A warrior comes to town

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/05/2010 (6011 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ARLINGTON, Virginia — The most decorated warrior in his nation’s bloody history pulled up to the Pentagon in a stretched black Cadillac. He really didn’t need such a big car: the hero was a middleweight, in his late 60s now but still ready for a fight, if it comes to that, which, where he comes from, it almost certainly will.

A cordon of honour with members from the U.S. navy, army, air force, marine corps and coast guard snapped to attention as the warrior hit the pavement, and the appropriate salutes were given and the flags flapped in the breeze off the Potomac. The American secretary of defence came down the steps to shake the hero’s hand.

We went inside the building while the soldiers and sailors marched back to their bus. In the corridors of the great military nerve centre were framed front pages of magazines and newspapers of days gone by: Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s. The headlines crowed Rommel halted on entire line and Carrier force sent to Korea and We fought to Murmansk.

But this defiant display petered out in a giant blow-up of a TIME cover from last April that sighed, dispiritedly, HOW NOT TO LOSE IN AFGHANISTAN.

We were just across the river from Barack Obama’s Washington — where not losing has become the new V-E Day — as the foreign fighter made some remarks to a few dozen reporters.

“In the neighborhood where we live, there is no mercy for the weak and no second opportunity for those who cannot defend themselves,” Ehud Barak was saying.

He is the minister of defence of Israel, its former prime minister, the former chief of the general staff of its military forces, and in his youth and middle age a ruthless avenger of Israeli’s manifold enemies, making him one of the few world leaders — Fidel Castro may be another, and no one knows how Vladimir Putin spent his nights in East Germany — who ever has pulled a trigger and killed another man.

Certainly the sitting American president has not, nor had George W. Bush, nor Bill Clinton, nor Dick Cheney, nor Donald Rumsfeld.

It was easy to make the mocking comparison: Barak and Barack, one a commando slaying terrorists, the other a community organizer signing up seniors for Medicaid.

But this was how the American republic had been purposely constituted, more than two centuries before: civilians commanding soldiers, non-combatants choosing wars for other men to fight.

(Ehud Barak shares his birthday, Feb. 12, with Abraham Lincoln, who did serve in the Illinois militia during a brief war against a usurped and exiled band of native Indians; the Palestinians of the 1840s, some might say. But Lincoln’s unit never saw the field of action, and a few years later, when he ran for Congress, he would scoff at “military glory — that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood.”)

“We are living in a very tough neighborhood,” Ehud Barak was saying now. “But we are staying.”

The ranking bureaucrat at the Pentagon, Robert Gates, the only Bush Republican retained in Barack Obama’s cabinet, stood beside Ehud Barak and waved off thoughts that America might be tiring of the reluctance of its ward and ally to surrender tracts of its hard-won land and precincts of its capital to the intractable enemies that surround it.

Secretary Gates — another (assumed) non-combatant, though he did serve as a CIA operative and Air Force intelligence officer during the 1960s — noted that the Hezbollah fighters of Lebanon now have “far more rockets and missiles than most countries in the world.”

Yet even this unhappy prospect was secondary to the naked nuclear ambitions of the Iranians, whose leaders cannot abide the existence of even a wasp-waisted sliver of democracy so close to their oil-fed empire of God.

“If they’re allowed to turn nuclear, it would be the end of any non-proliferation regimes anywhere in the world,” Ehud Barak said.

Left unsaid was who would be dispatched to destroy the threat, if it comes to that, which it almost certainly will.

Thirty years ago, Ehud Barak disguised himself as a woman, rode for seven hours in a speedboat to the corniche of Beirut, assassinated a Palestinian guardsman with a silenced pistol, knocked at the apartment door of the chief of operations of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and with his fellow operatives — one of them the current prime minister of Israel, Bibi Netanyahu — shot the man 55 times in front of his five-year-old daughter.

Now he was older, thicker, maybe slower. In Tehran, he’ll take the Cadillac.

Allen Abel is a Brooklyn-born Canadian journalist based in Washington, D.C.