Golden: State of the nation

You have to put the goings on in Iraq into context. Seven years ago an event occurs - the destruction of a large commercial complex in New York City. The nation responds by going to war, first against a small, isolated religious sect that has gained control over the tribal and national politics of a small, isolated, backward country called Afghanistan and then against a not-so-small country in the Middle East called Iraq.

The first war has plenty to do with the unfortunate event in New York; the later has virtually nothing to do with it. Seven years, 3,300 American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and hundreds of billions of dollars later the war grinds on, but in America you can hardly tell.

The malls are full, the television still casts is baleful, imaginary light across our living rooms - our emotional well being seemingly determined by the fortunes of professional sports players - and more and more of us spend our time glued to a computer screen, transfixed by the Internet.

Whatever the polarities energizing American life, wherever the political currents that course through the large cities and across the heartland flow, the nation has lapsed into somnolence.

We are engaged in a torpid national debate about Iraq, formed into a presidential campaign that has begun eight months before the first primary.

As if we had nothing else on our minds, nothing to make or do. Other issues float to the surface of the placid pond of public opinion - everyone's voice is heard now, every blog counts. We dream of cars and Paris Hilton Enterprise America rolls on. The stock market is up; American Idol pulls a hundred million votes to determine the fate of a so-so singer; a crazy college kid goes bonkers and snuffs out scores of innocent lives. More and more we respond by going out to eat. McDonalds is doing land office business.

Yet America is a nation of endless optimism and a can-do attitude. States are offering health insurance to the poor; mayors of large cities, New York most notably, are initiating ambitious green programs to clear the air and cut down on greenhouse gas emissions.

Maybe neither has much to do with the unfortunate state of affairs in the Mideast. Or maybe everything, if you believe emotional response and gesture, no matter how seemingly futile, can be elicited from a people. As individuals we may have abandoned hope of gaining control over the life of our nation, but perhaps we are beginning to understand there is an economic price, perhaps even a moral one, to pay for Iraq.

Did we really need to do this? Did we? To send so many of our beautiful, brave children to die - to kick the stuffing out of a people already abused beyond imagining by a malevolent dictator? For what?

One reason the American juggernaut in Iraq rolls on, the presence of IEDs in its path and so much carnage notwithstanding is that its cost is "only" 4 percent of our gross national product.

A knowledgeable observer of the Washington scene, a senior member of the U.S. House of Representatives, once told me that number would net out to a trillion dollars and then some, once the bonds that finance the war are all paid down in 20 years or so. And that was a conservative estimate based on the situation almost a year ago. A trillion dollars still buys a lot of hospitals, and health plans, and schools, and infrastructure improvements and energy research. A trillion dollars buys a future.

Foreign adventures such as Iraq are a staple of political life, with or without the existence of booty like the vast pool of oil sequestered under the Iraqi desert. Napoleon invaded Egypt for no good reason at all, his army was shredded and he came limping home. Within months the French forgot all about it.

Perhaps the same will happen here after our vice president's Cheshire cat smile and our president's stammer fade from the nightly news. The tendency is to want to blame someone - Congress, for instance, or big contractors - but Americans aren't like that. Terms of office end, political control shifts and before you know it a generation has passed and a morbidly clever filmmaker is producing a short picture featuring Robert S. McNamara facing up to his transgressions in the Vietnam era. Scant comfort for a wasted generation.

Life is a dream, a Spanish playwright once said. I'm dreaming that nothing bad will happen to all those soldiers going off to Iraq for a second tour and all the Iraqi kids whose days have become nightmares of sectarian violence will wake up on a bright, peaceful morning.

I'm dreaming that the Indian and Latino and Russian families that I see at the mall will grab their part of America and make it their own; I'm dreaming that my grandchildren and yours won't have to pay a price for all of this.

Let's go back to the beginning. Whatever the impulses that governed the young men who flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; whatever is happening in the world of Islam; whatever the former state of Saddam Hussein's nuclear arms program (tinker toy would be an embellishment, even taking the current presidential administration at their word), our response to the events of 9/11 has gone terribly wrong.

Perhaps we can live with it for a while more. I am no Jeremiah, but I am beginning to wonder. Might not there be some better way to spend a trillion dollars? Who gains from all of this and what do they get?

Have we all lost our minds? Have we no shame or sense of honor? What is to become of those we have used with such impunity in this maelstrom of blood?

Think about it. Pray on it. Do something!