Catch-22 and Iraqi Amnesty

I can't quite help myself. I've been reading Joseph Heller's masterpiece again. I saw it on the shelf and intended only to confirm whether I remembered the very first line: "It was love at first sight." I had remembered, and now I'm on page 200. I have a facility for remembering the prose of great books verbatim which unfortunately dispels much of the pleasure of multiple perusals. I would guess this is pass #6 or #7 through Catch-22, but the prose is such absolute perfection it withstands repetition, like listening to a great monologue from early Woody Allen.

Anyway, it's a disconcerting juxtaposition to read this brilliant parody of the insanity of war, even a war as just as World War II (the last one, I suppose, in which America wholeheartedly agreed to its necessity and righteousness) while occasionally watching C-Span coverage of Congress and reading on-line news reports. Yesterday the Senate argued at length about the language of a Senate resolution expressing the "sense" of the Senate about reports the Iraqi government of al-Maliki was considering granting amnesty to insurgents who had killed American soldiers. The Senators were posturing, thundering, and declaiming like mad to make sure they appeared to be the most outraged over such a suggestion. John Warner seemed to take the whole thing personally, as if that mane of white hair should have been proof enough that no one could possibly be more supportive of America's brave young men and women, and that if any ambiguity seemed to seep from the edges of the resolution...

Well, you see, that's the problem. The Senate, in expressing its "sense," does not want to be in the position of telling the Iraqi government what to do. We would never do that, because Iraq is a "sovereign" country that we set up and are dying to preserve. And as we set it up, defend it and die to preserve it, Maliki & Co. are trying to make peace with the unrelenting insurgents who attack them 600 times a week by letting them off the hook for killing the people who are dying to preserve the Maliki government.

So I'm wondering what the great, the incomparable, the brilliant, the one-and-only Joseph Heller would do with priceless material like this. Remember Milo Minderbinder? The entrepreneur who bombed the air base on Pianosa on a for-profit basis? Well, it really happened. It's called Kellog Brown & Root, and they furnish "services" to the military on a contract basis. They constantly short-change and cheat the military. They serve them substandard food and pad their invoices. If the Administration entered a contract with KBR to kill American troops, would Congress say anything about it? Wouldn't the Republican majority rise up and defend the Bush Administration's absolute right to conduct the war under the President's constitutional war powers in any way he saw fit? And if bombing American troops using American planes is part of that conduct, does Congress really have anything to say about it? Didn't they sign an Authorization for Use of Military Force in 2001? And if bombing American troops using American bombers isn't a use of military force, what is?

And Colonel Cathcart, who Yossarian kept saying was trying to get him killed by making him fly combat missions. Isn't Donald Rumsfeld the perfect Colonel Cathcart? Isn't he trying to get Americans killed by sending them in insufficient numbers with inadequate armor against an implacable foe who are so tenacious the government wants to tell them it's okay if you only killed Americans? Doesn't the American soldier have the right to say that his enemy is anybody who's trying to get him killed? And if some Clevinger, some unthinking grunt challenges the would-be Yossarian and tells him, they're not trying to kill you, they're trying to kill everybody, isn't the rational response -- what difference does that make?

Thank you, Joseph, for letting me see it was always thus. Contextually, the Iraq War is even crazier than World War II, of course. The entire exercise has become very similar to Captain Black's Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, where airmen were forced to sign nonstop loyalty oaths to eat, to get a parachute, to get a bombing map, to move about the base. The question now is who supports the troops? Maybe they shouldn't be there at all, maybe the whole project is insane, maybe we'll go bankrupt doing this forever, but that doesn't matter. Do you support the troops or don't you? You could say you support the troops by trying to get them out of Iraq, where the government you're fighting and dying to preserve says it's okay to kill you, but that's too complicated. And anyway, nobody cares anymore. Long ago everyone forgot why we're in Iraq. We call it the "central front" in the war on terror, but it's the central front only because we're there, and if we weren't there, it wouldn't be the central front anymore.

Gee, I can see how intoxicating it must have been to write the original Catch-22. All you have to do is open your eyes and see. And be an insightful genius, of course. The world is crazy.

And getting crazier. It now develops that Iraqi troops trained by Americans have used their training to kill Americans, including two soldiers from California in 2004. The Pentagon was a little slow in delivering that news to the parents of the soldiers killed by American-trained Iraqis. We may need another sense of the Senate on that one, that it's none of our business how the Iraqi government uses the training we give their soldiers, but our sense is that we'd rather they kill the insurgents with their training, even if the insurgents who kill our American soldiers will be given amnesty for killing us directly, although it's our sense we're not too crazy about that either.