GLORIOUS QUEST

The war of 1,000 Beltway tongues lacked clarity, common sense (James P. Pinkerton, 7/20/03, Miami Herald)

One day, this Iraq War will be thought of as the Intellectuals' War. That is, it was a war conceived of by people who possessed more books than common sense, let alone actual military experience.

Disregarding prudence, precedent and honesty, they went off -- or, more precisely, sent others off -- tilting at windmills in Iraq, chasing after illusions of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and false hope about Iraqi enthusiasm for Americanism, and hoping that reality would somehow catch up with their theory. The problem, of course, is that wars are more about bloodletting than book learning.

Tilting at windmills is what Don Quixote did. When I left for Iraq in June, I took along a copy of The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote, the comic/epic/tragic novel by Miguel de Cervantes. I had never read the book, but I knew of critic Lionel Trilling's recommendation: ''All prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.'' And since much of what was said about Iraq was so obviously fiction, I figured that the work would be an enlightening travel companion. [...]

Quixote's obsession was chivalry -- that is, the medieval knightly code of etiquette and martial arts that supposedly prepared a man for a quest or a crusade. The fact that not much of it had any basis in reality was no deterrent to an active fantasy life. So when Quixote rode off, accompanied by his sidekick, Sancho Panza, he did far more harm than good.

And so it is with the book-fed brainiacs who helped talk George Bush into the Iraq War. These people are commonly known as neoconservatives, or ''neocons'' for short, but they are anything but conservative. [...]

[I]n a world that's mostly gray, ''moral clarity'' becomes a synonym for tunnel vision. To see something complicated as simple requires that the seer leave out critical details. And thus amid all the intellectual intoxication, a lionized, neocon-ized Bush didn't worry about such variables as the world reaction to America's plan, not to mention the Iraqi reaction.

Cervantes would have seen it coming. The tales of chivalric righteousness that Quixote read ''took full possession'' of his brain, filling the knight-errant with the belief that ''the world needed his immediate presence.'' And so the Man from La Mancha went off to his adventures, plunging into gratuitous battles with the innocent and the harmless -- innkeepers, friars, puppeteers, shepherds and their sheep, and, most famously, windmills. [...]

And so there will be a reckoning, just as there was for Quixote. After 1,000 pages of adventures, Quixote takes sick with a fever. But as his temperature rises, his mind finally clears. ''I have acted as a madman,'' he laments. And he realizes that his nuttiness was brought on by ''reading such absurdities.'' Now, at last, on his death bed, he has come to ''abominate and abhor'' the books he wasted his life reading.

Mr. Pinkerton may well be right in every word he's written about how futile the war was and the world may indeed be beyond salvation, but he's entirely missed the point of Don Quixote and of the war. When the noble Don lies dying he does indeed regret the life he's lived and the dreams he's dreamed, but those around him lament his return to sanity and desire the old Don back. As Don Antonio Moreno says when Don Quixote's friends come to fetch him home to be cured:

Ah, sir, may God forgive you for the damage you've done to the whole rest of the world, in trying to cure the wittiest lunatic ever seen! Don't you see, my dear sir, that whatever utility there might be in curing him, it could never match the pleasure he gives with his madness? But I suspect that, despite all your cleverness, sir, you cannot possibly cure a man so far gone in madness, and, if charity did not restrain me, I would say that Don Quijote ought never to be rendered sane, because if he were he would lose, not only his witticisms, but those of Sancho Panza, his squire, any one of which has the power to turn melancholy into happiness.

We read Don Quixote today because we believe in his chivalric code, not in order to see him abandon it. That is why the best Broadway song ever is sung entirely without irony:

To dream the impossible dream,
to fight the unbeatable foe,
to bear with unbearable sorrow,
to run where the brave dare not go...

To right the unrightable wrong,
to love pure and chaste from afar,
to try when your arms are too weary
to reach the unreachable star!

This is my quest --
to follow that star
no matter how hopeless,
no matter how far --
To fight for the right
without question or pause,
to be willing to march into hell
for a heavenly cause!

And I know
if I'll only be true
to this glorious quest
that my heart
will be peaceful and calm
when I'm laid to my rest.

And the world will be better for this
that one man, scorned and covered with scars,
still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable stars!

Is not the world a better place for Don Quixote having followed his delusions? Who would live in a world where such delusions did not exist?

So, sure, the notion that America can bring liberty to the world may be nutty, but as Archibald MacLeish said: "There are those, I know, who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American dream." If we give up that dream then what is left of the idea of America that's worth saving? If they cure us, let it be on our death bed, like the Don, so that we die with the dream. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 20, 2003 4:10 PM