The big news earlier this month was that a North Korean rocket can hit Hollywood. Two days before the chief of the CIA released that bit of newly declassified intelligence, Richard Gere was in Berlin saying there wasn’t “any sort of basis” for America to be getting so uneasy and aggressive about what’s happening in the world.
Focusing on Iraq, Gere declared that Saddam Hussein was more of a pussy cat than George W. Bush: “Bush’s plans for war are a bizarre bad dream. We have to say ‘stop.’ There’s no reason for a war. At the moment Hussein is not threatening anybody. It’d be different if he was staring somebody down with a loaded gun in his hand. But there doesn’t seem to be any indications whatsoever that this man poses an immediate threat to anybody.”
For Gere, it seems, Saddam’s hidden piles of anthrax, VX gas, bombs and rockets don’t count as a “loaded gun.” And on his other point, I’d say it’s a sure bet that the parents of kids who’ve been blown apart in Israeli pizza shops might not quite agree with Gere’s assertion that there aren’t “any indications whatsoever” that Saddam, the guy who rewards the families of successful suicide bombers with $25,000 in blood money, poses a “immediate threat to anybody.”
Taking a longer view of America’s role in the world, Gere slammed the idea that the Iraqi people might be better off after a regime change in Baghdad. “America,” Gere told his Berlin audience, “has never paid any attention to other people, so it’s absurd for Bush to say that it’s all in the best interests of the Iraqi people.”
It would have been nice, of course, if someone in that Berlin audience would have had the guts to stand up and explain to Gere that it wasn’t all that long ago that America was paying a lot of attention to what was happening in the very city in which he was speaking, and paying attention to what was happening in Tokyo and Rome, and to what was happening to people in Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Dachau, and that America stopped it, and that it’s “absurd” to assert that the United States “has never paid any attention to other people.”
It would have been good, too, if someone would have reminded Gere that he wasn’t standing all that far from the spot where a wall divided the city, where people were shot in the back as they tried to escape to freedom, shot by a collectivist ideology that put 100 million of its own populace to death before America put a stop to it.
In other war news, Sheryl Crow announced that the best way to avoid war is “not to have enemies,” Judith Karpova, a peace angel from Hoboken, said she’s all packed and heading for Iraq to be a “human shield,” Home Depot reported that its stores around D.C. were running out of duct tape, Iran said it was constructing a plant that will produce enriched uranium, the National Organization for Women warned that “a U.S. invasion of Iraq will likely entail dangers to the safety and rights of Iraqi women,” the feds said we’ll all have to look after ourselves for the first 48 to 72 hours after we’re attacked, the spies at the National Security Agency reported “excessive chatter” on the lines, Hillary Clinton proclaimed that Bush wasn’t doing enough to protect the public from terrorism, and the Saudis announced that they’d allow the U.S. to run an air campaign against Iraq from Saudi soil so long as American pilots were instructed to hold fire until they’re fired upon or until they were certain that Iraqi anti-aircraft radar had a lock on their aircraft.
What can I say? Richard Gere was great as slick lawyer Billy Flynn in “Chicago” but he’s no master statesman, no Churchill. And Sheryl Crow? I’m a fan. But how’s it possible “not to have enemies” when the other side is acting on a belief that says we don’t have a right to exist, when they’re trying to fashion a world where a woman who sings “If It Makes You Happy” would be stoned to death?
And Hillary? The last time she was in the news about terrorism was when her husband, right prior to her Senate campaign, agreed to commute the sentences of 16 members of a Puerto Rican terrorist group that was involved in over 100 bombings of political and military installations within the United States, a move, reported the Washington Post, that was “widely seen as boosting Hillary Clinton’s standing among New York’s Hispanic voters.”
And with the statement from NOW, warning that U.S. actions against Baghdad might jeopardize “the safety and rights of Iraqi women,” there was nothing in that press release about Najat Mohammad Haydar, the obstetrician in Baghdad who was beheaded after she criticized corruption within local health services, and nothing about Aziz Salih Ahmed whose official duties include the “violation of women’s honor,” nothing about how the “safety and rights of Iraqi women” might be being affected by a government squad of professional rapists.
