She tossed the note on the table and replied, "Essentially."
"He's nuts!"
Condi looked at me, and I simply added, "What he said."
She gave a wry smile and shrugged. "If I don't pass this along, I am not doing my job."
"Why don't we send a reply, that if the Iraqis are willing to send us Saddam Hussein's head in a box we'll go home?" At that, I looked over at General Pace. "Can we drop leaflets over Iraq?"
He smiled. "Yes. We can also simply broadcast that over the radio and television airwaves."
"Okay, whatever. Why don't we do that? If we aren't already doing it, let's post a bounty on the man's head. We'll stop when they send us his head. They can keep the leftovers."
"You don't really want his head, do you, Mister President?", asked Condi.
I grinned back at her. "Sure, why not? We can stick it on a pike at the front gate, and march the diplomatic corps past it. Maybe they would get the message." She looked horrified at the thought. "No? Okay, that might be a bit much. Maybe we can mount it over the main gate at Fort Bragg?" The military guys and anybody else with a military background snickered at the thought. "Seriously, though, we need to make sure we get the message out that the best way to end this is by getting rid of that jackass in Baghdad. I don't care who takes over, but I am not interested in stopping until the Hussein problem is settled once and for all."
For real shits and giggles, I ended up doing an interview with David Brooks and Mark Shields for the PBS NewsHour during this time period. Like many interviews I had given, this one had a few unexpected side effects, but had generally proved positive. We had been speaking from the Map Room, and the discussion had been about the war in Kurdistan. Shields was a liberal and a writer for the Washington Post, while Brooks was a conservative writer for the New York Times. They typically sparred on the Friday edition of the NewsHour, but this was taping on Tuesday. Most reporters at that level of journalism are pretty smart fellows, but every once in awhile somebody reverts to their roots, where they started out asking idiotic questions like 'How do you feel?' to a mother who just ran over her baby with the family car.
Shields: "What kind of a message are you trying to send with this war?"
Me: (Staring at him briefly.) "MESSAGE?! I'm not sending a message! We've been sending messages for months now! If I wanted to send a message I'd call Western Union! No, the time for messages is over! Now I am sending death and destruction! You want to know what kind of message I am sending?! How about this for a message! If you kill my citizens and my soldiers and my diplomats, I WILL SEND DOWN THE THUNDERBOLTS OF THE GODS! How's that for a message!"
That was on Tuesday, and Will Brucis looked totally flummoxed by my words, as did Brooks and Shields. Presidents simply didn't talk that way! I just said, 'Screw it!', and we finished the interview. By Friday, though, the segment had been edited and was ready for their regular debate, this time with moderator Margaret Warner. The interview segment was only lightly edited, as much for clarity and timing as anything else. Certainly that segment made its way in, in full. Then, however, they digressed.
Shields: "I was curious about what the actual troops the Commander in Chief commands thought about this kind of talk, so I visited a few Army bases and spoke to them. I spoke to the enlisted guys, not their officers and especially not the Public Information specialists you always get saddled with. By and large, President Buckman is extremely popular with the troops. They loved being called thunderbolts. They all lit up when I played them the interview."
Brooks: "Not all of our Presidents have been well respected by their soldiers. Bill Clinton in particular was more tolerated than respected. Carl Buckman, on the other hand, is fairly well thought of. He was the youngest battery commander in the 82nd Airborne since Viet Nam and he earned a Bronze Star rescuing his troops while injured and behind enemy lines. That means a lot to these guys."
Shields: "You saw that when he made that bet with the Navy a few years ago about who would win the Army-Navy Game. The winner would get a deluxe dinner at the White House and the loser would get cold MREs. When Army lost and was scheduled for MREs out in the cold of a New York winter, he showed up in a captain's uniform and ate with them. That's the kind of respect troops understand and appreciate, and it means a lot to them. That sure never happened when I was a Marine, let me tell you!"
I had to think about that for a bit. It hadn't seemed all that significant to me at the time. It was simply standard Management Techniques 101, loyalty up and loyalty down, that sort of thing. On the other hand, I had known a shitload of managers over the years who thought that because they were the boss, their shit automatically didn't stink.
There wasn't much happening on the Kurdish front that week, but the domestic front heated up a touch. Carter managed to get a war resolution going. In theory, only Congress has the right to send the nation to war, but the President has the requirement to defend the nation. This was all written into the Constitution at a time when muskets and cannons were high tech, and communications took months to get anywhere. We have actually only had five instances where Congress declared war. Following the debacle in Viet Nam, Congress decided to rein in the President with the War Powers Act. Stripped of all the verbiage, after 60 days, if Congress disapproved, they could stop funding things and require you to bug out of whatever you had gotten into. There hadn't been a President since who didn't think it was unconstitutional, but we tended to walk pretty carefully around the subject.
The answer was the 'war resolution'. You don't declare war anymore, since wars need victories. It was much more likely that you were fighting to restore the status quo to some shithole, or keep oil and trade flowing, or stop genocide, or simply to do something to show the country that you cared. In this case, we were fighting to defend the Kurds, not to conquer and defeat the Iraqis. Condoleeza Rice had tried but failed to get a U.N. resolution against the Iraqis. The Russians had fought against it by claiming we didn't have any proof, and when it passed, they vetoed it. I called Putin and told him we were going in anyway, and that I sure hoped the latest weapons shipment had already been paid for, since we were going to destroy them. Chemical warfare really was a trump card on this, and all the neocons were baying at the moon and howling about how I should have done this in 2001. Since the neocons also hated the Russians, I used them to push for the resolution as a poke in the eye to Putin. I got the resolution I needed for funding purposes, and I let the legal types argue on the Sunday morning talk shows about the laws of war.
Christ, but I hated this mess!
Chapter 163: Kurdish Dragon
The Sunday news shows all ran the footage from the Brooks and Shield interview, and the chattering classes all pontificated on what it meant. The liberals were rather unhappy with my barbaric worldview and the conservatives couldn't understand why I hadn't gone after Iraq in 2001 when I had my first chance. The only one who seemed to understand, or at least was able to express it cogently, was Bob Schieffer, on Face the Nation. He devoted his personal essay piece to it.