Just how inevitable is an invasion of Iraq?
As part of my reunion extravaganza, the high school newspaper that first led me down the journalism path was celebrating its centennial. (Alas, its Web site does not appear to be fully operational at the moment.) On Saturday morning I moderated a panel of some of the paper's more illustrious alumni on the subject of "The Press, the Presidency and Wartime."
What surprised me was the consensus among the panelists -- historian Robert Caro, polling superstar Mark Penn, Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher and veteran DC corresondent Nicholas Horrock. When pressed, they generally agreed that it's more likely we will not wind up in a shooting war in Iraq, and that the entire process we're witnessing today is an elaborate game of chicken to bend Saddam to our will, or force his peaceful ouster. (Caro offered thoughtful parallels to the Gulf of Tonkin era --Johnson won the political battle for authority to use the military in Vietnam, and ironically it sunk his presidency -- but begged off the contemporary analysis.)
It was fascinating to hear this from such a diverse and well-informed group. I hope they're right. (Today's Tom Friedman column shares this view.) If it's all an act, I have to say, it's a very convincing one. And of course we need to remember that games of chicken (the classic version, where two cars head for a dead-on collision to see who will swerve first) don't always end well; sometimes either or both parties end up bleeding by the roadside.
History is littered with diplomatic car-crashes that caused unimaginable pile-ups -- games of chicken that led to out-of-control wars. The worst-case scenario is August 1914. Those diplomats on the eve of the First World War thought they were playing out their hands in a finely tuned international game; they ended up sparking mass slaughter on a hitherto unimaginable scale. I wonder: Has anyone in the Bush White House read "The Guns of August"?
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