WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WAR, AUNTIE?:

Culture War With B-2's (MAUREEN DOWD, September 22, 2002, NY Times)

The administration isn't targeting Iraq because of 9/11. It's exploiting 9/11 to target Iraq. This new fight isn't logical - it's cultural. It is the latest chapter in the culture wars, the conservative dream of restoring America's sense of Manifest Destiny.

The Bush hawks don't simply want to go back in a time machine and make Desert Storm end with a turkey shoot. They want to travel back even farther to the Vietnam War and write a more muscular coda to that as well.

Extirpating Saddam is about proving how tough we are to a world that thinks we got soft when that last helicopter left the roof of the American embassy in Saigon in 1975.

We can't prove it with al Qaeda. That's like grabbing smoke.

So former Nixon officials Cheney and Rummy are playing out their own "Four Feathers," rescuing the lost honor of the American empire in the sands of Arabia. They want to stomp on Saddam to exorcise the specters of Vietnam and Watergate - the ethical relativism, the lack of patriotism, the postmodern angst, the loss of moral authority, the feeling that America is in decline or in the wrong, the do-whatever-feels-good Clintonesque ethos.

Here's a very bad sign for a political commentator: you only sound intelligent when you're being sarcastic. For Ms Dowd in recent weeks this was true when she argued, one assumes tongue-in-cheek, that it is more important to reform Saudi Arabia than Iraq and last column when she sneered that the war in Iraq is about restoring civilization on the Euphrates and it's true here.
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 22, 2002 8:34 AM