Truth - Al Franken [100]
The President sat back, adjusted his codpiece for what seemed like the ninety-ninth time, and began humming “Hail to the Chief.”
“Please, sir,” Lussier said through clenched teeth. “Please don’t hum ‘Hail to the Chief.’ ”
Sweat rolled down the pilot’s brow as he approached the rolling carrier deck. Commander Lussier mustered every ounce of his training as both a sailor and a pilot to tune out his aggravating passenger and focus on the task at hand. But Bush couldn’t help himself and flipped a circuit breaker, setting off an ear-piercing alarm in the cramped cockpit. Distracted, Lussier came in a little too high and too fast, his tailhook snagging the fourth and final wire. The rugged thirty-nine-year-old pilot knew he’d get a razzing in the ready room, in addition to the razzing he was currently getting from the President, who knew just enough about flying to be a critic.
Bush’s codpiece led the way onto the carrier deck, followed a few inches later by the President himself. As the young men and women in uniform gathered around him, cheering and slapping him on the back, he gave a thumbs-up in the general direction of one of the thirteen cameras Karl Rove had strategically placed around the USS Abraham Lincoln with an eye toward dynamite footage for a campaign commercial. It was the kind of movie moment the President relished. He hadn’t felt so much like Tom Cruise since he had danced around the White House in his underwear, lip-synching to Bob Seger, much to the embarrassment of his daughters and their friends.
The President took his place at the podium photogenically positioned in front of the enormous “Mission Accomplished” banner that Rove had ordered up and that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root had manufactured at a cost of $738,000 after being awarded a no-bid contract. Major combat operations in Iraq, he told the world, were over.
Roll credits.
Eight thousand miles away, a very different kind of movie was unfolding. Instead of a Hollywood blockbuster, the movie taking place in Iraq at that moment was more like a gritty documentary that may win an award or two, but that no one really wants to see.
Hospitals, government ministries, and arms depots were being looted; yet another attack on American soldiers in Fallujah foreshadowed what would become a vicious and virulent insurgency; and Iraqis struggled to survive without basic services, which had been destroyed in the early days of the fighting and which to this day remain far short of their prewar standard. Weeks into the war, American viceroy Jay Garner didn’t even have access to a working telephone to use to report to Washington on how badly things were going.
Iraq was descending into chaos. Exactly as the unheeded postwar planners had prophesied. But you don’t need to be an expert to know that looting is a bad idea. It spits in the face of the rule of law. It rips the very fabric of civil society. It turns ordinary people into criminals. And on a more practical level, looting means that things that you need won’t be there when you need them. In the first days after the fall of Saddam’s regime, seventeen of the government’s twenty-three ministries were not just looted, but gutted—stripped of wiring, insulation, and plumbing.
No one in their right mind thinks that there’s any justification for looting. Except, that is, for the man who was in charge of preventing it, United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. On April 11, 2003, as the international looting Olympics were getting under way in Baghdad, Rumsfeld was asked whether there had been a plan to restore law and order after the war. His answer:
RUMSFELD: Stuff happens! . . . And it’s untidy. And freedom’s untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.
I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that I was free to walk over to Broadway, throw a brick through the window of Circuit City, and make off with a fifty-five-inch Fujitsu flat-screen plasma television. I mean, I want one of those babies. And I live in