© Maynard Chen, All rights reserved 2009.
A sharing by Maynard Chen
February 5th 2003, On the road to Des Moines, Iowa
The next morning I turned on the car radio and there was Colin Powell giving a speech at the UN on Iraq, so I switched off my audiobooks. It was an impressive and convincing speech. He had intricately detailed information about Iraq’s manufacture of weapons of mass destruction. There were satellite photos of mobile biological weapons factories and taped conversations of people actively engaged in concealing WMD from the inspectors. The case for war was getting stronger.
Upon further reflection however, there was something that didn’t quite add up. He was trying to argue that the inspections were a failure because Saddam was successfully hiding his weapons of mass destruction from the inspectors, and he could prove that because he had detailed evidence of their existence and locations. However if the US did indeed have such prodigious and detailed intelligence about these weapons, why didn’t they pass it on to the inspectors so that they could catch Saddam red-handed? The weapons could then be confiscated and destroyed and the inspections would be a success. Of course then there would be no rationale for an invasion to remove them. He was like the salesmen selling both invincible spears that could penetrate anything, and impenetrable shields.
Just a week before this trip, I had read an essay by Peter Lee in the Smirking Chimp website*, in which he wonderfully captured the essence of the Iraq situation in a single sentence.
“Today the new orthodoxy of war and pre-emption and empire is slouching towards Baghdad waiting to be born.”
In the late afternoon while heading towards Des Moines, I was again anxiously scouting for gas to slake the recurring thirst of my Toyota Camry. I suddenly realised that even though I personally didn’t have to kill anyone for gas, the country was preparing for war, to slake the collective thirst of millions of automobiles like mine.
February 6th 2003, On the road to Ann Arbor, Michigan
While I was hurtling along Interstate 80 towards Ann Arbor, Michigan. I heard an unfamiliar noise. I glanced up and saw V shaped lines slowly traversing the grey and overcast skies. It was a flock of honking geese on their annual migration to warmer climes. I felt a certain affinity for them. Fearing the impending chill of an economic winter, I too was migrating. We were each coasting on individual trajectories towards private destinies…. just as this great nation that I was traversing was slouching towards Baghdad.
Epilogue
I finally reached Boston safely after two detours to visit old schoolmates in Ann Arbor and Toronto. Buoyed by ever more creative financing, the housing market continued to rise during the two years I lived in my Cambridge townhouse, allowing me to sell at a good price and avoid paying a lot of capital gains tax. Then the bubble finally burst. My timing was sheer luck because I thought the housing market was going to crash much sooner, but then I did not anticipate the creativity of the mortgage industry inventing balloon loans, no doc mortgages and liar loans.
Peter Lee’s prophecy came to pass. The unborn beast reached Baghdad when US troops moved into Iraq on March 20th 2003 to hunt for WMD. Two years later the CIA admitted in a final report that no WMD were found in Iraq. Powell told Walters that he felt “terrible” about the claims made in his UN speech. When asked whether it would tarnish his reputation he replied: “Of course it will. It’s a blot. I’m the one who presented it on behalf of the United States to the world, and [it] will always be a part of my record. It was painful. It’s painful now.”
* The essay by Peter Lee is entitled “A few good men … and Condi too” by Peter Lee. Posted on January 23rd 2003 in The Smirking Chimp website. It is no longer available for download, but I saved a copy.
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About the Writer
Maynard Chen was a software consultant working in Silicon Valley from 1997 to 2003. He has now relocated to Singapore.