What if?

It being the season of fantasy, when ordinary boys and the occasional U.S. Senator dream of what it would be like to grow up to be President, it may occur to agile minds to wonder how the recent news of Qaqaa all over the place would be different if some of those dreams came true.

Let's listen in as a Presidential advisor opens the door of the Oval office one morning, carrying a President's morning coffee.

Scenario A:

Advisor: Good morning, Mr. President, here's your coffee. Word from the Pentagon is the invasion is going well, but unfortunately we can't find 400 tons of high explosive the IAEA warned us were stashed at al-Qaqaa.

President A: Dear me, really? Mohammed El Baradei will be cross with us, I fear. I better call him later and assure him we're planning on a full investigation into how this happened. Can you get the Senate majority leader on the phone? Maybe we can schedule the first hearings before I talk to Mohammed. Oh, and call the Secretary of State, too. We should put this on the agenda at the next G8 summit, too, so we can plan to get some kind of joint allied statement out. I'll start planning my speech to the nation right away.

Advisor: Right away, Mr. President. And may I just say how very Presidential you look right now, fashioning plan after plan on the very spot? Not a hair out of place, either! It's masterful, sir, just masterful.

President A: Thank you, Jeeves.

Exit Advisor, bowing and scraping.

Scenario B:

Advisor: Good morning, Mr. President, here's your coffee. Word from the Pentagon is the invasion is going well, but unfortunately we can't find 400 tons of high explosive the IAEA warned us were stashed at al Qaqaa.

President B: Christ, what next? Get SecDef on the phone and tell him if I don't know how this happened and whether it's a problem within 30 minutes he can save himself trouble by cleaning out his desk before I see him next -- no, on second thought, I'll just walk over myself right now and talk to him.

Advisor: Uh. . okay. Should I schedule a press conference for this afternoon, too?

President B: What? Who knows? It's only 9 o'clock. Y'all don't mind, I'd like to get a few facts straight before I open my mouth. Put down that cup and hand me my coat -- and close your mouth, you look like a God-damned fish.

Exeunt omnes.

How could it have happened?

This week mouthpieces of the Democratic Party have attacked the Bush Administration for criminal negligence in the matter of 380-odd tons of chemical explosive said to be missing from a former Iraqi weapons depot.

The agile mind will immediately inquire: how could this have happened? Bearing in mind that we "know" the 380 tons is "missing" because of a letter sent to the IAEA by Dr. Rashad Omar, minister of science and technology in the interim Iraqi government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, here's one scenario. . .

Here's the good Dr. Omar, just appointed, just moved into his office. He sweeps out the broken glass, tries to figure out where he can get a couple of chairs that have all four legs, maybe a Mr. Coffee. . .he looks gloomily over at the eighteen big file cabinets delivered this morning, stuffed with twelve years of water-stained documents left over from his predecessor in the Hussein government, half of which are certainly outrageous lies prepared by panicked government flunkies afraid to tell Saddam something he didn't want to hear. All delivered this morning -- a Tuesday morning -- by someone from Allawi's office who said, better get cracking on this, doc, the PM is going to want a complete report before his Cabinet meeting Friday.

So then the phone rings. It's the PM himself. Hey, Omar, how's it hanging? All moved in? Need anything? Yeah, well, we've got to send out for our coffee, and half the time it's cold before it gets back anyway. Listen, I just got a call from some fussbudget at the IAEA. Says he needs to close the books out on mumble mumble pounds of dual-use high explosives they were monitoring out at al-Qaqaa. Sure, I realize we've got far bigger fish to fry than doing a meticulous post-mortem on Saddam's nuke program. But we don't want to offend these folks, you know? We may need them later. So can you just tell me where the stuff is now? Confirm it's still out there, still safe? Just give me the building number, maybe a photograph or two, so I can tell them it's still under lock and key, and they can come look at it sometimes, make sure their precious seals are still intact?

What? Well, Jesus, Omar, I'm sorry there are eighteen of them. We're all a little busy, OK? Just get me some kind of report on this Qaqaa by tomorrow morning, will you? I've got a country to run and I can't waste more time with this.

Poor Omar puts down the phone and contemplates the wall of filing cabinets. Big secret nuke-research base. Yup. Now what are the odds the paper trail left by the Saddamites is going to be all neat and complete? Oh boy, forget it.

So Omar requisitions a jeep and drives out to the place. A God-damned mess it is, too. Gigantic compound, hundreds of buildings, pits, shacks, some camouflaged, some not, some locked, some open. People he doesn't recognize wandering around, some with guns. Not clear who he'd have to get permission from to start breaking open locked doors. Bloody big hidey-hole for Saddam's techno-toys for two decades. Where to even begin? No way he can poke through this mess in 24 hours and be sure there's nothing to bite him in the ass later.

But as he trundles back to Baghdad, lighting strikes. Eureka! Everyone knows there was all that chaos and looting in the first week of the war. It was on the TV everywhere. Lots of stuff vanished! Antiquities, guns, ammo, fighter jets, WMDs, whole divisions of the Republican Guard. . .why not a little plastique? Who could doubt it? More importantly, who could blame me? Plus the added benefit of: I don't have to fling blame on the GIs (who hadn't established control yet) or the UN (who were out of the country). Everybody wins!

So poor Omar writes up his memo and sends it up the line. So sorry, it all got lost to some nameless looter, nobody's fault. After which it's dutifully passed on to the UN chair polishers, who make a neat notation in their books and get back to drawing up a detailed policy statement on who is, and isn't, the victim of genocide in Darfur.

Omar even gets a nice call from the PM: Good work, Omar, glad you were able to nail that down for me. All serene.

Except: in the middle of the night one week later, Omar sits up in a bed in a cold sweat. Wait a minute, HOW much explosive did I say just walked off in the fog of war? Mumble mumble pounds. . .divide by 2000. . .Four hundred tons? Fuck! Well, maybe no one will notice. I mean, what sensible person would even give a damn? This all has nothing to do with the pressing issues in Iraq, with rebuilding or with security (since there's already enough unexploded ordnance for a hundred years of civil war). As for terrorism, who's ever heard of a terrorist having trouble getting his hands on explosives, having to pay through the nose for it on e-Bay? It's probably even some kind of unofficial licensing test or initiation ritual, stealing the requisite bang stuff for a martyrdom operation.

Plus it all happened a year ago and nothing's happened in all that time to suggest it's a problem. Nah, only a complete moron would worry about this. . .

Teasing

Most of us have met an incorrigible teaser. The kind of person who,
when you ask for something, smiles and speaks encouragingly, but isn't
quite ready to do it -- and turns out never to be. He'll tell you
there's just one, small, itsy-bitsy thing you have to do before he's
ready to help you out, but then after you do that small itsy-bitsy
thing it turns out there's another small, itsy-bitsy thing he didn't
think worth mentioning before. . .

Or, you didn't quite do the itsy-bitsy thing quite right,
so there's just one, small, itsy-bitsy correction you need to make. . .

And so on. Sometimes it can take a while to realize you're being
teased. That you're not ever going to be able to come to a meeting of
minds, that the teaser has no real intention of ever handing over his
quo for your quid, but that holding you hostage to your hopes can be a
very useful way of manipulating you.

I thought of teasers I'd known while pondering the recent debate over
whether Mr. Kerry can be trusted to use military force in the
interests of the United States when it's really necessary. Many folks
seem to feel that this is a bottom line issue in deciding whom to
support. The argument seems to go like this: Mr. Bush has done X and
Y which I don't like, but I completely trust him to use military force
when necessary. Mr. Kerry seems like such a nice man, but he's said
some troubling things about military force, and I worry about those
terrorists. I don't like war, but I just wonder: can Mr. Kerry really
be trusted to actually use force when it really must be used?

Mr. Kerry has resolved, if that's the right word, the discrepancy
between his statements and actions over the past 30 years and the
current national needs by saying that, well, yes, it's true he opposed
every other significant projection of American force from Vietnam to
the Cold War to 1980s Central America to the first and second Gulf
Wars -- but that was just because the conditions weren't quite right.
Certain small, itsy-bitsy, preconditions weren't satisfied. Other
countries weren't properly consulted, the legal arguments for action
weren't quite right, certain ultimatums weren't given, war was used as
the second-to-last resort instead of last resort. . .

And so on. A familiar pattern, if you're a middle-aged cynic like me.
So, you know what? Mr. Kerry is a teaser. At least on this subject.
If you step back a bit, and take the long view, look at the whole
broad sweep of his 40 year adult career, you can see that. He isn't
really ever going to see the necessity for taking a national stand, is
he? He isn't ever going to get to place where he says to hell with
being a nice guy, and to hell with the rest of the world; this spot is
where the United States stands fast and will spend her sons' and
daughters' blood to defend.

Why he feels that way, I don't know. But his whole career is a
testament to the fact that he does, whatever his speech of the moment
may be.

Why Mr. Kerry is a teaser on the subject is, however, perfectly clear.
He wants very badly to be elected President, and it's obvious he can't
be unless Americans can talk themselves into believing that he might
be willing to use force on our behalf.

Fortunately, he is telling us that he is. He is willing to use force
on our behalf. Just so long as one, small, itsy-bitsy thing gets done
first. . .