WANTED: One
good enemy for
a new Cold War
Look at us now. The CIA spent $100 million helping the Kurds fight Saddam Hussein, and didn't even know that half the Kurds were planning to switch to his side. A hundred million sure doesn't buy you what it used to. We've tried to tilt to Iran, we've tried to tilt towards Iraq, we've zigged when we should have zagged, and we've zagged when we shouldn't have done anything at all: Trying to be a superpower on the model of the wily British, but wishing we all drove electric cars and could tell the entire Persian Gulf to go drill itself. The Cold War made the world much simpler. There were the good bad guys--the despotic dictators who liked us--and the bad bad guys--the ruthless dictators who danced to Moscow's tune. Sometimes our guys killed more people, sometimes theirs did, but we always knew whom to root for. Miraculously, the really troublesome bad guys like Saddam were all on the other side, and when one of them got rowdy, our President would just pick up the red phone and warn Khrushchev or Brezhnev, "Get your boy back in line, or it's nuke city." And, boom, after a little tube time for the diplomats to shuttle back and forth with concerned looks on their faces, the problem was over. When you blow things totally out of proportion, and anything could mean the end of the world, stuff gets solved. The Cold War got things done. The Interstate Highway system was funded so that trucks would have nice big roads on which to carry missiles. Serious money went to schools because we were in a space race against the gang who ran the gulag. Americans pretended to care about what was going on in the rest of the world, because it was so damn simple. What we need is one big enemy. If Saddam, let's say, could round up Colonel Kaddafi, President Assad of Syria, maybe get Idi Amin out of retirement, hire whoever replaced Pol Pot and form some global version of the Hells Angels, then we'd have something to have a foreign policy about. Then we'd know how to tell the good Kurds from the bad Kurds. And then maybe the good Kurds would be disciplined enough to take our hundred million and not switch sides. That's the magic of a good cold war. Co-creator and co-star of "This is Spinal Tap," comedian Harry Shearer is the voice of more than a dozen characters on "The Simpsons." He has been a two-time cast member of "Saturday Night Live" and is the host of nationally syndicated weekly radio broadcast "Le Show". |