[lit-ideas] Holy Shiite, what a week
- From: JulieReneB@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2004 23:12:43 EDT
Holy Shiite, What a Week!
A Strange Time, as Questions and Deaths Mount
by Susan Lenfestey
What a week.
Last week was holy week for Christians and it was the bloodiest week of this
ill-begotten war. The uprising, led by the Mahdi militia of Muqtada al-Sadr,
the extremist Shiite cleric, erupted after the United States shut down
Al-Sadr's viciously anti-American newspaper for printing lies that incite
violence.
Didn't most of the newspapers in this country print the Bush administration's
... oh, never mind.
We all saw what followed: The bodies of American contractors brutally beaten,
burned and gleefully displayed, civilian workers from Japan and other
coalition countries captured and held, some with knives to their throats, our
forces
bombing a mosque in Fallujah and the subsequent walling-off of the city, where
over 600 Iraqis are said to have died, and the death of nearly 50 Americans,
including three young Minnesotans.
Topping it off stateside was the eerily emotionless testimony of Condoleezza
Rice. She was a wall of sound, talking through and ignoring the commissioners'
questions, unless they served her own purposes. Her poise and mental agility
is impressive, but her demeanor was as veiled and disturbing to me as the
photo that ran last Sunday in many newspapers including this one, of the Shiite
women of the Mahdi Army, marching in full chador like a phalanx of Darth
Vaders.
I mean, they're my sisters, Condi included, and I want to like them, but they
scare me for many reasons, including their allegiance to the men they serve,
men who are not known for their women-friendly programs.
By the end of this tumultuous week there were enough disturbing images abroad
and scraps of damaging information at home to further muddy this already
murky mess, but surely one emerging picture is the enormous failure of
leadership
by this administration.
It wasn't reassuring to learn that the now-released Aug. 6, 2001, PDB
entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S." was considered by the members
of
our top security team, from President Bush on down, to be too vague to be
"actionable," despite references to hijacked airplanes and New York City. It
turns
out we're not the only ones who are clueless when there's an Orange Alert.
Rice's ability to duck her own responsibility and paint those beneath her as
the source of all failure isn't leadership, it's a defensive shellac job,
shiny and protective.
But the real lack of leadership lies with the president, who seems
increasingly immature and out-of-touch. If he grasps the gravity of where he
has taken
us, he fails to show it. Much has been made of the premature flight suit dance
last May, but it goes on and on -- the "bring 'em on" taunt to the Iraqi
resisters, the jocular search for the missing WMD under his desk, the flippant
language and imagery of "swatting at flies," the refusal to appear before the
9/11
Commission without Vice President Dick Cheney at his side, the swagger,
bravado and tough talk, and finally, spending this most bloody of weeks down on
the
Crawford ranch.
Last Thursday, as Rice was testifying and our troops in Iraq faced an
increasingly perilous mission, the president was leading representatives of 22
hunting and fishing organizations on a tour of his 1,600-acre ranch. The next
day,
as the death toll mounted, Bush went fishing for bass with Roland Martin, host
of a TV fishing show. According to Martin, Bush took the biggest catch of the
day, a 4-pound bass.
In this day of instant communications I'm sure he's on the job, or can
quickly be called in from the bass pond if needed. But how can the White House,
so
obsessed with image that it bans the media from covering the return of our dead
soldiers to Dover Air Force Base, not see how this looks?
If the president expects Americans to die for a noble quagmire of a cause,
and the rest of us to pay for it with our children's futures, he should
sacrifice a week at the ranch to make a grown-up stab at getting us out of this
mess,
and not just at getting himself reelected.
He could start by living up to his own words from the 2000 campaign: "If
we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us. If we're a humble nation, but
strong,
they'll welcome us."
Susan Lenfestey (soolen@xxxxxxx) is a Minneapolis writer.
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