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the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112
from: Christopher Buckley
to: Christopher Caldwell and Walter Shapiro

Sitting, Squatting, and Straddling the Fence

Posted Monday, Jan. 27, 2003, at 12:40 PM ET

Who are these people?

Dear Chris, Walter,

As Bertie Wooster would say, that's rather a lot to spring on a lad with a head this early in the morning.

It's myself I find in a pickle this morning. I cannot manage to extricate myself from the fence upon which I am sitting, squatting, straddling. In recent weeks I've found myself doing the deplorable on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand dance. Should we invade Iraq or shouldn't we? Maybe you gents can unhook me.

As a card-carrying reactionary, my knee jerks when I see, as I did in this morning's Times, a two-acre ad from something calling itself www.nion.us proclaiming its noble and principled opposition to war. Maybe it was the inclusion of Susan Sarandon's signature that did it.

Also in the Times today was the text of Colin Powell's speech to the Bilderbergers—sorry, the World Economic Forum—and frankly I was just stunned by it. I didn't know that Powell could give a speech that good. I don't mean that snarkily. It's just that I have never been a major Powell fan: This is, after all, the guy who persuaded the president's father to pull back from total victory over Saddam in '91, putting us in the present pickle—and the man who tried to get Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson to yank the phrase "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" on the grounds that it might offend our stalwart European friends. Now here he is, amid the vacillating Jell-o molds in Davos, telling it like it is while disclaiming, very eloquently, U.S. imperialist motives. Where has this Colin Powell been all my life? I want to marry him.

And yet, and yet, I wring my hands like Hamlet. Some very smart people, such as Bob Graham, who I suspect knows rather more about all this than I do, think this is not an especially wise course we have embarked upon. And yet I cannot bring myself to side with Susan Sarandon and Ramsey Clark.

If you could sneak into the president's TelePrompter tomorrow night and insert your own lingo to state pellucidly the case for war, what silvery phrases would you suggest? The only satisfying ones (to me) have a whiff of sodium pentothal to them; that is to say, let's be honest why we really need to do this, to wit: "Look, my fellow American chaps and chapettes, I'm doing this because the Middle East is terminally f***ed up and as my secretary of defense says,'If you can't solve a problem, make it bigger.' If we don't do something—and do you really want to wait for the French to do it?—this bastard is going to have nukes. You all saw from my not inspiring volte-face over North Korea that once a country has nukes that is pretty much it. You do not threaten a hostile nuclear country run by a maniac who wouldn't hesitate to go for the scorched earth option. You offer them fuel incentives and dispatch New Mexican governors to make nice with them. So, we either do this now or forever hold our peace and proceed with another 2000 years of Middle East Peace Process. So, what shall we do, then?"

Doubtless the talented Mr. Gerson might find a more Bushian mode of rendering this come-to-Jesus moment. At any rate, something definitive and plain is in order tomorrow night. Finally, I'm chilled by Chris Caldwell's fear that Bush's presidency might "turn Carteresque," though to be honest I'd love to hear his pronunciation of "malaise."

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112
from: Christopher Buckley
to: Christopher Caldwell and Walter Shapiro

Sitting, Squatting, and Straddling the Fence

Posted Monday, Jan. 27, 2003, at 12:40 PM ET
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Christopher Buckley is the author of Thank You For Smoking. His new novel, Boomsday, will be published in April. Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard. Walter Shapiro has covered the last seven presidential campaigns and just completed a fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He can be reached at .
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