Playing the war game
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington Scipio Africanus he isn't, but the second the aircraft carrier Nimitz docked in Naples, the authorities had the pilot in charge of shooting down the Libyan airplanes on the television for the morning news shows. He and his fellow pilot revealed themselves to be two dull young men who prefer bureaucratic militarese to English. They are the kind of people who say, 'I off-loaded and vectored toward a pub'. They will kill on command, and do.
On the day of the American air Trafalgar, in which our fighting men in their homicidally up-to-date warplanes returned fire from the wheezing, out-of-date Russianmade, Libyan-owned sky jalopies, the President, on the other side of the world, ascended the bridge of another atomic aircraft carrier. He marked the victory by wearing his gold-braided commander-inchief hat as he presided over the electronic machinery controlling the USS Constellation. The man looked like a Southern Californian version of Muammar Gaddafi enamoured with the idea of power and powered by dangerous ideas. It would be unkind to think of the two men as impractical crackpots, as the ill luck of history would have it, facing off a contest of pride and swagger. Colonel Gaddafi will have to answer for himself, but Mr Reagan's background makes him a bad risk when it comes to moving fleets of ships and planes around the globe. Beware presidents who weren't in the armed forces and believe they must make up for it; Mr Reagan was, however, in the army, quite literally stationed in a dream factory throughout World War Two. In college and in the reserves after school and through the film years of the Thirties, our leader served in the Cavalry.
Cut, as they say in the film scripts, to Ronald Reagan off to serve God and country in World War Two, but don't cut too far. He was assigned to a film studio in Burbank, adjacent to Hollywood, where he made military training films. A harmless occupation, except that some of them involved building small-scale models of Tokyo and other small-scale models of American bombers flying over that city. This is not a good experience for understanding the horrors of war, modern or ancient. If he looks down at the map of the world in the Pentagon's situation room and, taking a pointer, pushes aircraft-carriers hither and thither, that's what he thinks it's all about.
It is fitting that while the President pushes his toy boats around the world's oceans — and it has been boasted in Washington that the decision to put the fleet in the Gulf of Sidra was Admiral Ronnie's personally — it is fitting that chests should puff out, suck in eggs and air and exhale a verbal meringue about freedom of the seas. In Woodrow Wilson's time (a president who also enjoyed over-matched showdowns with small nations in lesser weight categories), the phrase 'freedom of the seas' was taken to mean the safe passage of ships of commerce. To talk of the same freedom in connection with that American armada that appeared off the coast of Libya is akin to talking of the freedom to sit in connection with an 800-pound gorilla — the gorilla sits where it cares to and the fleet sails where it damn well pleases. That agglomeration of naval power has the capacity to fuse the sands of Libya into glass. Gaddafi annoys them in Washington, of course. He has done so for years with his inclination for clumsy, felonious mischief. Who put him on his road to crime, to hiring assassins to kill people in other people's countries — you are entitled to murder your own citizens so long as you do it at home — none of that, none of the origins of misbehaviour is known. Perhaps he has always had a weakness for Moslem fervour and murder, or perhaps the oil companies drove him mad or he suspected that the Americans were trying to kill him. This city has been listening to loud, not at all secret, stories for months of plans drawn up to kill him. They were always denied, but it was regarded as preposterous bad taste to suggest that the CIA was trying to assassinate Castro until it came out that the CIA was indeed trying to put exploding cigars in the Cuban dictator's personal, private stock of Corona-Coronas, or whatever lush leaf the world's only charismatic Communist official smokes.
Be that as it may, this naval overawing of the Libyans has also been explained here yet once again as 'sending a signal'. Apparently the administration mistrusts the efficacy of its semaphore, or else why so many signals? Or are we sending them in the wrong language for the Russians or the bad Berbers of Benghazi to read? These loutish Slays must be suffering from political dyslexia if they can't get the message. Every day there is an announcement of a new weapon, another aircraft carrier, manouevres, new steps to be taken to cover our military nakedness, additional measures to 'shut the window' fast.
This year's political cliche is, in fact, that the Russians have a 'window of opportunity' between now and 1984 or 5 or 6, or whenever it suits the speaker. The window metaphor has o'erleapt the walls of the five-sided war temple, the Pentagon, to infiltrate vocabulary as far away as Capitol Hill. Call someone up to ask them for lunch and you're likely as not to be told, 'That would be delightful. I have a window next Thursday between twelve and two'. No matter, they'd have to be stone deaf in Moscow to miss the sound of the Reaganskis slamming the thing shut.
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