Barry Farber
Monday, April 12, 2004

It seems the Israelis were ignoring the tradition of inviting the policemen inside the Embassy for tea every afternoon at four. That’s like not being offered coffee at a business meeting when custom expects it and your body craves it.

The head constable got an Israeli Embassy official on the phone and gave him one of those “See here, old chap” reproaches and let him know the Israelis were not playing by the rules and, please, could something be done about it?

The Israeli official understood immediately, apologized and vowed to initiate the procedure that very afternoon. And then he added: “We do hope you will understand. You see, we haven’t had an embassy in 2,000 years!”

And that’s my message to the Democrats (most of them), the Iraqis (some of them) and the world (a majority) about America's conduct of the war. You see, we’ve NEVER been brutally attacked on our own soil, leaving as many Americans dead as died at Pearl Harbor, and then gathered ourselves together and overthrew al-Qaeida’s launch pad, Afghanistan, and then set out to attack the one regional leader who most enjoyed seeing Americans killed and was the most capable of assisting al-Qaida in future strikes and making sure that he, Saddam Hussein, was stripped of his means of making other people miserable, tortured and dead.

Guess what! We’ve made mistakes in the war. We’re feeling our way. And along that way we’ve made formidable mistakes, we’re currently making others, and we’ll continue to make more. And we who support President Bush and consider the War on Terrorism the most important issue of all by far are even making mistakes trying to decide which of our actions were mistakes.

Was it a mistake to invade Iraq? I vote no. Was it a mistake not to wait until we’d assembled a bigger roll call of allies? Again, no. If we’d tried to wait for France, Germany, Russia and China, we’d have waited until Gabriel blows that high note. Was it a mistake not to deploy more troops? Maybe.

What was our biggest mistake? Probably disbanding the Iraqi army, instead of giving them new leadership and a pay raise. Then again, maybe that was NOT a mistake. Who knows?

How about closing down the newspaper run by Shiite militia leader Muktada al-Sadr? It’s too early to tell.

If his Shiite army swells and deals America a severe setbak, it was a mistake. If, however, that impassioned band of warriors peaks, fights a little, and then runs and dwindles and disappears, it was NOT a mistake. Better to get his 15 minutes of fame over with.

What irks me is not the number of Americans pointing out our mistakes. It’s the number who seem glad of it!

It’s perfectly possible to think that an endeavor you approve of is mistaken in certain of its major parts. We were all for winning World War II, right? But that didn’t keep us from complaining that, for example, too much of our Navy was bunched up too close together at Pearl Harbor. We, who desperately wanted America to win, thought that was a mistake.

Most of us thought that the landings at Anzio and Salerno on Italy’s west coast were mistakes, costly mistakes. Surely the British, who wanted to beat Hitler and liberate France, concluded that the fiasco of a commando raid on the French port of Dieppe was a mistake. In no case were the complainers against the side that COMMITTED the mistakes. They were purely and simply against the MISTAKES.

Two sports fans watching a football game would agree that the team that tries a field goal from too far out and fails has made a mistake. The one who then cusses for a hour is sorry the team he loves did a dumb thing. The guy who smiles is delighted with the mistake. He hopes that team will make more.

So many Americans now pointing the bony finger of indignation at our mistakes in Iraq don’t seem to be “with” America’s effort. Please note: I didn’t call them unpatriotic, subversives, traitors or al-Qaida moles cleverly disguised as insurance agents in Gaffney, S.C. The worst I’ll say is I have the feeling they’re not with the Coalition effort. Usually they say so themselves, quite unbashfully.

America is making honest mistakes in a worthy endeavor. That’s my opinion. If you consider America’s mistakes something other than honest and the endeavor itself malevolent, I find that unfortunate. I hope you’ll reconsider over time and rejoin the team later on.

The arguments have jelled into clichés. “No weapons of mass destruction have been found!” “There’s no proven connection between Iraq and al-Qaida!” “Iraq posed no immediate threat to the United States!”

It’s interesting that those who belt out those clichés seldom take a breath and deliver the OTHER “clichés” reminding us of “mass graves,” “rape rooms,” “torture champers,” “multiple invasions of Iraq’s neighbors,” “unleashing of poison gas against his own people” and the two most energizing clichés of all, “The world is rid of a monster differing little qualitatively from Adolf Hitler” and “Iraq is now free to become a democracy.”

Why should Israel be the only democracy in the Middle East?

I see it as irrelevant whether Saddam had WMD or posed an imminent threat to America or had any kind of relationship with Osama bin Laden. Most Americans agreed in March 1941 that it mattered not one whit whether Iceland was a threat or in cahoots with Nazi Germany when we moved in and occupied it.

We had to get there before the Germans did, unless we wanted many more ships sunk by Nazi submarines based on that mid-Atlantic island and German bombers bombing America’s East Coast cities from Icelandic bases when America inevitably entered the war.

And what gave us the right to invade Iceland? Recent German history as of March 1941. End of story.

Likewise, we had to take Iraq to abort any al-Qaida plan to make common cause with the one Middle Eastern leader who was the richest, the most militarily able and the most eager to exact vengeance upon America. And that was Saddam Hussein, who we evicted from Kuwait and upon whom we inflicted the mother of all military disasters.

All those who say nay are using the old rule book. The new one was published long before nightfall on 9/11.

My side is the quiet side. The opposite side is the loud side. And in their fulminations about WMD and imminent threats and lack of connection with al-Qaida, they bring to mind the story of the Southern preacher who came forth with such a spectacularly great sermon one Sunday morning the congregation thought he’d been divinely visited and kissed by tongues of flame.

One of the altar boys cleaning up the sanctuary after the service noticed that a single page of the preacher’s sermon had fluttered to the carpet beside the pulpit. He reached for it, as a souvenir of the most stirring sermon of his lifetime.

As he beheld the printed page he noticed the preacher had penciled a note to himself in the left-hand margin of the page.

The note said: “Argument unsubstantiated here. Yell like hell!”

"The Barry Farber Show" is heard over the Talk Radio Network Saturdays and Sundays beginning at four p.m. Eastern time.