Praise for Peace Kills:
“O’Rourke cut his teeth writing brilliantly caustic dispatches from the most war-torn parts of the world. He’s in peak form with these pieces detailing America’s seemingly insane foreign policy and offering a grunt’s eye view of the mess in Iraq.” (Must Buy—4 stars out of 5)
—Maxim
“O’Rourke is an actual conservative, with ideas and a conscience, as opposed to the stealth flacks staying on party message that often pass for conservatives in these Hannitized and Limbaughtomized days.”
—Zay N. Smith, Chicago Sun-Times
“We are fortunate to have an erudite companion with a heavily stamped passport, a guy who can read and digest the wonkiest policy paper and still knows a good punch line when he sees one.”
—Patrick Beach, Austin American-Statesman
“Although self-billed as an ‘investigative humorist,’ O’Rourke’s dispatches convey far more understanding and insight than more serious-toned pontificating.”
—Bill Virgin, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“The esteemed P. J. O’Rourke is a conservative but so funny liberals love him too.”
—Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times
“Some of the best work O’Rourke does is when he asks those put in harm’s way to talk about it. … His technique is deceptively simple: He describes what he sees and then tells you what he thinks about it.”
—Joe Mysak, Bloomberg Markets
“The senior satirist of the right returns to dissect foreign policy. … Checking out ravaged Iraq, his backgrounder journalism is first-rate and, reviewing a Washington Mall political demonstration, his color reportage is smartly selective and funny.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“O’Rourke’s essays—like Twain’s—may well hold up long after the partisan battles of our age become dated and obscure.”
—National Post
“O’Rourke is one of the most articulate and reasonably honest journalists in the United States, with great dexterity at absorbing telling details and smacking a reader upside the head with a pointed but almost always funny simile. … [Peace Kills] possesses, besides clear and entertaining journalism, an admirable cascade of darts.”
—Globe & Mail
“Like Tom Wolfe, he is not simply funny—he does his homework. … The result is a kind of satirical travelogue in which local mores are treated rather in the manner of Mark Twain, but with a tart political twist.”
—The Sunday Telegraph
“O’Rourke is at his best when he concentrates on individuals rather than ideas. His vignettes are superb. … A gutsy polemic.”
—Independent on Sunday
PEACE KILLS
ALSO BY P. J. O’ROURKE
Modern Manners
The Bachelor Home Companion
Republican Party Reptile
Holidays in Hell
Parliament of Whores
Give War a Chance
All the Trouble in the World
Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut
Eat the Rich
The CEO of the Soja
PEACE KILLS
P.J.
O’ROURKE
Copyright © 2004 by P. J. O’Rourke
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
FIRST GROVE PRESS EDITION
“Homage to a Dream” from COLLECTED POEMS by Philip Larkin, edited by Anthony Thwaite. Copyright © 1988, 1989 by the Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, in the United States, and by Faber and Faber Limited in Canada and the UK.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
O’Rourke, P. J.
Peace kills: America’s fun new imperialism / P. J. O’Rourke.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-8021-4198-6 (pbk.)
1. United States—Foreign relations—2001- 2. United States—Foreign relations—1993-2001. 3. War on Terrorism, 2001- 4. War on Terrorism, 2001—Social aspects—United States. 5. Imperialism. 6. O’Rourke, P. J.—Travel—Serbia and Montenegro—Kosovo (Serbia). 7. O’Rourke, P. J.—Travel—Middle East. I. Title. E902.076 2004
973.931—dc22 2003069505
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
05 06 07 08 09 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In Memory of Michael Kelly
He could have advocated the war in Iraq without going to cover it. He could have covered it without putting himself in harm’s way. But liberty is an expensive feast. And Mike was a man who always picked up the check.
CONTENTS
1 WHY AMERICANS HATE FOREIGN POLICY
2 KOSOVO
November 1999
3 ISRAEL
April 2001
4 9/11 DIARY
5 EGYPT
December 2001
6 NOBEL SENTIMENTS
7 WASHINGTON, D.C., DEMONSTRATIONS
April 2002
8 THOUGHTS ON THE EVE OF WAR
9 KUWAIT AND IRAQ
March and April 2003
10 POSTSCRIPT: IWO JIMA AND THE END OF
MODERN WARFARE
July 2003
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I like the places I write about. I enjoy the people. I’ve had a good time wherever I’ve gone, Iraq included. My subject, in a way, is pleasure. This is really a book about pleasantness, which is why I dedicate it to Mike Kelly. He and I were drinking one night—a pleasurable occasion—and I remember him saying, “Wouldn’t it be pleasant if we could do something with the forces of evil other than hunt them down and kill them?” If we increased funding and reduced class sizes at the fundamentalist madras schools … If all the Mrs. bin Ladens had access to day care and prenatal health services … If, when Germanic hordes were threatening Rome, a Security Council meeting of the United Despotisms had been called, and Marcus Aurelius had pursued a multilateral foreign policy working in cooperation with the Parthians, the Huns, and the Han Chinese … If Aztec priests had taken it on faith that their captives had a lot of heart… If Australopithecus and the sabertoothed tiger had engaged in meaningful dialogue …
How pleasing would the whole world be,
If everyone would just say please.
And thank you, too, of course. Thanks being what this part of a book is about. I thank Mike Kelly—a little late, as heartfelt thanks tend to be. But I assume that Mike is keeping current in Reporters’ Heaven (open bar and porthole in the floor through which highly placed sources quoted on the condition of anonymity can be watched as they fry). A few years back Mike took over as editor of The Atlantic. I was writing for Rolling Stone, where my job was to be the Republican. After sixteen years even Rolling Stone had figured out that this made as much sense as offering readers a free bris. Also my excellent and long-suffering editor there, Bob Love, was about to head to someplace where “Marcus Aurelius” would not be mistaken for Beyoncé’s latest brand of bling. Mike called and said, “I can pay you less.”
Most of this book originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in The Atlantic, first under the brilliant editorship of Mike Kelly, then under the brilliant editorship of Cul
len Murphy. If you think the book good, behold what three short Irishmen can accomplish when they’ve lost the key to the liquor cabinet. If you think the book otherwise, assume that, after a certain amount of feeling around in the carpet, they found it.
The first chapter contains material from a piece that appeared in The Wall Street Journal, on the op-ed page then edited by Max Boot—may he long give enemies of America a taste of his name.
I’m not sure that Bob Love would care to do that to Robert Bork. But it was under Love’s stewardship of Rolling Stone that “Kosovo—November 1999” appeared with its Borkian pessimism, doubtless causing a puzzled tug of a lip ring and a quick flip of the page by more than one reader.
As important as getting “Kosovo” into print was getting there in the first place. Irena Ivanova and Biljana Bosiljanova of the Macedonian Press Center made all the arrangements. Nothing has ever been simple or easy in the Balkans except for my stay there, thanks to Irena and Biljana.
My old friend Dave Garcia came from Hong Kong to travel with me through both Israel and Egypt, just for the hell of it. (Luckily, no literal experience of the cliché was had.) Dave has a knack for finding tequila in the least likely places. Besides being good company, he is universally simpatico. The most foreign foreigners take to Dave immediately. He understands their point of view. It is Dave’s opinion that everybody’s point of view can be understood if you stipulate that everybody is crazy. When it comes to intelligent treatment of foreigners, Dave is the next best thing to Thorazine.
Not that it was always the foreigners who needed the psychiatric aid. Talking to Ashraf Kalil was therapeutic in helping me cope with that maddening city Cairo. Michele Lieber was a link to sanity on 9/11/01, as was the Palm restaurant in Washington, D.C., where I’ve been taking medication for years under the supervision of Tommy Jacomo, Jocelyn Zarr, and Kevin Rudowski. And, during the initial weeks of the Iraq war, I would have gone nuts from boredom if I hadn’t had excellent companions with whom to crawl the walls of Kuwait. Chief among these were Matt Labash and Steve Hayes of The Weekly Standard and the “room boy” at their hotel. The last shall go unnamed, but if any reader is offered the chance to direct a remake of Thunder Road set in Kuwait, please cast that young fellow in the Robert Mitchum moonshine-running hero role.
Alas, most of the time in Kuwait was passed sober, and there wasn’t much to do but pass the time. Long conversations with pals when neither you nor they have had a drink can be a test of palship. I fear I received an “Incomplete.” Others passed with honors: Alex Travelli of ABC, Simon McCoy and Philip Chadwick of Sky News, Colin Baker of ITN, Ernie Alexander, Marco Sotos, Spanish documentary filmmaker Esteban Uyarra, and my friends Charlie Glass and Sal Aridi, whom I met at my virgin war, in Lebanon, twenty years ago.
ABC News, as it has many times before, allowed me into its Big Top and let me tag along with the parade of real journalists. I suppose they hope that one day I’ll grab a shovel and clean up behind the elephants. In lieu of that, they gave me a part-time job as the world’s worst radio reporter. (“This is P. J. O’Rourke in Kuwait City and not a darn thing is happening.”) My boss in Kuwait, Vic Ratner—a real radio reporter with the old-school voice and the AK-47 delivery—was more than welcoming and patient. Thank you, Vic, and thank you, Chris Isham, Burt Rudman, Peter Jennings, John Meyerson, Deirdre Michalopoulos, Wayne Fisk, John Quinones, and all the cameramen, soundmen, and technicians in whose way I constantly was. Here’s to you, ABC News—don’t let them make you wear those mouse ears on camera.
Thanks also to Alex Vogel, who did his best to repair a faltering ABC Land Rover in Iraq by phone from New Hampshire. Looting was rife in Iraq at the time and Alex asked—amid discussion of diesel compression loss due to piston scoring from desert grit—“If New York is ever freed from oppression by liberals, will there be looting in Manhattan?” I believe, Alex, that Manhattanites have been doing that all along, on Wall Street. But there will be plenty of sniping from The New York Review of Books.
Max Blumenfeld, from the Department of Defense, managed to get me to Baghdad, where Major William Dean Thurmond made me at home. Dean, you are an officer, a gentleman, and damn handy at making coffee in plastic sacks using the chemical heater packs from the Meals Ready to Eat. Additional thanks to Major Mike Birmingham, of the Third Infantry Division, and a tip o’ the pants to Derek and Ski (they’ll know what I mean).
At the Baghdad airport I was billeted with good friends of mine, the courageous and beautiful Alisha Ryu from Voice of America and the equally courageous if not quite so good-looking Steve Kamarow of USA Today. With us was The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Andrea Gerlin, fresh from combat coverage with a brilliant idea for selling American women a fitness and weight-loss program based on sleeping in holes, getting shot at, and eating MREs. James Kitfield from The Atlantic’s sister publication, The National Journal, was there as well. Kitfield is fluent in the language of the military, which is harder to translate than Arabic. Were it not for James, I would still be pondering what it means to be in a part of town that was “controlled but not secured” and thus I would be blown to bits.
We had, as I mentioned, a good time in Baghdad. Chaos is interesting. Reporters would rather be interested than comfortable. Put that way, it sounds noble enough. Put another way, we would rather be interested than well paid, worthwhile, responsible, or smart.
Fifty-nine years ago Iwo Jima might have been a little too interesting for this reporter. At least it’s still uncomfortable. It was the idea of Tim Baney to take me to Iwo. Please use Baney Media Incorporated for all your television programming needs. (Except Tim doesn’t do weddings, although for a price …) We traveled with ace cameraman Pat Anderson—three Irishmen again, but this time only one of us was short. Transport from Okinawa was arranged through the kind offices of Kim Newberry and Captain Chris Perrine, USMC. On the island battlefield we were entertained (if that verb ever can be used in connection with war) and instructed (a verb not used in connection with war often enough) by Sergeant Major Mike McClure, USMC, and Sergeant Major Suwa, Japanese Self-Defense Forces.
There are many other people to whom I owe thanks. My thanks credit is woefully overextended. I am in gratitude Chapter 11. Any number of debts of obligation doubtless will go unpaid as I attempt to settle my accounts. For years Max Pappas was my invaluable research assistant. I know he misses sitting in the kitchen trying to extract Dora the Explorer from the disk drive while dog and children gnaw on his pants cuffs. And I’m sure he’s much less happy and fulfilled in his present position as policy analyst at Citizens for a Sound Economy, no matter what he says to the contrary.
Likewise, sisters Caitlin and Megan Rhodes escaped the same kitchen computer post to, respectively, go to college and pursue a career in Chicago. They are probably, this minute, sprinkling dog hair and Froot Loops onto their laptop keyboards for nostalgia’s sake.
Dr. William Hughes has kept me healthy through years of Third World travel. He carefully researches the hideous diseases that rage in the places I’m about to visit, gives me a bottle of pills, and says, “Take these if you begin to bleed from the ears and maybe you’ll live to be medevaced.”
For all questions on military matters, I go to Lieutenant Colonel Mike Schellhammer, who introduced me to my wife and who, therefore, she tells me, cannot be wrong about anything. If there are errors about military-type things in the following pages, it’s because Mike, an intelligence officer, is very tight-lipped. “I could tell you what I do,” Mike says, “but I’d have to bore you to death.”
Don Epstein and his colleagues at Greater Talent Network continue to find lectures for me to give and lecture audiences who do not throw things that are large or rotten.
My literary agent, Bob Dattila, maintains his remarkable ability to extract money from people in return for work that accidentally got erased in the hard drive; was lost by UPS; just needs a slight final polish; was e-mailed yesterday, honest, but the attachment probably couldn’t be opened because
of that computer virus that’s going around; and is really, truly, completely finished in my head—and I just need to write it down.
The Atlantic is the only magazine in America with a readership and staff who are sitting, clothed, and in their right minds. Writing for The Atlantic is an honor I don’t deserve, and you’d think Cullen Murphy would be able to tell that from my spelling, grammar, and punctuation. But when I read what I’ve written in The Atlantic, I find that it’s, mirabile dictu, in good English. (Or, if the occasion warrants, as it does with mirabile dictu, it’s in good Latin. The phrase is Virgil’s—as if I’d know.) This is the work of The Atlantic’s deputy managing editors Toby Lester and Martha Spaulding, of senior editor Yvonne Rolhausen, and of staff editors Elizabeth Shelburne, Joshua Friedman, and Jessica Murphy. Bless you all, and you, David Bradley, for buying The Atlantic and saving it from a dusty fate in library stacks next to bundles of Transition, New Directions, and The Dial, or a fate worse than dusty, running features such as “The Most Important One or Two Books I’ve Ever Read” by Charlize Theron.
Historically, Grove/Atlantic, Inc., branched from The Atlantic Monthly, although a cutting was made and transplanted into the rich mud of the New York literary scene, which, combined with a graft to the sturdy root of Grove Press, caused this metaphor to badly need pruning. Grove/Atlantic is a great publishing house, and I would say that even if it hadn’t published all my books. Grove/Atlantic chief, Morgan Entrekin, is a true aristocrat among publishers, and I would say that even if I didn’t owe him money. Go buy a lot of Grove/Atlantic books, no matter what the subject, and maybe Morgan will let me off the hook for that advance on my proposed Howard Dean presidential biography. You’ll be doing a favor not just to me but to every person at Grove/Atlantic. They are all true aristocrats of publishing, albeit impoverished aristocrats due to—let’s be blunt—you, negligent reader, spending your money on DVDs and video games. A prostration, a curtsy, a bow, and a yank on the forelock to Charles Rue Woods, archduke of art design; Judy Hottensen, maharani of marketing; Scott Manning, prince regent of public relations; Debra Wenger, caliph of copyediting; and Michael Hornburg and Muriel Jorgensen, potentates of production. Even if this book gets remaindered, it will be a royal flush.