Déjà Vu and the Dealers of Death

Déjà vu, all over again, Yogi.

“If we invade Iraq, it will be a very limited invasion, part of whatever is necessary to drive Saddam’s troops from Kuwait. The “war” will last a few days, something like the six day affair that resulted when the Arabs attacked Israel back in 1967. I’m sure you remember how that went: Egypt, after expelling a U.N. peace-keeping force, amassed something like a thousand tanks backed by a hundred thousand troops on the border, and when they had called for a joint attack by all the Arabs, attacked. Jordan and Syria joined in the assault and the Arabs got their asses kicked, big time. It all lasted, basically, about six days.

“At the war's end, Israel had gained control of eastern Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. The Arabs have been pissing and moaning about their losses, in that way of theirs so incomprehensible to the rest of the world, arguing somehow that they should be given back what they lost. Talk about Jews having “chutzpah!”

“For a tactician, two things are key here: first, that last. The Arab mind is very, very different. It never forgets. Its – that’s he, really, women have no role in Arab culture except to supply sex to the male and reproduce - world will sulk, and hate, forever. Allah wills it.

“That concerning the Arab female, parenthetically, is something to think about, too, but also generally beside my point here.

“The Arab’s culture is different (hence my comment concerning its women), like many cultures are, from ours in basically European society. Our new “celebrate diversity” demands not only that we pretend all human beings (the sexes, too) are alike, but that we bullshit ourselves concerning matters as critical to the world as those having to do with geo-political policy between nations.

“That last, too, is beside my point, however. My point is that no one who doesn’t want to turn what is basically – yeah, I know I use that word a lot, but this is basic stuff – a religious war between Judaism and Mohammedanism into one between the latter and Christianity would invade and occupy Iraq. No body is that stupid, not even the United States of America post feminism.

“The second point is the first here, that being that the Arab gets his ass kicked every time he goes up against even little Israel (my god, the country is what, two hundred, fifty miles long, something like ten miles wide at one point?). He is a miserable tactician, mostly because Allah can over-rule him any time Allah likes, and because anything the Arab does must be macho-spectacular. He will send kids carrying some kind of religious symbol into a mine field (the Iran-Iraq war, remember?). The kids clear the mines by exploding them with their bodies; they all go to heaven and the mines get cleared. What’s true for their kids is true for the rest of them – don’t forget that, it’s part of the discussion here.

“The U.S. firepower is impossible to describe to anyone outside the U.S. defense establishment. Even Soviet military planners and all the technology they possessed during the Cold War had real, strategic and tactical difficultly with that. The military industrial coup d’etat that took over here right after the Second World War has spent fifteen trillions of dollars on our war machine, building levels of redundancy dictated entirely by fiscal greed, not military or defense strategy. In a conventional war – something other than guerrilla, in other words – the U.S. could destroy the rest of the world’s military powers about seventy times (the world, too – but that’s again beside the point) over.

“The U.S. will destroy Saddam’s Army in about ten days. Since there’s no real need to do anything else, that’s all they’ll do. The “Mother of all Battles” will deliver a still-born baby, weighing about a pound. Anything else, moreover, would be f-ing nuts, the reason Israel didn’t go to Cairo or Damascus, or whatever the hell the capitol of Jordan is (Amman?). The Arab will take any ass-kicking he can explain away with that love of language and bullshit bluster talk he has, but he will not tolerate being held captive. Read your history book, for cripes sake.

“If we go all the way to Baghdad, or – god perish the horrendously ugly thought – try to occupy the country, it would be a disaster of proportions so damned big I get sick to my stomach, just thinking about it. Man, have you thought about what all the terrorism against the airlines, against the Jews, and other enemies of Allah is about? How long has that been going on? Fifty years? Since the partitioning of Israel, that’s for sure.

“In fact and essentially, Islam has been waging guerrilla war against Christendom – and, for that matter, all other religions – for six or seven centuries. Read the Koran (of course, being a westerner – especially a citizen of “I know it all because I watch TV” U.S – you probably haven’t even seen the book, much less read from it).

“The Arabs have been fighting a guerrilla war against Israel because they believe the Jews are occupying their land. If we try to conquer – occupy Iraq – they will do exactly the same thing. And it won’t be just the Iraqis who wage guerrilla war; it will be every Islamic Arab on the planet. Moslems who live in this country will start here what Moslems in Israel started. It will also be Afghanistan and the Soviets all over again – in spades. Remember what happened to the Soviet Union, now only Russia?

“But there’s another possibility. And, now that I think of it, your question has really made me sick. The military industrial complex – to use President Eisenhower’s expression as he left office – is about making war, the bigger the better. I was always afraid during the Cold War – especially Cuba that time (are you old enough to remember that?) – that these goddamned (I use the term advisedly) maniacs would start a nuclear war, just so they could profit by it. Of course, the one, great reason they didn’t do that was the fact that they would suffer enormously, too. All their profits; and you can damned well bet that’s how they saw it. Remember when they were trying to make a bomb – cobalt, as I remember – that wouldn’t destroy anything, just people?

“We – and, more importantly, they – might even lose. Besides, they had going on the sweetest game in the world – a secret war. With the public having no way to know what was going on, who was winning and who losing, the military industrialists (and, don’t forget, their CIA with unlimited power to spend without even keeping books) could build weapons unimpeded by anything so conventional as having to claim the need to replace materielle destroyed in conventional war. The only war being fought could be the war called the Arms Race – everything was “destroyed” by virtue of having the other guy build a better one than we had.

“Meaning, supposedly, that we had to build another weapon - the better one. Even that could be faked, the reason for Operation Mockingbird and CIA control of the news media. If the evening news said the Soviets had a new weapon and we had to build a better one – well, what the hell? At the same time, we could foment a little “Communist takeover” brouhaha here, then there, and the folks would all be convinced there was another world-wide war going on. We were “making the world safe for freedom,” remember?

“The fact that none of the countries that “fell” to Communism ever actually attacked us was somehow lost on everyone. We needed desperately to “free all those oppressed people;” that we seldom did was also lost on everyone. Strange.

“Hell, even little “Communist attempts at takeover” like the Philippines and such weren’t enough; when Vietnam came along . . . Shit – perfect! Billions to spend on munitions, pull out after a while . . . Ken, you really don’t relate Vietnam with what would happen in Iraq? Damn!

“And if we should invade Iraq like we did Vietnam . . .? Holy crap! Did I say perfect? With Korea, the Philippines, and all the other places, there was always the threat of the Soviet Union and Red China and their nuclear arsenals. But with the Arabs . . .? Oh, shit! You don’t suppose?

“God, this could go on forever! If we invade Iraq, Saddam’s troops could just fade away, then start guerrilla warfare. AK-47s, RPG’s, mines, and booby-traps everywhere. The rest of Islam would feed sacrificial martyrs like those little kids in the Iranian minefields into the fight forever. Even that raises another specter. Pakistan has the bomb, and sooner or later, so will somebody else Arab. Egypt, maybe. Iran.

“And those demented loons will use it. Never doubt that. Our friend minister is always loathe to depreciate religions other than his own Christianity. Well, sorry, amigo – I call ‘em like I see ‘em. Remember those “children into the minefield?” I just looked it up, and it’s worth digressing for: During the Iran-Iraq War, the Ayatollah Khomeini (remember that nut case?) declared something called the Basiji Mustaphan – “the mobilization of the oppressed” (you should be thinking about jihad – “holy war”). Khomeini sent Iranian children, some as young as twelve years old, to march in formation across minefields and clear a path with their bodies.

“The kids were given a plastic key to wear around their necks, in order that they could open the gates of paradise when they got there.

“Think that’s insane? Well try this: The kids not only went, sent by their parents, but they went in droves, by the tens of thousands. A German newspaper I read all the time, the Frankfurter Zeitung, reported that sometimes the enlistments for the mine-clearing “became a race – even without orders, everyone wanted to be first.” What the hell (pardon the expression) - this is about paradise.

“If we were to invade Iraq and go to Baghdad, and/or try to occupy the place, that’s what we’d be starting.

“Nobody’s that stupid? No, but lots of people are that greedy. What Islam is to the Arab – those kids in the minefields – money and power are to the corporate capitalist. Thanks for your damned question, Jeff – now I am really, really scared.”

I wrote that in November, 1991 - letter to a friend at the old National Judo Institute. I found it yesterday, looking for this in my old files (when we moved a year ago, things got more than a little disarrayed – even worse than I knew when I started digging). I wrote this in March, 2005, concerning the Terri Schiavo matter (she was the brain-dead girl whose husband wanted to take her off life support, and her family didn’t).

“Oooh—did I stick some people right in their old (and obviously debilitated) consciences! Let’s see if I can help all you righteous (I am not being cynical) moralists with your moral dilemma:

“Suppose you are up on a mountainside and you suddenly hear the heart-rending sound of a child screaming in agony. Looking down you see her. A thousand yards from you, separated from you by extremely difficult terrain, she is being attacked and eaten alive by a wild dog. You have a rifle, a high-powered one, and you are an excellent shot. You have only four rounds. You shoot the dog in the head—you’re that good—three times, only to learn that for some reason you can’t kill it. It goes on eating the little girl as if nothing has happened. The child also goes on - screaming in mortal agony. You have one round left, and it will take you at least an hour to get to her rescue. One round left.

“What do you do? The Bible all of you cited to me says god's grace - the good sense and free will he gave you all – ‘is sufficient unto all.’ You are, in short, never given a problem, ethical or otherwise, you can't deal with to his satisfaction. . .

“Still, if you’re the United States of America, I wouldn’t want to be that child.

“Notice, incidentally, that I didn’t propose that the child could by some form of telepathy beg you to end her suffering. I assume, obviously, that—being like her—you know what she wants. Maybe I assume too much . . .?”

Now, I wrote the piece about the child being eaten by the wild dog in order to make a point about a nation so confused in its morality that it could have a furious argument about what GOD wants. I’ve written here, too, about the furious argument that ensues every time subjects like sex come up – again, what does GOD want? I’ve also, and finally, commented time and again, that I wish we could stop listening to god. For all of our wondrous, high-tech communication – hell, we can communicate with other star systems – we seem to get that one garbled every time.

GOD told the Ayatollah Khomeini he should drive little kids into a minefield? If Iranian parents put a plastic key made in Taiwan around a kid’s neck, the child could get into paradise after the mines vaporized (the kids also wrapped themselves in blankets, then rolled into the mines; the blankets would assure that the parents had pieces to honor with burial) him?

GOD decrees that a guy who straps on an explosive vest, sits down in a crowded restaurant or gets on an airliner and blows himself up will go to heaven? High-jacking an airliner, then diving it into a skyscraper with thousands of people in it and knocking it down, is “holy war?”

Crazy, nutcase, fanatics – right?

Well, now. I admit that I see the world and creation as an endless string of analogies. I relate things and affairs, one to the other. It’s the reason I am a history buff. But as Ricky Ricardo used to say, “’Splain dat to me, Luci.” How do those Moslem fanatics whose confidante GOD tells them to use “keys to heaven” children as minesweepers differ from confidantes of God like President George W. Bush? Invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan isn’t walking into a minefield that is Islam?

Isn’t that, in light of history, the societal and national equivalent of wearing an explosive vest? How about firing your pistol into a backpack you’re standing over in order to see if it contains a bomb. How about a suitcase “nuke?”

Of course, I hasten to point out, the average “American” (think about the implications here of one society among two hundred, thirty-four in the Americas calling their country alone “America”) doesn’t know enough about the Arab world to so much as be able to spell or pronounce any of their names, let alone anything of their religion or how GOD speaks to them. What the average “American” – all those people who keep voting for “American” George Bushes about as bright as they are – knows about their prospective enemy and what GOD is telling him you could get in your eye and it wouldn’t make you blink. You’ll shoot without having any idea where the bullet is going or what it will do, just like your dumdum vice president once did with his hunting partner (oh, boy – is that an analogy for Iraq?). You don’t know what’s in that damned backpack, but GOD, it seems – nothing else explains any behavior as stupid – tells you shooting into it will be okay.

When the son-of-a-bitch blows up, we’ll all go to heaven.

P.S. Why did I mention the Terri Schiavo matter, and the child with the wild dog on the mountain?