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| Give Pontification a Chance | |||||||
| The New York City Council’s effort to oppose the coming war provides a glimpse into our conflicted national psyche | |||||||
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| March 17 — It’s a pretty big statement when the nation’s largest city takes a strong stand against the inevitable invasion of Iraq. So it’s an even bigger statement when it doesn’t. |
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CONFUSED? SO WAS the mostly Democratic New York City Council, which wanted to condemn the coming war in no uncertain terms—that is, until they got uncertain about it. The result was an “anti-war” resolution that covered so many bases—from condemning violence, to condemning Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons, to condemning the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive attack—that it reads as if paragraphs were lifted indiscriminately from White House press releases, Ralph Nader speeches, Condi Rice briefings and Jacques Chirac private conversions with Gerhard Schroeder. Now, Lord knows, the last thing I want to do is write a story about the New York City Council, a legislative body that is as underpowered as an ’83 Yugo. This is a governmental entity so feckless that it can’t even set housing policy, tax policy, education policy, or a number of other policies without the approval of the State Assembly and State Senate (and don’t get me started on them!). This is the same esteemed body that passes more ceremonial street-name changes than actual laws. Remember that detail—it becomes important later. But the New York City Council’s erratic effort to oppose the coming Gulf War sequel actually provides a rare glimpse into our conflicted national psyche on the eve of America’s first pre-emptive war. Either that, or there are just a bunch of wackos on the New York City Council. I’ll report, you deride: Back in October—when President Bush made the first of his 14,732 pronouncements that “time is running out” for Saddam—a decent Councilman named Bill Perkins introduced a resolution opposing unilateral action against Iraq. Such non-binding resolutions had already been passed in several U.S. cities and towns, some of them far less liberal than New York. Many lawmakers felt that the Council needed to join the “Cities for Peace” movement, if only because the Council chambers are a mere quarter-mile from Ground Zero (the big hole that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with, but that’s not important now). Perkins’s resolution was a simple anti-war statement: “Resolved: That the Council of the City of New York opposes the Congressional resolution allowing President George W. Bush to unilaterally declare war against Iraq without the authority of the United Nations or without evidence that the U.S. is in immediate danger due to actions by the government of Iraq.” It may sound simple, but the devil was in Perkins’s pre-amble: Not only did he infer that a unilateral war would be a “misstep,” but his anti-war resolution quickly turned into a kitchen sink of Northeastern liberalism: “Consumer confidence wanes and the public’s faith in our business leaders diminishes with each new revelation of financial impropriety ... Domestic issues are being ignored; the budget is in severe deficit and education programs have not been funded.” (Wouldn’t that still be true even if this were a so-called “just war”?). “We should ... not repeat the same mistakes our leaders have made in the past,” the pre-amble added. For the handful of Council members, this was the smoking gun. Mistakes of the past! Wasn’t it a “mistake of the past” that we did not take out Saddam during the first Gulf War (or even earlier, when the CIA created him—but that’s not important now)? And given that the Council had spent much of the last year renaming streets for the “heroes” of September 11, why wasn’t there any acknowledgement of New York’s primal place in the history of terrorism? A mini-revolt ensued and Perkins’s resolution was tabled by the Council’s speaker (hey, he may be a liberal, but he also wants to be mayor someday). But while New York City was trying to pass an anti-war resolution that wouldn’t anger a single one of the city’s 8 million residents, dozens of cities started rubber-stamping far more aggressive anti-war statements. Ithaca, New York argued that there’s “no proven linkage” between the World Trade Center attack and Saddam, and that war with Iraq “will kill many innocent Iraqi civilians, who have already suffered enormously.” Montclair, New Jersey demanded “that the resources to be used for war instead be allocated to the States and municipalities to assist them in meeting the many needs of our citizens.” Detroit argued that “for the past eleven years, U.S. aircraft have been illegally invading Iraq’s airspace on a daily basis ... yet there have never been any Iraqi attacks on U.S. aircraft and President Bush’s statement that Iraq is a threat justifying war is false.” Amherst, Massachusetts blamed the U.S. for Saddam and questioned our motives: “Iraq’s use of chemical and biological weapons during the 1980s was enabled, facilitated, and tolerated by the government of the United States. And the Administration’s post-Iraq War plans to make Iraq’s oil resources available to private energy companies is both morally and politically repugnant.” Des Moines made it a life-and-death issue ... for Des Moines, that is. “Most importantly, a war will cause death and dismemberment of citizens of Des Moines.” And Key West, Florida—that vacation paradise—made what I believe to be the most-compelling anti-war argument: “Tourism,” the town fathers stated, “suffers in times of war.” In all, close to 140 cities have passed the kinds of resolution that New York—which has seen just about as much war as we can take, thank you very much—could not. |
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So with war imminent, the Council gave it one more shot, redrafting Perkins’s original resolution to include as many ingredients as an Emeril Lagasse gumbo. The final version is a resolution only Confucius could love: If war is inevitable, relax and enjoy it. Gone is Perkins’s original single-mindedness, replaced with a lot of hedge phrases urging the U.S. to “make all efforts” to work with other countries, but in the end supporting war if “other options” for disarming Saddam “have failed.” Before the Council vote last week, idiocy, bombast, pomposity and the reduction of complex issues into simple one-sentence sound-bites was clearly not the monopoly of one party, one racial group or one ethnicity. Eloquence was in short supply. One Councilman said that we had to go to war because Iraq “attacked Kuwait, gassed its own people and attacked Israel—not to mention how they treat their women.” (Their women? Maybe we could avoid war by trading a few hundred of our goats for a few hundred of their women.) Another pointed out that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction “could be used to destroy the world and aid the terrorists.” (Why would Saddam need to aid the terrorists after destroying the world?) Another said “the threat of more terrorism should not deter us.” (I don’t know; once they knock down the Empire State Building, New York will hardly be worth visiting.) Another complained that the Council spends “too much time on issues outside of what our constituents elected us to do.” (To make his point, he went far over his 90-second time limit.) And one confused anti-war Councilman argued against the war—unless we “turn those tanks in another direction—at Saudi Arabia! That’s where Osama bin Laden came from!” And, of course, one Councilman pointed out that “if we don’t disarm Saddam Hussein now, we won’t have enough streets to name for new victims.” (I told you that the street-name thing is a sore subject in New York.) Yes, the redrafted resolution passed, 31-17, but watching this entire five-month process made me wonder why we’re so eager to foster true democracy in post-war Iraq. I mean, haven’t those good people suffered enough? Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His Web site is at www.gersh.tv © 2003 Newsweek, Inc. | ||||||||||||||||||
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