I had a few beers Friday night with my old friend, Stanley, who is always a treat to behold holding forth on a wide range of topics, so long as you’re not too uptight about ever getting to the point and don’t mind stumbling around in the dark, bumping into things, and asking—again, pointlessly—“now, where were we?” a lot.

With Stan, it's strictly Be Here Now. Sometimes you end up somewhere, sometimes you don't. It's that journey's-the-destination thing. Sit back, relax, enjoy the ride.

Being with Stanley at its most casual is like visiting The Old Curiosity Shop. Most times you're not looking for anything in particular, so you're always delighted when you find it. Something catches your eye, you go check it out. You could be rhapsodizing about it when something catches his, and he's off. You might come out with a two-headed goat or a Chinese gong. You might stumble out dazed and confused, bleeding from the ear, crying "It's a COOKBOOK!" You might be giddy, your gut aching from all the belly laughs. Or you might need a Percodan and a stiff drink.

But Stanley's good company in The Old Curiosity Shop, whatever the case. He has a lot of heart, that's for sure. He is a good and decent guy. And he thinks about things. And while I know sort of what he thinks about things, I will freely admit I don’t know how he thinks about them, exactly. I mean, the method in his madness. Which causes delight and vexation in roughly equal measures whenever I'm with him.

Used to be you could tell a lot about how someone thought by peeking into their office, say. Stanley’s a thoroughly modern man—which is to say, a computer guy (seriously—to judge by the banks of monitors and all the flashy cutting-edge equipment, he's preparing for a shuttle launch in there)—he doesn’t generate much paper clutter, so it’s hard for me to judge his thought-process that way.

I'm not quite as modern. I tend to be a stacker. I have stacks of books, magazines and papers all over the place. This is what my desk currently looks like:


Say what you will, it is a system of sorts.

Our conversation Friday night ranged, as conversations with Stanley invariably do, over a wide area—a lot of social justice issues were discussed from various angles, and movies, and politics, and as friends joined us, sex. When they had had enough, around one in the morning, we found ourselves alone again. And somehow—after sharing two six-packs—of Guinness, no less—we found ourselves locking horns on Iraq.


I would not have thought this would be an area of cussedness and contention between us, but politics is just one of those things. I mean, people can get riled up over all sorts of things, and politics is worthier of a good tussle than most of them. But it can come down—as Swift observed—to how to eat a boiled egg (for the record, although you likely wouldn't know it to look at me, I am a dyed-in-the-wool Little-endian).

I used to get chairs thrown at me and threatening phone calls over politics. And that was from friends. After losing one or two in overheated exchanges I asked myself if discussing politics like this was really worth it, and decided, by and large, it wasn't.

And it's not because I can't handle disagreement. I can respect a wide range of views on most things. It's politics qua politics that I find it hard to countenance. Sharing personal experiences and observations about the issues of the day is superior in my personal hierarchy to spewing platitudes, which is what most "political" discussions turn into, in my experience. (And I can spew with the best of them.)

As a rule, the further from personal experience an issue is the more abstract it necessarily becomes, and the more infused with ideology, which is the enemy of good sense and the root of all sorts of bad behavior. Case-in-point: Iraq.

And so it was that eventually our discussion of Iraq devolved into me accusing Stanley of "armchair quarterbacking" and him throwing bottle caps at me. I don't think I have ever finished a political discussion in the past twenty years without having something thrown at me. Seriously. Which is why I'm not all that keen on talking politics. (Stanley was nice about it. He told me, "I'm trying to find small things to throw at you." I told him I appreciated it.)

I haven't lost any friends recently over politics. Over the last decade, with politics being so polarized, it would be difficult to do. Seems like we are all more or less "profile" these days, for better or worse. When I meet someone I can generally tell within a few minutes where their sympathies are likely to lie. If they're views are polar to mine—like most of my immediate family—we won't be talking politics. I'm not the proselytizing kind. If I'm going to preach I prefer preaching to the choir. I think it's natural.

And anyway, sometimes it seems to me that our politics these days are based more on temperament than ideas about things. It's like Lionel Trilling said in The Liberal Imagination, when he likened conservatives' "impulses" to "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."

None of this should be taken to mean that I am isolated from debate. But I will freely admit I prefer discussion. I like narrative, and listening to other people’s stories and sharing my own with them is the greatest pleasure I derive from social intercourse. However we may wish our ideology to define us, in our lived experience we all defy ideology.

The problem with debaters is that after a few beers they can easily become strident, abandon civility, and then what's to stop them from hurling things at one another? First come epithets, then punches or pieces of furniture.

And I am certainly not immune. When it comes to talking politics, I can surprise even myself with my stridency. I am as prone as anyone to pat answers and platitudes, and over the course of our late night debate Stanley must have said, "yes, well, that's obvious," at least ten times. I ignored these interjections, because it may have been—hard to tell in the sober light of day—that the obviousness of certain observations was the very point I was trying to make with them.

Even before the charges of obviousness were leveled and the bottle caps were launched, talking to Stanley about Iraq in the wee hours when neither of us could see straight was surprisingly heated. Stanley took what I would call the "anguished liberal" tack on the matter, and I told him I thought it was poppycock.

Make no mistake, there are Iraq apologists on the left, and they usually come in the form of "anguished liberals," who lament that "we" cannot, in good conscience, abandon Iraq now that "we" have demolished it. Their anguish is typically either for the Iraqis, whose lives "we" have disrupted, or for the troops, living and dead, whom "we" disrespect by admitting defeat this late in the game.

The "anguished liberal" is falling into the trap set for him in the beginning of this frivolous mercenary adventure by those who designed it for their own purposes. The notion that our continued meddling in a civil war will ever bring peace to the region can be dismissed out of hand as bosh. We are not helping the Iraqis by continuing to serve as foils, stooges and fodder for full-blown sectarian warfare, regardless of how we may have facilitated it up to now.

What's left to keep us there? The troops? When our chief argument for "staying the course" is that taking our troops out of harm's way will humiliate them at home, or some such nonsense with knobs on, we have already all but admitted that their continued sacrifice is a farce. It's like saying, "but if they really want to be ground into hamburger meat, isn't it awfully mean to say no?"

Stanley, I gathered, wants "us" to take responsibility for what "we" have done. He said he agreed with Colin Powel’s “You break it you buy it” philosophy. He kept saying, we went in there and we broke it, now we've got to fix it. While I understand wanting to take some responsibility for the suffering this administration has inflicted, this tack is based on a fallacy.


Iraq is not a matter of “You break it you buy it.” It is “They broke it, we buy it.” It's as if you and I were window shopping out on Main Street, minding our own business, when suddenly Cheney and Bush and their gang of thugs strode into The China Shop with clubs in hand and smashed the place to smithereens. Moments later, the china shop in shambles, these thugs come out onto the street giggling and present us with the bill. Furthermore, we are informed that Mr. Cheney has a friend who could use some extra work fixing up The China Shop, and he's gonna make us an offer we can't refuse.

Make no mistake, this is not our war. By insisting that it is we buy into the neocon fallacy responsible for this mess, and we let the crooks off the hook in the process. We are complicit in our passivity, to be sure, but this was a mercenary expedition from the get-go, not a war in the national interest. "Well, that's obvious," Stanley remarked. If it is, we have a compelling interest as a nation in rejecting the idea that this is "our" war, and in exposing exactly whose war this is.

It is not our troops' war. As I've said, the sentimentality surrounding the troops is a trap. It’s true they’re just doing their jobs. But we should have the courage to admit that this is not an argument for perpetuating the war.

Let’s say there's a factory a little further down on Main Street. The factory, run by the same band of thugs that just smashed up The China Shop and seem to be eyeing the Couscous joint next door, provides jobs for hundreds, although no one seems to know what the factory produces, aside from a lot of black, putrid smoke. It must be something very necessary for us to tolerate all that black, putrid smoke stinking up our little town, though, mustn't it?

Let's say one day it comes out that the factory's stoking its furnaces with women and children—not anyone from around here, mind you. We've heard through the grapevine that the women and kids are the wives and children of some bad guys who've threatened our little town in the past. Still, when it comes out, some folks feel pretty bad about it, although they have to admit that whatever that factory is producing must be pretty important if they're stoking the furnaces with women and children, so it would probably be kind of rash to demand they stop production.

Maybe someone should be reprimanded, so that people in other towns didn't think we're all a bunch of monsters. But who? Let’s say when it comes out, many of the workers swear they had no idea that's what was going on in there the whole time. Let’s say there’s a relatively small crew charged with doing the actual deed. Once the operation is exposed what do we do? Who do we hold accountable? The handful of people at the top who knew? The handful at the bottom who carried out their orders? Everyone? Society? Human nature?

Let's say we decide it’s just way too complicated to assign blame, or it takes too much courage to carry through a just punishment for those responsible, do we allow the factory to keep operating while the CEO and board of directors promise to look into alternative ways to power the plant, gorging themselves with the profits all the while?

This is roughly where we are with Iraq, in my opinion. We have known for a long time—and it has now been openly acknowledged—that the campaign was built on a fallacy—an ideological fallacy backed up by manufactured "intelligence."

These are high crimes.

There are all sorts of arguments against prosecuting those responsible, none of them compelling.

We know that being there is perpetuating the violence and anarchy. We know that even if Mr. Bush’s "surge" were the answer, the influx of troops would have to be about ten times what’s being sent, and they would have to destroy just about every man, woman and child in Iraq to "win."

So, actually, no, the surge is not a solution, it’s another provocation.


I tried to pin Stanley down (he's pretty slippery sometimes) as to what he thought the possible courses in Iraq were, from where we are at this moment. He came up with these three:

1. We could withdraw.

2. We could dramatically increase the number of troops (though we have had difficulty keeping the ones we already have there in body armor). Stan mentioned 300,000 troops might do the trick. I said (a) it ain’t gonna happen, and (b) where are you going to get the troops? He mentioned pulling troops out of Japan and Germany. I said, why not have a draft? Those are fun.

3. We could, in Stan's words, “sit and spin”—just keep on keepin’ on pretty much like we're doing now.

I'm like, so, Stanley. Which of these three courses—by your own admission, one of which (#2) is not practically or politically feasible—do you think makes the most sense?

He clasped his head with both hands—he will probably deny it but he did—and shouted: “I DON’T KNO-O-O-OW!”

"You what?"

I stood up, and made to leave the room.

I'm like, "g'night, Stan. I'm going to bed."

That's when he followed me into the hallway and started pelting me with bottle caps.

There are things you can be anguished over, my liberal friends: climate change, the willed failure of our public institutions, underfunded schools and libraries, cycles of violence in our cities, the lack of quality universal healthcare. And many more besides. But our course in Iraq is not one of them. The course there is clear.

It really is. Get the UN in there. Partition the place if that's what it takes (I liked what Chaim Kaufmann had to say about it in this morning's Globe). Get our troops out. ASAP.

There will be chaos, anguished liberals, but there has been nothing but chaos since we got there, and the road we are on leads to out-and-out apocalypse.

It's not "cut-and-run," either. We have to start doing the long-term hardcore diplomacy the Bush administration has shunned abroad, and we cannot do it until Bush and his thugs are out of office. But if we can't kick them out now, we can keep them occupied at home so that they feel constrained to do more damage, possibly by striking out at Iran.

We can do this by initiating impeachment proceedings. This will not only give our President pause, it will show the world the United States is still a nation of laws. A nation that can deal with the bullies in its midst, that rejects military adventures, cowboy diplomacy, pre-emptive wars, unilateralism, secret prisons, kidnappings, torture, and a host of other horrors that we have sat by and watched perpetrated in our name.

Or if you don't have the stomach for the impeachment process, I told Stanley, just throw the ones responsible for this travesty—and we all knew who they are—in The Pit.


The Pit you say?


What is interesting about Stanley is that he is a professed fan of "revolution" (I prefer evolution myself), but he doesn’t like my idea about The Pit. Not that it's original, as he was quick to point out. And he's right. I don’t mean to sound like I think I invented it.

My plan has two parts. Here's how it works:

1. Fnd a pit—maybe one of those superfund sites out west with toxic sludge in it.

2. Throw these bastards in it.

Stanley's objection: "well, then you’re just as bad as them."

I don't know, Stan. I like to think the best of people. Myself included. You have to admit these guys have been very, very naughty. But, honestly, I don't see The Pit as punishment or retribution, so much as a simple corrective—and maybe—we can hope, can't we?—an effective deterrent for future leaders who might be tempted to succumb to imperial hubris. It's actually very humane if you think about it. It's not filled with hellfire after all, just toxic sludge. And it'd all be over in a matter of minutes.

And if you're really worried about a fair hearing. We could set up a secret tribunal to decide their guilt.

I believe there are a great many scoundrels in both parties we need to keep an eye on, and just having a Pit handy might give them pause, too, whenever they're tempted to pull a fast one. Government by definition is, after all, "putting the foxes in charge of the hen house" (look it up in the OED if you don't believe me). We have to recognize that, and the challenges it presents for us chickens.

There is a time for bipartisanship. But all this namby-pamby talk all the sudden that Democrats should reach across the aisle and become the party of bipartisanship is bosh. The first thing they need to be is a stomach pump for a government so drunk on unchecked power it's poisoned itself. Once you've purged the poison from the body politic, you get back to making nice.

I am willing to award Halliburton a no-bid contract amounting to billions to construct The Pit, by the way. And to grant Fox exclusive rights to broadcast the proceedings. I think this could be even bigger than American Idol and Aqua Teen Hunger Force combined!

Even after hearing me out, Stanley, who is nothing if not well-intentioned and very conscientious, quickly rejected The Pit as rash, unworkable, logistically unsound. And yet he’s in a genuine quandary over Iraq, where we’ve tossed over 3,000 of our own innocents, and tens of thousands of theirs, into one.

It's not rocket science, it's Occam's razor.