Dances With Wolfowitz (Dowd alert)

The New York Times ^ | 04/09/03 | Maureen Dowd

[Pokey78]

WASHINGTON — There is an unforgettable scene in "Lawrence of Arabia" when an agonized Lawrence resists as a British commander in Cairo presses him to return to the desert to lead the Arabs revolting against the Ottoman Turks.

Lawrence: "I killed two people. One was yesterday. He was just a boy, and I led him into quicksand. The other was . . . well . . . before Aqaba. I had to execute him with my pistol, and there was something about it that I didn't like."

General Allenby: "That's to be expected."

Lawrence: "No, something else."

General Allenby: "Well, then let it be a lesson."

Lawrence: "No . . . something else."

General Allenby: "What then?"

Lawrence: "I enjoyed it."

We were always going to win the war with Iraq. We were always going to get to some triumphant moment, like the great one on Fox at 1:30 a.m. Eastern time on Monday morning, when two G.I.'s from Georgia held up a University of Georgia bulldog flag they intended to drape over Saddam's presidential palace in Baghdad, and others mischievously headed upstairs to try out Saddam's gold fixtures in the master bathroom.

The big question about the war was, How much blood could Americans bear?

Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were determined to lead America out of its post-Vietnam, post-Mogadishu queasiness with force and casualties, to change the culture to accept war as a more natural part of a superpower's role in the world.

Their strategy might be described as Black Hawk Up.

Mr. Cheney's war guru, Victor Davis Hanson, writes in his book "An Autumn of War" that war can be good, and that sometimes nations are better off using devastation than suasion. Mr. Davis cites Sherman's march through Georgia, the 19th century's great instance of shock and awe, as a positive role model.

Polls and interviews show that in their goal of making Americans less rattled by battle, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney have succeeded: most Americans are showing a stoic attitude about the dead and the wounded so far.

(Perhaps the American tolerance for pain is owed to the fact that much of the pain is not shown on television, embeddedness notwithstanding.)

Wolfowitz of Arabia and the other administration hawks are thrilled with U.S. hawkishness.

When Mr. Wolfowitz was on "Meet the Press" on Sunday his aides sat in the green room watching the monitor and high-fiving their boss's performance.

As American forces made their first armored thrusts into Baghdad, visions of a JDAM strike on Damascus danced in the hawks' heads.

James Woolsey, a Wolfie pal and a prospective administrator in occupied Iraq, had bluntly told U.C.L.A. students last week that to reshape the Middle East, the U.S. would have to spend years and maybe decades waging World War IV. (He counted the cold war as World War III.)

He identified America's enemies as the Islamist Shia who run Iran, the Iranian-supported Hezbollah, the fascist Baathists in Iraq and Syria, and the Islamist Sunni who run Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups.

Mr. Wolfowitz, however, played the diplomat on Sunday, gliding past Tim Russert's probing on whether the neo-cons' dreams of other campaigns in Syria, Iran and North Korea would come true. Pressed, he said, "There's got to be change in Syria as well."

The Times's David Sanger reported that when a Bush aide stepped into the Oval Office to tell the president recently that his hard-boiled defense secretary had been shaking a fist at Syria, Mr. Bush smiled and said one word: "Good."

The administration already sounds as triumphalist as Lawrence at his giddiest.

The success of this war should not leave us infatuated with war. Americans' tolerance for these casualties should not be mistaken for a willingness to absorb endless American sacrifice on endless battlefields.

Victory in Iraq will be a truly historic event, but it will be exceedingly weird and dangerous if this administration treats it as an overture.

There remains the unfinished business of Osama bin Laden. But the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom should not mark the beginning of Operation Eternal War.   

[Pokey78]

Catherine Zeta-Jones
2003 Academy Award Winner
Best Supporting Actress

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From Oxblog:

IMMUTABLE LAWS OF DOWD

1. Ashcroft never deserves credit.

2. Offering constructive solutions to problems, instead of whining endlessly about them, is a sign of weakness.

3. The People Magazine principle: all political phenomena can be explained with reference solely to caricatures of the personalities involved ("Dubya" is stupid; "Poppy" is an aristocrat; Cheney is macho-man; etc.). Any reference to the common good or even to old-fashioned politicking is, like, so passe.

4. It is much better to be cute than coherent.

5. Maureen knows best. Her long years as a columnist (doing basically what your great-aunt Tillie does in the nursing home bull sessions, but getting paid for it) have given her deep insight into foreign relations, politics, welfare, the Constitution, and all other topics. To disagree with Maureen in any way is not only a sign of being wrong, it's a hallmark of pure evil...or at least membership in the NRA, which is pretty much the same thing.

6. It is usually possible and always desirable to name-drop and name-call in the same sentence.

7. The particulars of my consumer-driven, shamefully self-involved life reveal universal truths.

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Explanation of the Dowd/Douglas connection: by Miss Marple- 2/11/03

Ms. Dowd was escorted around New York and DC for many months by one Michael Douglas of Hollywood fame and fortune. She got to go to all the best parties, was photographed for the tabloids, and was picking out a gown to wear at the Oscars. Of course, Michael had become interested in her during Clinton's impeachment, when she had written some very anti-Clinton columns. After a few weeks of the Michael treatment, she began to write anti-Starr, ant-Newt columns, ignoring Clinton.

Then Clinton was acquitted by the Senate. In an amazing coincidence, Michael Douglas dropped Ms. Dowd like a hot potato, and instead picked up a hot tomato, Catherin Zeta-Jones, who subsequently bore him a son and they were married.

Ms. Dowd cannot get over her tragic loss. Her columns are increasingly anti-Bush, in the hope of impressing her lost love, Michael.

In addition, we think she has a secret crush on the President and is trying to get him to pay attention to her. Ha!

[JZoback]

Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were determined to lead America out of its post-Vietnam, post-Mogadishu queasiness with force and casualties, to change the culture to accept war as a more natural part of a superpower's role in the world.

Can she really be that clueless? In a word. Yes

Their strategy might be described as Black Hawk Up.

She should be bitch slapped for writing that. What a pig.

[The Hon. Galahad Threepwood]

If Bush intends to keep his promise to strike the terrorist regimes, the Administration really needs to start an intensive campaign to explain the particular dangers of state sponsorship of terrorism, and why terrorists will be much less dangerous is their state sponsors are overthrown.

Dowd still won't get it, but Dowd is particularly dim. The problem is that I don't think the American people get it, and I think it's largely Bush's fault for not ramming it down their throats.

[Cicero]

Someone really has to feed that woman her meds.

[oust the louse]

"Their strategy might be described as Black Hawk Up. She should be bitch slapped for writing that. What a pig."

She should be bitch slapped just for being herself and then again for saying what she said.Liberal witch crying again...

[goldstategop]

Maureen Dowd thinks she's living in the Kevin Costner flick.

[Search4Truth]

"Dowd still won't get it, but Dowd is particularly dim. The problem is that I don't think the American people get it, and I think it's largely Bush's fault for not ramming it down their throats."

Nothing succeeds like success.

President Bush deposing Saddam will be a big notch in his gun and the reward a sizable amount of political capital. Lets see how he spends it.

[Mo1]

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[dighton]

[sinkspur]

The problem is that I don't think the American people get it, and I think it's largely Bush's fault for not ramming it down their throats.

President's don't "ram" things down American's throats! What a mindless image!

There have been no further terrorist attacks, alQaeda has been decimated, Iraq liberated, and China is already leaning on North Korea to clean up its act.

Bush gets it, and the American people love him for it.

And the terrorists are gradually being eliminated.

[CFC__VRWC]

Perhaps the American tolerance for pain is owed to the fact that much of the pain is not shown on television, embeddedness notwithstanding.

Or perhaps it's simply owed to the fact that many of us who don't live on the Upper West Side haven't forgotten the pain we felt on Sept. 11, 2001, when 3,000 of our fellow Americans were massacred by the trash we're starting to take out with this war.

Mo needs to go gargle with another fifth of bourbon.

[UncleSamUSA]

Once again the living Barf Machine, Maureen Dowd has totally botched a great movie in a feckless attempt to make some sort of liberal-weenie point.

The memorable scene about Lawrence's character comes at the very beginning when Lawrence does a trick for his soldier comrades in Cairo. He lights a match and then moves his fingers up the lighted match slowly until they finally put out the flame in a small puff of smoke.

"You'll do that once too often, you're only flesh and blood!" protests one soldier.

A bit later, as he is about to leave a second soldier tries the match trick that Lawrence had done, and as he glides his fingers up the match he screams in pain and throws the match down.

"Ouch.. it bloody well hurts."

"Of course it does" says Lawrence.

"Well, what's the trick then?" says the soldier.

"The trick, William Potter, is NOT MINDING that it hurts."

And that, sports fans, is a far better metaphor for what is happening now in Iraq than Dowd's quote, which actually highlights the personal moral ambivalence (as well as the later sexual ambivalence) of Lawrence himself.

For the fact is that no one is accusing President Bush, or Secy Rumsfeld or even Wolfowitz of being bloodthirsty or enjoying violence for its own sake, or for being morally ambivalent in any way. Or at least no one with even the smallest semblance of a brain is. Which undoubtedly leaves Miss Dowd out.

[BerniesFriend]

OMG!!!!!!!!!...I laughed so hard I almost fell out of my chair..I expected some kind of CZJ pics..but to have her Oscar pic upfront with her big and pregnant..with another one of doofy dowd's columns...made my night..

[Hildy]

GIVE IT UP..women get over old boyfriends. ENOUGH with the Michael Douglas thing.

[AsYouAre]

Prediction: As hard as it is to believe, Maureen Dowd will get more shrill and even the NYT will get fed up with Maureen and fire her. You heard it hear, first!

[sydbas]

Has to be the first time Ms. Dowd has ever mentioned Georgia, or any other state south of the Mason Dixon Line, more than once in anything she has written.

[Kenno]

Reading Maureen Dowd, you actually start to understand where paleoconservatives get so bitter. She represents the epitome of American decadence. Look at her snideness toward Lawrence of Arabia, a greater man than any of her limp-wristed Manhattan associates. To her way of thinking, anybody who doesn't sit around talking in a high-pitched voice about his or her girlfriend or boyfriend (not necessarily respectively) and drinking latte is someone to be insulted. Of course, where the paleos are wrong is in thinking that she represents the dominant trend in American society today. Understandably, paleos look at Euroamericantrash like Maureen Dowd and say, "If this is the future, I'll take the past," and try to isolate themselves in a synthetic past. We traditional conservatives (not neocons) look at her and her ilk, decide we took a wrong turn somewhere, and try to find the correct off-ramp that will take us into a future of American greatness instead of Maureen Dowdiness.

[L`enn]

There remains the unfinished business of Osama bin Laden.

She does not get it. This is all woven together, bin Laden, Iraq, Syria, are all different chapters in the same book.