Coke-Sniffing Monkeys and Headline-Seeking Republicans

Someone dug up the fact that the economic stimulus package of nearly $820 billion included about $70,000 to study the effect of cocaine on chimpanzees. Every Republican to the right of Karl Marx began chattering and howling like rhesus monkeys on methamphetamine. It may be good politics to go on like that, but it’s yet another case where the catchy headline and nifty sound byte substitute for real thought.

Why assess the impact of cocaine on monkeys? The reason is simple beyond belief: Because we can’t experiment on human beings.

We can all agree that cocaine addiction is a bad thing in people.

One supposes that we can further agree, though this might be giving too much credit to the compassion of some of these Republicans, that it is a good thing to help cokeheads of the human variety to wean themselves from their addiction.

Monkeys are the creatures must like us in physiology and brain structure. Experimenting on them just might offer insight into ways to help their human cousins escape what can so easily become a nightmare. If anyone is entitled to object, it’s the monkeys and their human defenders from groups like PETA. The less squeamish among us will recognize animal research of the life-saving and -enhancing variety for what it is: a regrettable necessity.

The specific study in question was explained favorably by Adi Jaffe, a Ph.D. candidate from UCLA, who blogs about drug addiction for Psychology Today. He writes that researchers put a series of lone monkeys that had been previously identified either as dominant or subordinate into a cage next to a large group of unfamiliar monkeys who shrieked and jabbered like, well, Republican politicians. When the ordeal ended, the monkey was returned to normal surroundings and allowed to pull on levers that would provide either food or cocaine. The evidence seems conclusive that subordinate monkeys were more likely to dose themselves with cocaine than were dominant monkeys.

A logical next step would be to search for a healthier alternative to cocaine for the weaker monkeys. If it can work on monkeys, it may also work on humans. That would be a good thing.

Now if only we can find a way to wean politicians from their addiction to cheap headlines.

Leaving Iraq

President Obama said on Monday that our “combat mission” in Iraq would finish by the end of the month (August 2010). I’m so glad. Now, maybe we’ll figure out what the mission was in the first place.

Evict Saddam Hussein? Did that back in 2003. Kill Saddam? Mission accomplished, 2006.

Found weapons of mass destruction?

Stopped looking in 2007 because, President Bush acknowledged, they weren’t there.

“Halt the spread of terror?” Before 2003, when we invaded, there was no such organization as “al-Qaeda in Iraq.” By 2008, we had eliminated more than 40 organizers and leaders of a formerly non-existent organization. “Only” a dozen or so of the top leadership remained–again, out of none who existed in 2003.

Built a stable society based on the rule of law? Sorry, not done yet. In fact, everything we’ve “accomplished” in Iraq has achieved the opposite of civil society.

“On Point,” the NPR show hosted by Tom Ashbrook, had Jane Clayson as guest host today (August 3). She, in turn, had three legitimate experts  “on the ground:” David Finkel, whose book The Good Soldiers tells the story of the battalion with whom the Finkel was embedded; Anthony Shadid, a New York Times reporter who has written his own book on the war; and, most powerfully, Matt Gallagher, a former Army captain, whose own book is called Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War.

Except for the occasional phone-in or email message, the talk was not of missions accomplished or abandoned. It dealt mostly with the pain, loss, and frustration of those who actually had to fight in the savage little war. The panelists, all of whom had seen people killed or maimed or left in trauma, talked about the toll of a war that never had a clear statement of mission and that leaves only loss in its aftermath.

They told of an officer who rescued an enlisted soldier, shot in the head by a sniper. The heroic officer carried his comrade to safety down several flights of steps. As he ran down the steps, the motion threw the blood of the wounded soldier into the officer’s mouth. Six months later, he said, he could still taste the blood. Finally, the Army has acknowledged the reality of his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

They told of a young man who lost his legs, one arm, and most of his remaining arm when an incendiary bomb exploded in a Humvee. In the hospital, his nose fell off from the burns suffered in the explosion. Eventually, after weeks in the hospital, the young man died. He was 19. As his mother said in a letter after his death, now he will be 19 forever.

President Obama talked Monday about the completion of the combat mission. One phone-in ex-soldier said that our “mission” was achieved with the removal of Saddam. At that point, he said, we should have left them to their own country because we had given them what we intended. His words were tragic almost beyond meaning.

This soldier desperately sought a “mission accomplished.” The reality is that we got rid of Saddam seven years ago and knew then that we couldn’t leave. As Capt. Gallagher said: “If you break it, you own it.” The mission for the past seven years has been to leave Iraq less broken that we made it by our invasion. It’s not the stuff of nobility, just of moral honesty.

Every Memorial Day and each July 4, we talk about veterans, living and dead. Invariably, we talk of how they sacrificed themselves to preserve our freedom at home.

We do, indeed, owe these men and women more than we can ever hope to repay. They did what their commanders asked them to do, and their supreme commander is the person whom we, the people, elected to be president. If our president (who is also their president) made a mistake, as George W. Bush clearly did, we owe them no less than if our mutual president had asked them legitimately to fight in a conflict where our liberty was really at stake.

They were brave, and their mission is at an end. It is a tragic commentary on the end of the mission that we still can’t quite define, let alone agree about, its purpose–and, even more, that the “end” will leave tens of thousands of American troops in Iraq apparently to ensure the success of what is apparently the post-mission mission. 

None of this is the fault of President Obama, who was an unknown state legislator from Illinois in 2004, though he will taken plenty of blame. That might not be fair, but it carries a certain rough justice. The president put himself voluntarily into the middle of events.

Our combat troops and veterans did not have the luxury to volunteer. They did what they were told, which is what soldiers and sailors are supposed to do.  

We owe them honor.

That is true no matter the folly of the politicians who sent them on a mission that their nation still cannot define.