Dubya is for War

Our goal for this Spring Books issue is to read beneath the text of war. The surface plot is obvious enough: Bush is going to invade Iraq, and nothing will stand in his way. What, then, is the subtext? Why is our nation so war-bent and ready to fight? Where did all this bellicose determination come from? It doesn't matter that most Seattle Weekly readers, and most of Seattle, are against the conflict. Bush's America, Red America, will have its way. Iraq will fall at great cost, and the world will tremble and howl in protest. What follows are the slips, the clues, and the inferences our writers have drawn from the past year's worth of war books.

Chessmen

Let me distill all 496 pages of Kenneth M. Pollack's The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (Random House, $25.95) to a single image: Saddam is a chess piece, and America should knock him down with a flick of its mighty finger to make the game easier to play. Published last fall by a Democratic-leaning former CIA analyst (a Yalie, no less!), the book boils down to thatlet's make chess into checkers. The world is too complicated. The Middle East is too confusing. People can't be bothered to think about it. But after we take out this despot, everything will straighten itself outIsrael, Palestine, and those fickle Arab states with their strange customs and festering grievances whose oil we need so badly.

Absent Saddam, Pollack writes, "We would be truly free to pursue other items on our foreign policy agenda." Items. Like a grocery-store list. Bread, milk, toilet paper, world domination. Check.

Pollack begins his book with a foreboding poem from Yeats"The Second Coming," couldn't he show more imaginationand concludes with John Stuart Mill, the father of utilitarianism. In other words: The inescapable ends justify the ineluctable means. And there's no time to lose after Sept. 11, Pollack acknowledges: "[P]olls demonstrate that with each passing month, the willingness of Americans to use force to remove Saddam from power declines a bit further." So we have to dumb down our foreign policy to achieve quick, easily apprehensible results. They have to neatly fit within a headline, a sound bite, a CNN crawl, or a photo.

So leave it to photojournalist Peter Howe, the editor of Shooting Under Fire: The World of the War Photographer (Artisan, $35), to provide some essential context outside the tidy 35mm frame. He selects the words and images of 10 important combat photographers to show everything Pollack leaves out of his white paper. Here are scenes of what Baghdad might become: Berlin, Saigon, Hue, Belfast, Beirut, Sarajevo, Grozny, Ramallah, Kabul, and lower Manhattan on Sept. 11. The images may scorch your retinas, even if you don't recognize all the place names.

Howe will visit the University Book Store on Thursday, March 20, and he can tell you about the scenes he's witnessed in Northern Ireland and El Salvador. I hope he'll show slides, since words can't compare to such pictures. It's the best way to honor the men and women who risk their lives to portray the horrors of war.

Although they're also an articulate lot. Says James Nachtwey (himself the subject of an entire documentary, War Photographer), "When I was photographing the wars in Lebanon, the war in Afghanistan against the Russians, the Afghan civil war, and both Palestinian uprisings, I thought I was covering separate stories. But on September 11, 2001, I realized that I had actually been photographing one story, and this was its latest phase."

And now it will be continued. -Brian Miller

The Three Faces of George

If you think Bush is stupid, you are. If defenders of democracy and the life of the mind don't quit treating him like a joke, the society-shattering joke will be on them. So it's high time to brush up on Bush with three important books that help explain why he's so intent on taking us to war.

First and most fair-minded is Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (Vintage, $10), by Molly Ivins, who has hung out in Bush's circles since high school, and Lou Dubose. It gives Bush his due as an education reformer and political adept who recruited Hispanics and bridged the hate-filled cultural gulf between country-club Republicans and the Christian right. He's also been stunningly lucky: The $2 billion tax cut on which he ran for president was paid for by the tobacco lawsuit won by his b괥 noir, trial lawyers. "This guy is not just lucky; if they tried to hang him, the rope would break." Which explains Bush's no-plan, faith-based strategy for Iraq: "Hey, trust me; it's always worked out for me before!"

Mark Crispin Miller's The Bush Dyslexicon (Norton, $24.95) is often found in bookstore humor sections, and it's packed with rib-tickling Bush quotes, like "More and more of our imports come from overseas." But it's also a close, angry analysis of a coldly calculating mind. "We misunderestimate him at our peril," says Miller. Part of that peril, for Iraqi troops, the U.N., and anyone who disagrees with his bellicose extremism, is a stunning lack of compassion.