Books

Go to the archives

“Stuff Happens”

David Hare

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Jul 05, 2021
Category: Drama

“Stuff happens . . . And it’s untidy, and freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”
– Donald Rumsfeld’s response on April 11, 2003, following the infamous looting and pillaging of Baghdad.

David Hare’s play about the decision to form a “coalition” to overthrow Saddam Hussein opened in London in 2004, where it caused a stir. When it came to New York, I was curious, so off I went to the Public Theater. Two and a half hours later, I reeled out. I wasn’t the only one. The theater had been set up like an indoor stadium, as if there were bleachers on both sides of a basketball court. The actors mostly sat in executive swivel chairs in the center — you felt like a close spectator at a board meeting. And this board had very exalted executives: Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenet, Wolfowitz, Paul O’Neill for the Americans, and, for the Europeans, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Dominique de Villepin and Hans Blix. Among others.

Bush-haters might find that Hare made the President more cunning and clever than the idiot they believe him to be; Bush supporters might conclude that Hare’s President is wrongly depicted as a simpleton who’s manipulated by his advisors. And what about Colin Powell? Is he a tragic hero who tries to do the right thing and is exploited at every turn — or is he so desperate for a powerful job that he brings lies to the United Nations? And Tony Blair: staunch ally or idealistic schmuck?

Any way you slice it, the results are grim. In “Stuff Happens,” Bush neuters Powell and makes Blair look ill-equipped for real-world politics. And, in both the play and reality, the liberation of Iraq turned out to be a sand trap from which no one emerged looking good.

Which brings us to the text.

To see if ‘Stuff Happens” is as good as I thought it was, I read the 130-page book of the play. I commend it to you. And to your college-age kids who are looking for something meaty but short to read. And, if you’ve got a high school student with an interest in current affairs — this is just the ticket. [To buy the play from Amazon, click here.]

It’s an exciting read because, unlike most political dramas, it’s intensely psychological. It’s not always clear what anyone wants. (Well, Cheney is not exactly opaque.) And characters make statements for effect — indeed, for such obvious effect that other characters can’t believe they’re supposed to believe them. It’s boardroom chess, and it sucks you in, even though you know how it all worked out.

It starts with Colin Powell. “War should be the politics of last resort,” he says. And then Dick Cheney enters: “I never met a weapons system I didn’t vote for.” We learn that Condi Rice has two mirrors in her office, “so she can see her back as well as her front.” And that Blair came to politics late, “fired up by an original mix of theology and social duty.”

At last we meet George Bush. “My faith frees me,” he says. “Frees me to put the problem of the moment in proper perspective. Frees me to make decisions that others might not like. Frees me to enjoy life and not worry about what comes next.”

Anybody see a collision dead ahead?

9/11 has just happened. America must capture Osama. But some are already looking beyond the Taliban — to Iraq. They have many reasons; you’re invited to take your pick. Will our allies go along? “The coalition will not determine the mission,” Rumsfeld says. “The mission will determine the coalition.”

Translation: Forget France and Germany, is Blair’s Britain with us?

Enter Blair. Flummoxed. The Brits had Osama in their rifle sights. The United States ordered the Brits to pull out. Now Osama has escaped. Why did this happen? Who made the decision? Bush responds in monosyllables. “We don’t ever not hear you,” he says.

Disturbing, both in the play and as a matter of historical record.

It gets worse. Europe wants an invasion of Iraq to be a United Nations decision; Cheney recasts the issue so the question is whether the UN has the guts to make a tough decision. Rumsfeld prepares for war; Blair and Powell are not told until they have aligned themselves with the mission so completely they can’t back out gracefully.

The play becomes a series of showdowns. The French vs. Powell. Blair vs. Bush. Powell vs. Rice. The talk is fast and smart, the issues huge. What are the limits of power? When you say you’re “responsible,” what does that mean?

Here’s David Hare: “It’s about power, and it’s about the exercise of power, and it’s about people who think they can make an accommodation with power. And the terrible thing is that the two, as it were, benign characters in the play, Tony Blair and Colin Powell — Tony Blair, who’s a humane believer in humane intervention for good purposes, i.e. the relief of suffering, and Powell, who’s a believer in, again, doing things which are practical and efficient and helpful, not things that are wild or idealistic and irresponsible — both these men get mashed… How powerless intelligence is against cunning really is one of the themes of the play. And I think Bush is very, very cunning.”

Hare is too gifted to write propaganda. He plays fair: The case for the war is as fairly presented as the case against. Which only makes it harder for you to know what you think.

You like intellectual thrillers? Read “Stuff Happens.”

BONUS: SOMETHING YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT DONALD RUMSFELD, COURTESY OF RACHEL MADDOW

“In 1845, Frederick Douglass, the great American abolitionist, published the first of what would become three autobiographical accounts of his life. One of the most harrowing periods Douglass describes in his own incalculably hard life was a year he spent ‘when I was made to drink the bitterest dregs of slavery,’ after the man who owned him decided he was “incorrigible and needed in effect to be tamed.’ He was sent to a Maryland plantation owner named Edward Covey, who enjoyed the execrated reputation of being a first-rate slave breaker. Covey’s brick manor and farm were called Mount Misery.

“At painful length, Douglas describes Covey’s “most brutal chastisement” in 1833 and 1834: endless, bloody, severe whippings with sticks or cowskins, random beatings into unconsciousness, labor ‘up to the point of my powers of endurance,’ from dawn until late at night, in heat, cold, snow, hail: The longest days were too short for him, and the shortest nights were too long for him…I was completely wrecked, changed and bewildered, goaded almost to madness…combined with that ever-gnawing and soul-devouring thought, I am a slave, a slave for life.’

“Fast-forward to June 30th, 2006, when the New York Times published a frothy feature titled ‘Weekends with the President’s Men’ about St. Michael’s, a burgeoning resort community in Maryland where many D.C. pols and fat cats were buying second homes. The piece prompted some debate because it revealed the exact address of one senior government official. The kicker: The home was Mount Misery. The official was, yes, Donald Rumsfeld.

“Rumsfeld bought it for $1.5 million in 2003, the year the U.S. invaded Iraq, as a weekend retreat. He liked to have the Chinook helicopter drop him off at the slave breaker’s home where Douglass was tortured. He could relax there. Would you want to live there yourself? Would you like to wake up there in the morning and plan breakfast, have that be your home? Who would do that?”