President Bush recently sought to convey, through the curious medium of a Fox
News interview, his assurance to the nations of the Middle East that America
harbors no imperial design:
"We won't have permanent bases," Bush told Fox News television in the interview
conducted at his retreat at Camp David, Maryland.But he added, "I do believe it is in our interests and the interests of the
Iraqi people that we do enter into an agreement on how we are going to conduct
ourselves over the next years."
The revealing slip is the uncolloquial phrase "the next years." Nobody born in
America and thinking straight and clear would ever speak that phrase. It mixes
up "the coming years" (indefinite but distinctly long-term) and "next year" (as
short as short-term gets).
The president was on the verge of saying "the next few years"; but he wanted
more. He would surely have preferred to say, "the next decade or so." But he
wanted more than that, too, and, at the same time, he needed to imply less. He
has in mind fifty years at least; and we know it because he said it on May 30,
2007. The point of the number, 50 years, was that George W. Bush estimates the
U.S. presence in Iraq by analogy with the U.S. presence in South Korea after
1952. Yet John McCain went unnecessarily far, as the president knows, when he
said 100 years. To say that the U.S. will maintain superbases in Iraq for 100
years but that those bases are "not permanent" could seem like hairsplitting.
Hence the awkward and not-native locution "the next years."
It is already clear that a vote for McCain is a vote for a permanent American
imperial presence in the Middle East. (In the short term, it is a vote for war
with Iran.) That is one reason the president stepped forward early to endorse
McCain. But if the Democrats mean to challenge the Bush-McCain policy, they
will have to do so on a more inspired basis than "Iraq has been very
unpleasant, and staying there a long time will be very unpleasant." For McCain
can take the high ground of noble self-sacrifice (supported by the Gothic
conceit that if we leave the ground unsalted the terror will "follow us home").
McCain can take the high ground with better license than either Bush or Cheney,
because, unlike them, he has a history of self-sacrifice for his country, and
also because his delusions, being fresher than theirs, may glow more brightly
for a time.
The only sure antidote to the 50-100 year plan is to explain to voters that our
military expansion into the Middle East is wrong because the Middle East is not
America's country and not America's property. It may not be useless to remind
them that all the original justifications of the war are discredited, and that
many people--including, perhaps, themselves, if they can imagine it--resent an
occupying army all the more fiercely when the occupiers belong to a different
race and religion. It can be added that we create more terrorists than we kill
by the violence we inflict with the best of intentions; and that we have no
right to subject our soldiers to the sheer thankless peril of occupying a
country where half the people think it is praiseworthy to kill Americans.