Up the Meds

Richard Cohen on paying attention.

Ever since Thomas Riley Marshall, Woodrow Wilson's vice president, uttered the immortal phrase, ''What this country needs is a really good 5-cent cigar,'' people have felt challenged to better it. So if you Google the phrase ''what this country needs,'' you will find that it needs many things, including a national architect, better infrastructure or this peach of an idea from Will Rogers: ''dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds.'' Allow me, though, a suggestion that applies to the war in Iraq: Ritalin.

This drug for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is sorely needed. ADHD explains why few seem to challenge the call to continue the mission in Iraq, apparently forgetting that the mission has changed and no one is quite sure what it is now. It explains why after just 100 hours, the first President Bush concluded the Gulf War with Saddam Hussein still in power and his helicopters slaughtering rebellious Shiites and Kurds. And it explains why the Carter, Reagan and first Bush administrations so ardently supported Saddam and then -- an administration later -- made it U.S. policy to topple him. We were always forgetting the kind of guy he was.

ADHD also explains why we are still fighting in Afghanistan almost five years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that launched the war against the Taliban. It's because our attention got diverted from the Afghanistan-based al Qaeda, which had attacked us, to Iraq, which had not. Take two pills for this one.

[...]

The first rule of warfare is: Kill your enemy -- or make sure, in some way, that he can no longer do you any damage. The first Bush administration ignored that rule with Saddam, and now the second one has ignored it with Osama bin Laden. It allowed this mass murderer to escape, and he will come back to haunt us; it is what he lives for. Bin Laden does not suffer from ADHD.

As any ADHDer can tell you, it is the moment that counts. What comes next or before is over the horizon. This is particularly true in a sound-bite, bitterly partisan era in which it is possible to say ''cut and run'' and think (or pretend) you have actually said something. It's easy enough to say that America's leaders suffer from ADHD, but on the basis of all this, it's apparent that so do we all. We always forget to hold them accountable.

Pass the Ritalin, please.