, those of us who opposed the war against Saddam are largely held in contempt by roughly half our population. We are accused of being unpatriotic and soft on terrorism, much as two generations earlier those who opposed the arms race with the Soviet Union were called soft on communism.

The fact that we correctly anticipated that it was unlikely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, not to mention nuclear weapons, seems to have made no difference, although the contrary view was Bush’s justification for the war. And Bush successfully managed to confuse the public by implying that there was some connection between the al-Qaida attack on the World Trade Center and the Iraqi government. Of course, no such connection existed as even the administration admitted.

We Cassandras said that winning the Iraqi war would be very much like losing it. Such a war, we maintained, would create terrible animus against us in the Mohammedan world. The administration, we argued, had not the slightest idea of what it was getting into. Subsequent events in Iraqi, including the terrible and continual losses against American and coalition troops, have justified our position, but still we are labeled unpatriotic for saying so. We don’t “support our troops” our opponents say, although how getting them killed is supporting them is hard to understand.

My gift of prophecy tells me that Iraqi and the Arab world will become, if it is not already, a situation worse that we faced in Vietnam. It is a myth that Vietnam was lost because we lost the will to succeed. Vietnam was lost because we had no business being there and the people on the ground hated us as invaders. So it is with Iraq.

This situation is not helped by the administration’s lack of candor, to put that politely. Nothing this administration says about the situation can be trusted. Having misrepresented the justification for going to war, they somehow are constantly claiming victory in the occupation which obviously is going from bad to worse.

It would be wonderful if we could propose some easy solution to get us out of Iraq and leave Iraq a democratic country. Unfortunately, no such solution seems possible. Almost nowhere in the Middle East does democracy exist. Culturally, it is much like trying to teach a water buffalo to waltz. Moreover, if a democracy results in an Islamic theocracy, will we be happy?

Having resisted internationalization in the first place, it is unlikely that the UN will take over the problem we have created absent a complete abdication of our authority in Iraq. This administration will have to be even more desperate than it is now to do that. Other solutions, such as increasing the number of troops on the ground, which obviously make sense, have been resisted by the administration on political grounds. I was stunned just today to hear the argument that more troops would create more targets. On that theory, we should withdraw all troops. Obviously, any of our commanders in Iraq who publicly said we need more troops would find himself working for Halliburton.

Speaking of Halliburton, it strikes me as perfectly consistent that Bush, Cheney et al, have given their favorite rich people more riches by awarding sweetheart contracts to repair Iraqi infrastructure without competitive bidding while at the same time cutting their tax rates. Eighty-seven Billion Dollars indeed! Consider how that money, if used to support schools, might have decreased the property tax rate not to mention improve education.

This Cassandra maintains that Bush has led us to the end of American greatness as a major power and as an example of functioning democracy to the world. The decline will not come at once, but the evidence is clear. More than a billion people hate us. Our popularity in Europe is at an all time low. The administrations trade policy is bankrupting the country, as even such conservative figures as CNN’s Lou Dobbs agree. Civil liberties in our country, under the aegis of Attorney General John Ashcroft, have been suppressed in ways not seen since the Alien and Sedition Laws of John Adam’s administration. Hostility between the rival parties in congress has not been as high since shortly before the Civil War. The deficit is rising to unheard of heights and is clearly out of control. And one could go on.

Encouraged by his success in stealing the election in 2000, Bush has managed to raise a huge campaign war chest to insure victory in 2004. There is even reason to believe that the electronic voting machines, which replaced all those hanging chad machines, may be programmed to help Bush. What is worse, even should the Democrats succeed in defeating Bush and taking control of congress, the damage done by the Bush administration may be irreparable. Unhappily, I have yet to see a Democratic solution to the occupation of Iraq that seems to work and the ideology of the judges Bush was successful in appointing to the bench, may haunt us for years.

As I’ve said, we Cassandras don’t get no respect.