Now that we're still stuck in Iraq after five long and bloody years, there are those, including Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, who insist that the tide is turning and that the "surge" in U.S. troop strength and improved tactics are responsible. The proof, they claim, is that levels of violence have decreased in recent months, although it appears that there are other reasons for that, probably having to do with a general sense of war-and-terrorism weariness on the part of both Shiites and Sunnis (and that, in fact, the situation may now be heating up again).
Noting that "only" 40 American soldiers stationed in Iraq died in January, as opposed to much greater numbers just a year before, this cheerleading squad has been urging that if we only just hang in there, "victory" may soon come our way after all.
I, however, maintain that even if winning (whatever that's supposed to mean) were possible for the bargain price of one or two of lives each day (along with many more billions of dollars), to achieve it would be immoral—in the sense that it would ultimately serve to reward unscrupulous, unlawful and unacceptable behavior.
To illustrate my point, I'd like to invoke a classic chronicle of criminality from the Brothers Coen—not their current Oscar winner, No Country for Old Men, but their earlier comic thriller, Fargo. The movie, I think, is a good metaphor for the shameful saga of lawlessness, murder, mayhem and miscalculation that has been going on ever since the Bush Administration launched its invasion of Iraq exactly five years ago.
The story involves a morally challenged and not overly bright Minnesota car salesman named Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) whose way of resolving an apparent financial crisis is to hire a pair of hoodlums to abduct his wife as a means of extorting a million bucks from his wealthy father-in-law (and employer) in the form of a ransom. What Jerry has in mind is to claim that the kidnappers have insisted he alone make the exchange. That way, he can pay them off with a small fraction of the money and a new car (delivered in advance) and get his wife back unharmed, having strictly instructed his cohorts to refrain from any sort of "rough stuff, " and no one will be any the wiser.
But what he doesn't count on is that crime, once embarked upon, takes on a life of its own. In this case, things soon go haywire when his dimwitted and trigger-happy hirelings (who, to complicate things further, don't get along) gun down a state trooper after being stopped for a license tag violation. Before long, the frozen landscape is strewn with the corpses of innocent 'bydrivers' and various other victims, including Jerry's wife and father-in-law and one of the thugs, whose body the other attempts to dispose of in a wood chipper.
Ultimately the remaining culprits are brought to justice through the efforts of virtuous and intrepid small-town police chief Marge Gunderson, which restores our faith in humanity. And the ransom money—most of it, anyway—ends up buried under a snow bank along an anonymous stretch of prairie highway.
So how, you might be wondering, does a movie about criminal stupidity and its consequences relate to the Iraq war? Well, let's consider some of the parallels.
To begin with, we have an ethically disconnected and none-too-bright commander-in-chief whose poor judgment, failure to contemplate consequences, furtive mannerisms and facial expressions (especially a disconcerting habit of smiling at inappropriate times) and brazen manner of lying are distinctly reminiscent of Jerry Lundegaard.
We also have a plot that he and a few accomplices had hatched, calling for a massive armed invasion of a sovereign nation with the ostensible intent of toppling its government and replacing it with something more to their liking—and giving cronies in the oil business direct access to a huge pool of petroleum in the process.
This illicit little scheme could also, as they envisioned it, be carried out with relative ease, the inhabitants being so gleeful at having their dictator deposed that they would gladly accept the presence of foreign invaders, and no one would know or care that it had all been the result of duplicity. The perfect crime, in other words.
Except that it proved to be anything but.
It wasn't just the colossal bungling (e.g., Blackwater and Abu Ghraib) that made it look as though the miscreants from Fargo were running every aspect of this escapade. It was also the fact that the entire enterprise was from the get-go an act of criminal aggression, beginning with the unprovoked rocket attack on Baghdad known as Shock and Awe.
But just as in the movie, that initial crime has been compounded into a series of far worse ones, all a result of the "mastermind" being in way over his head and failing utterly to comprehend the enormity of the act he was contemplating.
To get an idea of that enormity, just take the handful of murders depicted in the film and multiply them by a factor of perhaps 100,000 or more. I'm talking about hordes of innocent people who were living their lives—and were in no way responsible for our beefs with their government—only to end up cut down in their cars, their homes, the streets, all victims, in one way or another, of that initial decision of an American president to act outside the pale of established international law.
And that doesn't include the countless other civilians who have suffered grievous injuries, lost family members or livelihoods, or been turned into refugees, or the thousands of children who have lost parents and grandparents (not unlike Jerry's son Scotty). All of which adds up to a level of violence too vast and removed for most Americans to begin to grasp.
What they can more readily appreciate, however, are the resulting crimes against our own military personnel and their families, with some 4,000 sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, husbands and wives lost forever to this gratuitous mission, many thousands more gravely wounded and requiring indefinite care, and the survivors forced to endure relentless multiple deployments.
Then there's the malfeasance involved in having diverted so much of our country's revenue to finance this nefarious episode. "A million dollars is a lotta money," proclaims Jerry's father-in-law Ward before making the fateful decision to deliver the ransom himself. Well, what about a trillion? Or, better yet, two trillion? That's the approximate amount of money, either in tax dollars or borrowed funds, that experts have told a congressional committee will have been thrown away on this ill-advised venture when all is said and done.
So if all this is true, why, unlike in the movie, have the perpetrators never been brought to justice? Could it be because so many people, including politicians and pundits, were so easily persuaded or coerced to become accessories? (Not that everyone was so gullible. Many of us saw through the charade and accurately foresaw the probable consequences of allowing it to proceed.)
It's abundantly clear that Iraq is no country for young men—or women—in American uniforms, and that it's high time we allowed the United Nations to step in and attempt to restore some semblance of order, as has been proposed by a group of prominent Iraqis, while our troops exit as expeditiously as possible.
By having virtue triumph so unequivocally over vice, Fargo concluded with one of the oldest morals in moviedom—that crime doesn't pay. But those who continue to call for America to prevail in Iraq appear to harbor hopes that somehow it still might.
Bill Bonvie is a New Jersey-based freelance writer.
