Make Cruise Missiles Fun in Prime Time

For those frustrated by the fact that our cruise missile attack on Iraq didn’t work out too well, I am here to provide assurances that smart weapons do have a future, if only we would be more imaginative in their use.

Cruise missiles should be marketed exclusively as fireworks, with the proviso that they never be fired at human targets. Let the networks, led by CNN, pay the $1.2 million that each missile costs, and blast away to their heart’s content at some target that only they know has been towed far out to sea. That way they get to keep the ratings up, Pentagon officials can still be featured on prime time and the military-industrial complex will continue to garner its exorbitant profits.

Or a president, looking for a September surprise, could pay for the show out of his campaign funds as a way of boosting his standing in the polls without further mucking up life in the real world.

Unfortunately, Iraq is in the real world, and the evidence is now in that the salvos fired with such celebratory gusto last week were an unmitigated disaster. Saddam Hussein is stronger, the Iraqi opposition is decimated and the Kurds are hopelessly splintered. The U.S. has alienated most of its allies in the Gulf War and tied its national security interests to the whims of the ayatollahs of Iran, the prime beneficiaries from any weakening of Hussein.

Are we now supposed to cheer Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, currently sneaking across northern Iraq to come to the aid of “our” Kurds (as opposed to “their” Kurds, who invited Saddam Hussein to give them their capital city back)? Obsessed with Hussein, we have now blundered into the most intractable of regional problems: finding a home for the 20 million Kurds who make claims on the territories of no fewer than five nations and whose political leaders have been warring with each other for decades.

How embarrassing: Hussein’s troops moved at the invitation of the leader of the same Kurdish faction that our CIA has been banking on to create a new Kurdistan in land wrested from Hussein during the Gulf War. Until a few weeks ago, Massoud Barzani was our man, and the CIA was spending millions funding his operation. But we were also backing his longtime rival Jalal Talabani, who has even stronger ties with the government of Iran.

Iran likes those Kurds, and gives them plenty of arms, but has its own Kurdish problem and felt no compunction last July in crossing the border with Iraq to smash the refugee Iranian Kurds opposed to the mullahs of Tehran.

While we denounce Hussein for denying Kurdish claims to Iraqi territory, our allies, the Turks, have also moved, with our approval, into northern Iraq to create a buffer in the U.S.-protected zone, allowing them to destroy with impunity those Kurds who claim land now part of Turkey.

The Turkish government, now in the hands of Islamic militants, has made it clear that it does not share Washington’s antipathy toward Hussein. In fact, it has been trading with him despite the embargo. Turkey has also just signed an oil deal with Iran, violating yet another U.S.-imposed embargo.

But the Republicans’ call for eliminating Hussein, which they failed to do when they had the chance, would only further destabilize the region. Hussein’s demise would leave Iran, which we have branded a terrorist nation, dominant in the area, a fact the U.S. recognized when it backed Iraq in its lengthy war with Iran. The fixation of the U.S. government, and media, on Hussein masks the far more serious threat posed by Iran. Rich from oil sales, and with a rapidly growing population to supply endless sacrificial troops, Syria, our Gulf War ally, has replaced Iraq as the lead developer of chemical weapons in the Arab world. Perhaps the U.N. inspectors crawling over Baghdad could also visit Damascus.

It’s depressing, and there are no good easy choices, but firing rounds of expensive missiles from time to time only exacerbates the overall problem. This is annoying, because we do pay a lot for our modern weapons and there ought to be something useful we can do with them.

Which brings me back to the smart weapons’ entertainment possibilities. Our leaders--and the electorate--seem to have no patience for the serious business of foreign policy and our curiosity is only aroused during flash moments of battle. So it’s high time to go all the way and just turn war into a pay-per-view TV show. Used as pure entertainment, costly smart weapons would cease to be a burden on the taxpayers and a source of madness in international relations. But they’d still be loads of fun.

Robert Scheer is a Times contributing editor. E-mail: rscheer@aol.com