I've been contemplating the words of Donald Rumsfeld that I quoted yesterday: "At a time and place of our choosing." The Rice testimony today shows how out of control we felt as a nation after 9/11; Bush tapped into this feeling by saying over and over that this challenge wasn't our choice, but we would deal with it anyway--it was the work of this generation. But that wasn't a very easy task, and Bush didn't rally the nation around limiting the threat of terror; the government just made us scared to fly and suspicious of our neighbors. I'm not blaming them--I don't know if anyone would have done better.
But attacking Iraq may have been about control. We looked at this one thing we couldn't control at all--al Qaeda, and terror in general--and it frustrated us. So we looked for something else that we could control. Iraq and Saddam Hussein seemed to fill the bill--we'd already kicked their butts once, and it seemed likely we could do it again. We had things there relatively under control already, and we just knew that, at a time and place of our choosing, we could deliver the death blow.
Maybe that's why we're so impatient as a nation for this to be over. Whether Bush and his administration lead us to believe it or not (and I think they did), we believed as a nation that beating up on Iraq would be a lot easier, and a lot more satisfying, than trying to beat up Osama. That makes all the violence and death that continues to take place there not only tragic and disturbing, but psychologically painful to our idea of ourselves as a nation.
For that reason, the Iraq experience may turn out to be good for America. 9/11 could have taught us a bit of humility--we're not invincible--but it taught us anger instead. Iraq was supposed to let us take out our anger--and now, it, too, is trying to teach us humility. Will we listen?
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