posted April 13, 2003 at 1:20 a.m. MDTDances With Wolfowitz [NYTimes OpEd] - " ... Mr. Cheney's war guru, Victor Davis Hanson, writes in his book "An Autumn of War" that war can be good, and that sometimes nations are better off using devastation than suasion. Mr. Hanson cites Sherman's march through Georgia, the 19th century's great instance of shock and awe, as a positive role model.
Polls and interviews show that in their goal of making Americans less rattled by battle, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney have succeeded: most Americans are showing a stoic attitude about the dead and the wounded so far. (Perhaps the American tolerance for pain is owed to the fact that much of the pain is not shown on television, embeddedness notwithstanding.) [nota: Al-Jazeera's more documentary approached was met with contempt and condemnation ... and with a missile in Baghdad.]
Wolfowitz of Arabia and the other administration hawks are thrilled with U.S. hawkishness. When Mr. Wolfowitz was on "Meet the Press" on Sunday his aides sat in the green room watching the monitor and high-fiving their boss's performance. [nota: An officer in Central Command commented on people raiding relief trucks in Basra that it's kind of wonderful that already they've started to act like caplitalists; aid workers decried the fact that Iraqis were being stripped of their dignity.]
[...]
Mr. Wolfowitz played the diplomat on Sunday, gliding past Tim Russert's probing on whether the neo-cons' dreams of other campaigns in Syria, Iran and North Korea would come true. Pressed, he said, "There's got to be change in Syria as well."
And the Times's David Sanger reported that when a Bush aide stepped into the Oval Office recently to tell the president that the hard-boiled Rummy had also been shaking a fist at Syria, Mr. Bush smiled and said one word: "Good."
