War of the Water Cooler
By Richard Cohen
Washington Post
Wars get odd names. My favorite is the War of Jenkins' Ear (1739 to 1741), but the one about the Roses is good and so is the Hundred Years' War and also the French and Indian War which, somehow, neglects to mention that the British were also involved. Usually, though, those names are wonderfully descriptive and more truthful than an Orwellian moniker such as Operation Just Cause, which was that silliness in Panama (1989), or Operation Iraqi Freedom, the present debacle in the desert. A better name for it would be the War of the Water Cooler. This, I'm sure, is where it all started.
You can scour the vast literature about the Iraq war and how it started and not find the single moment when George W. Bush decided he had to go to war -- and why. The minutes of all the pertinent meetings, all of them surely monitored by Bob Woodward, either have produced nothing or will produce nothing because nothing was produced in these meetings. This war, I am sure, was the product of what Dick Cheney said to Bush at the White House water cooler. No one was present to take any of this down on paper.
"God wants you to do this, Chief."
"Yes, I know."
It was an amazing thing and it was prodded, mind you, by one man who thought that the presidency had been critically weakened by post-Watergate reforms (Cheney) and another (Bush) who didn't think much at all about anything -- but knew his heart was pure and his soul even purer and his hearing so keen he could hear God himself. He said this, you will recall, on at least two occasions, once to Woodward himself and yet again when he met with leaders of the Palestinian Authority.
"God told me to strike at al-Qaeda, and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did," Mahmoud Abbas quoted Bush as saying.
(The rest is here.)
Washington Post
Wars get odd names. My favorite is the War of Jenkins' Ear (1739 to 1741), but the one about the Roses is good and so is the Hundred Years' War and also the French and Indian War which, somehow, neglects to mention that the British were also involved. Usually, though, those names are wonderfully descriptive and more truthful than an Orwellian moniker such as Operation Just Cause, which was that silliness in Panama (1989), or Operation Iraqi Freedom, the present debacle in the desert. A better name for it would be the War of the Water Cooler. This, I'm sure, is where it all started.
You can scour the vast literature about the Iraq war and how it started and not find the single moment when George W. Bush decided he had to go to war -- and why. The minutes of all the pertinent meetings, all of them surely monitored by Bob Woodward, either have produced nothing or will produce nothing because nothing was produced in these meetings. This war, I am sure, was the product of what Dick Cheney said to Bush at the White House water cooler. No one was present to take any of this down on paper.
"God wants you to do this, Chief."
"Yes, I know."
It was an amazing thing and it was prodded, mind you, by one man who thought that the presidency had been critically weakened by post-Watergate reforms (Cheney) and another (Bush) who didn't think much at all about anything -- but knew his heart was pure and his soul even purer and his hearing so keen he could hear God himself. He said this, you will recall, on at least two occasions, once to Woodward himself and yet again when he met with leaders of the Palestinian Authority.
"God told me to strike at al-Qaeda, and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did," Mahmoud Abbas quoted Bush as saying.
(The rest is here.)
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