Thomas Ricks’ recent book, The Gamble, on the US military’s “all in” crushing of al-Qaeda in Iraq captures the poetic absurdities of life there: A triumphant yet starving Iraqi Army in Basra last spring resorts to fishing with grenades due to logistic incompetence. A sheep smuggler, asked by an American officer why he smuggles sheep across the Syrian border, answers “Why did you put the Syrian border in the middle of my sheep?” And a Sunni calls Iraq’s 9-1-1 to report a Mahdi Army attack, only to catch a scolding: “The Mahdi Army are not terrorists like you,” said the dispatcher. “And how could you know that they are the Mahdi Army? Is it written on their foreheads?”We have our own absurdities in Minnesota. Zacarias Moussaoui took flight lessons in Eagan, requesting to learn everything except how to land. A Minneapolis man left America to blow himself up in Somalia, where people supposedly blow themselves up because they don’t have what we have in America. And when passengers at the Minneapolis airport saw men of Muhammad Atta’s complexion making bizarre preflight demands and insisting on praying out loud, they called for help. The government eventually dispatched a response: the worried passengers would face humiliating charges for their Islamophobia. And how do you know they are terrorists? Is it written on their foreheads? Yes, we too have our dispatchers.
There’s a haunting wind blowing in this war against Islamists. You can hear it in what Norman Mailer called “the delicate filtered laughter of a pessimist who is reassured that things have turned out badly.” This wind heaves everything upside-down, so that it’s support for Israel and the Iraq war that comes to require the explaining. You can hear it in the howling applause that greeted candidate Biden in July 2007, just before the “surge” proved itself, when he pledged “not within the lifetime of anyone in this room will there be a unity government in Baghdad.”
And so it was that when the widows of Iraq needed cows last January, it was not the National Organization for Women (NOW) but the United States Marine Corps that provided them. NOW has no stake in this.
Fouad Ajami, enemy of Arab apartheid and supporter of the invasion and surge, describes America’s new Iraq policy: “we are not to embrace the Iraqis, and claim the victory we won there and the decent democratic example we implanted on so unpromising a soil.” Ideology, says Secretary of State Clinton, is “so yesterday.” So here is yet another absurdity of Iraq: only when the satanized Mr. Cheney departs does the US actually return to its “no friends, only interests” permafrost.
If only ideology were “so yesterday,” we could forgive Amnesty International and the Ron Paul libertarians for demanding that the US suspend military aid to Israel. But Islamism is yesterday-today-and-tomorrow, and it kills. To each its own: Five thousand dead and five hundred concubined in a two-day Afghan massacre; shooting of legs and follow-up beheadings of tourists in Egypt’s massacre; genocide for Islamist Sudan; a hundred thousand dead in Algeria’s Islamist civil war; daily stonings/honor killings/suicide bombings in Somalia/Saudi Arabia/Iraq; a hundred plus Jews blown up in Buenos Aires; hundreds of thousands of Iranians doing The Rahbar’s will shot down armed with Korans and keys (to paradise); tongues cut out from those who would call such a strategy absurd; and two soldiers shot-up in Arkansas while smoking cigarettes last Monday.
The winds of this war blew in India and Israel long before we claimed 9/11 as our own, and Islamic terrorists are the whole world’s nightmare. Yet some would have Israel fight its own war: we have our own interests, they have theirs. That attitude, as a weary Republican senator once said of Bush’s Iraq strategy, “is absurd. It may even be criminal.”
The Islamists forget that Americans can fight for an ideology too, and that they are recruiting more Americans for the cause of liberty than they are killing. They can be forgiven, for they hear we’ve “reset” foreign policy: if Pakistan, Somalia, and Indonesia fall into the horrors of Islamic law, America, with its humbled defense budget, will have to be okay with it, as if to say, "we have no stake in this." If terrorists win back Iraq, it will be vindication for those that called Bush’s war “criminal.” But until the military completely withdraws from Mr. Bush’s bidding, it would be a mistake to confuse our cows-for-widows idealism with France’s oil-for-food imperialism. There are still some in America that don’t need writings on the forehead to tell friend from foe.
The Islamists forget that Americans can fight for an ideology too, and that they are recruiting more Americans for the cause of liberty than they are killing. They can be forgiven, for they hear we’ve “reset” foreign policy: if Pakistan, Somalia, and Indonesia fall into the horrors of Islamic law, America, with its humbled defense budget, will have to be okay with it, as if to say, "we have no stake in this." If terrorists win back Iraq, it will be vindication for those that called Bush’s war “criminal.” But until the military completely withdraws from Mr. Bush’s bidding, it would be a mistake to confuse our cows-for-widows idealism with France’s oil-for-food imperialism. There are still some in America that don’t need writings on the forehead to tell friend from foe.
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