A healing heart, an aching heart

THERE are times, despite dangerous international conditions, when one is more concerned with self than with the world.

We turn inward when illness threatens our lives, oblivious to the larger tragedies besetting the globe, because in pain, we become the larger tragedy.

I say this in reference to my recent removal from the scene due to heart surgery. Because survival is a major instinct of the human condition, it was my primary concern during recuperation. But things have changed.

I emerge from the self-concentration that illness provokes to find that in terms of war and survival, we are worse off than before. We’re upping the human ante in Iraq. We’re surging.

I probably wouldn’t have written about this had it not been for a newspaper item on the $300 billion we’ve spent on the war and the wasteful reconstruction in Iraq that has left buildings unused or unfinished and weapons unaccounted for.

The money spent on killing and rebuilding was a shocking revelation, but the shock wears off when one considers the more devastating human waste brought on by the same duplicity and stupidity that drives profit-motivated greed in the business ethos.

More than 3,000 Americans have been killed in combat since the Iraqi war began in 2003; 23,000 have been wounded. While this isolates the carnage to our own nationals, consider the larger picture of woe in the human family: An estimated 100,000 civilians have lost their lives in the chaos of the Middle East war.

Empathy has a short reach. We tend to limit our concerns in war to those on “our side,” which is not dissimilar from concentrating on our own bodies during times of illness. But it is increasingly obvious that the world is growing smaller and the distances that once divided us are no longer a factor in the separation of our pain from theirs.

Imagine it is our own sons and daughters who constitute what generals regard as the collateral cost of conflict, lying in the street or in the rubble of their homes, torn by shrapnel, pierced by bullets, choking on their own blood. Imagine those we love gone in the hellfire blast of a single missile. Imagine the sorrow. Imagine the rage. Imagine the emptiness.

But still, the man we twice elected president doesn’t hear the screams. The way to end the war, he says, is to increase the number of Americans at risk, to raise more targets for a shadowy enemy to demolish, to up the potential for more civilian deaths. And even as he fails to hear the cries of agony, he fails to heed the roars of rage.

When he marched into the war like Napoleon at Waterloo, George W. Bush did so unsupported by the community of nations we considered our friends. He was out to destroy the weapons of mass destruction, by God, and to punish Saddam Hussein for his participation in the horror of New York’s Twin Towers. Nothing was going to stop him. Congress, bereft of facts, cheered him on.

But he found no weapons of mass destruction and he found no link between Saddam and the Twin Towers. Efforts to impose pax Americana on a nation in turmoil veered sharply from its original intent. A war to liberate a people became a war of survival and then a civil war and then just a lot of killing. Motivations blurred. Causes disappeared in the black smoke.

In the U.S., encouraged by a newly elected Democratic Congress, peace advocates finally found their voice. Republicans began joining with their political counterparts to call for an end to the war. Marchers demanding a withdrawal from the killing fields filled the streets. A bipartisan Iraq Study Group called the situation “grave and deteriorating.” Polls damned the conduct of the war and wanted it ended. The roar for peace magnified.

But Bush didn’t hear that either.

When silence provided space for a response, he announced that he was going to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq, not as an increase but as a “surge” to help quiet things down. It was a moral non sequitur in the face of what everyone was demanding. Just as he had ignored the counsel of other nations in his decision to go it alone, now he was ignoring both Congress and the cry of the people not to send more troops.

A newspaper editorial summed it up: “You’re not listening, Mr. President,” it said.

It isn’t exactly that. His concentration is inward, not due to any physical illness but to an emotional barrier that allows no empathetic outreach. Meaningless platitudes, supported by distorted logic, shape what vision he possesses. He can’t imagine the horror of war. He can’t imagine that more troops will, in so many ways, fuel the killing.

We are saddled with a leader who lacks even the wisdom to imagine, and this could lead in the time of his fading presidency to a conflagration beyond even our wildest and most horrific nightmares. He can’t internalize the grief of war. He can’t hear the sobbing.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.