Love Among the Ruins: MAUREEN DOWD - Deadly Embrace

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
The New York Times

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Love Among the Ruins
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 10, 2007


The search goes on for the right relationship metaphor to describe our deadly embrace of Iraq.

It isn’t really a romance turned sour, because it was never sweet.

The American military’s cocky heroes were supposed to sweep in and carry off a poor, grateful Iraq to security and bliss, like Richard Gere did Debra Winger in the finale of “An Officer and a Gentleman.” The strategy was: Love lift us up where we belong/Where the eagles cry/On a mountain high.

Didn’t happen. Yet the search goes on, in this country obsessed with hookups and breakups, for the right relationship metaphor to describe our deadly embrace of Iraq.

My colleague Tom Friedman wrote last week: “Whenever I hear this surge idea, I think of a couple who recently got married but the marriage was never very solid. Then one day they say to each other, ‘Hey, let’s have a baby, that will bring us together.’ It never works. If the underlying union is not there, adding a baby won’t help.”

Juan Williams repeated Tom’s metaphor on Fox News, agreeing that “a bad relationship” cannot afford the “pressure” of a newborn.

One reporter who writes about the war told me he thinks of the American entrenchment in Iraq more like a marriage that’s run out of gas, but you decide to stay together because of the kids.

Bill Maher used a bawdier metaphor of a man who promises his date a glorious romp, doesn’t deliver, and then just refuses to admit it and get out.

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