9-15, Saturday

Hot and Wet

September so far has been hotter than normal and wet but still below our historical average for rain. It’s been a bad couple of years for us. We were down a foot of rain in 2006 and still down 7 inches for this year, despite our 12 days with rain so far in September. The humidity is suffocating in the morning when Marian runs and I walk. We both come back just soaked in sweat.

Here is sweaty Marian:

and here I am:

Longing For The Mountains

Are we ever. Forecast for the mountains this upcoming week is highs around 60 and lows around 50. They’ve actually flirted with lows around freezing in the past week. What a difference from here where we have just gone through a string of 90s.

Movie We Saw

We saw No End in Sight, written, directed, and produced by Charles Ferguson. This documentary looks at the decision-making about Iraq by our political leaders in 2003-2004. Most of the people in the film were important to the Bush administration. They had top government or military jobs, they had responsibility in Iraq or Washington, they implemented policy, they filed reports, they labored faithfully in service of U.S. foreign policy and then they left the government. Some jumped, some were pushed. They all feel disillusioned about the war and the way the White House refused to listen to them about it.

The subjects in this film now feel that American policy in Iraq was flawed from the start, that obvious measures were not taken, that sane advice was disregarded, that lies were told and believed, and that advice from people on the ground was overruled by a cabal of neo-con goofballs who seemed to form a wall around the president.

The president and his inner circle knew, just knew, for example, that Saddam had or would have weapons of mass destruction, that he was in league with al-Qaida and bin Laden, and that in some way, it was all hooked up with Sept. 11. Not all of the advice in the world could penetrate their obsession, and they fired the bearers of bad news.

It is significant, for example, that a Defense Intelligence Agency team received orders to find links between al-Qaida and Hussein. That there were none was ignored. Key adviser Paul Wolfowitz’s immediate reaction to Sept. 11 was “war on Iraq.” Anarchy in that land was all but assured when the Iraqi army was disbanded against urgent advice from our people in the field. That meant that a huge number of competent military men, most of them no lovers of Saddam, were rendered unemployed — and still armed. How was this disastrous decision arrived at? People directly involved said it came as an order from administration officials who had never been to Iraq.

Did Bush know and agree? They had no indication. Perhaps not. A National Intelligence report commissioned in 2004 advised against the war. Bush, who apparently did not read it, dismissed it as guesswork — a word that seems like an ideal description of his own policies.

Who is Charles Ferguson, director of this film? A one-time senior fellow of the Brookings Institute, software millionaire, originally a supporter of the war, visiting professor at MIT and Berkeley, he was trustworthy enough to inspire confidences from former top officials. They mostly felt that orders came from the precincts of Vice President Cheney, that Cheney’s group disregarded advice from veteran American officials, and in at least one case, channeled a decision to avoid Bush’s scrutiny. The president signed, but didn’t read, and you can see the quizzical, betrayed looks in the eyes of the men and women in the film, who found that the more they knew about Iraq, the less they were heeded.

As compelling as the train of facts and accusations were the faces of those interviewed. They are haunted by their participation in this war and continue to lose sleep over their sense of responsibility for what has happened in Iraq. A remarkable documentary. However, the director obviously is anti-war and the film argues from an anti-war perspective. The film would have been more balanced if those supporting the war had accepted Ferguson’s invitation for an interview, but they all refused to appear in the film.

During a War

The poet Naomi Shihab Nye writes from the perspective of growing up with a Palestinian father and an American mother. She is sensitive to the ambiguous, tentative nature of relationships and the obliterative character of war, wiping out the nuances of human social arrangements. This poem, During a War, addresses that tension between the impulse toward social connection and the brutal necessities of violent conflict.

Best wishes to you & yours,
he closes the letter.

For a moment I can’t
fold it up again-
where does “yours” end?
Dark eyes pleading
what could we have done
differently?
Your family,
your community,
circle of earth, we did not want,
we tried to stop,
we were not heard
by dark eyes who are dying
now. How easily they
would have welcomed us in
for coffee, serving it
in a simple room
with a radiant rug.
Your friends & mine.

 

————“During a War” by Naomi Shihab Nye from You and Yours.