THE NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED THURSDAY AUGUST 18, 2005 YT A23
_BOB HERBERT
Blood Runs Red, Not Blue
| You have to wonder whether reality ever comes knocking on George W. Bush's door. If it did, would the presi- dent with the unsettling demeanor of a boy king even bother to answer? Mr. Bush is the commander in chief who launched a savage war in Iraq and now spends his days happily riding his bicycle in Texas. This is eerie. Scary. Surreal. The war is going badly and lives have been lost by the thousands, but there is no real sense, either at the highest levels of government or in the nation at large, that anything mo- mentous is at stake. The announce- ment on Sunday that five more Ameri- can soldiers had been blown to eterni- ty by roadside bombs was treated by the press as a yawner. It got very little attention. You can turn on the television any evening and tune in to the bizarre ex- tended coverage of the search for Na- talee Holloway, the Alabama teenager who disappeared in Aruba in May. But we hear very little about the men and women who have given up their lives in Iraq, or are living with horrific inju- ries suffered in that conflict. If only the war were more enter- taining. Less of a downer. Perhaps then we could meet the people who are suffering and dying in it. For all the talk of supporting the troops,they are a low priority for most Americans. If the nation really cared, the president would not be frol- icking at his ranch for the entire month of August. He'd be back in Washington burning the midnight oil, trying to figure out how to get the troops out of the terrible fix he put them in. Instead, Mr. Bush is bicycling as soldiers and marines are dying. Doz- ens have been killed since he went off on his vacation. As for the rest of the nation, it's not doing much for the troops, either. There was a time, long ago, when war required sacrifices that were shared by most of the population. That's over. I was in Jacksonville, Fla., a few days ago and watched in amusement as a young woman emerged from a restaurant into 95-degree heat and gleefully exclaimed, "All right, let's go shopping!"The war was the furthest thing from her mind. For the most part, the only people sacrificing for this war are the troops and their families, and very few of them are coming from the privileged economic classes. That's why it's so |
easy to keep the troops out of sight and out of mind. And it's why, in the third year of a war started by the rich- est nation on earth, we still get stories like the one in Sunday's Times that be- gan: "For the second time since the Iraq war began, the Pentagon is struggling to replace body armor that is failing to protect American troops from the most lethal attacks by insurgents." Scandalous incompetence? Appall- ing indifference? Try both. Who cares? This is a war fought mostly by other people's children. The loudest of the hawks are the least likely to send their sons or daughters off to Iraq. The president has never been clear about why we're in Iraq. There's no Is Iraq worth the
|