Proudly Never Getting It
A sobering anecdote today in (of all places) Robert X. Cringely's post-election column, with regard to the potential ("impending"?) conflict between the fundamentalist regime just re-elected in the U.S. and the one in Iran. His story is set in the border war between Iraq and Iran in the '80s.
There were several thousand [11-and 12-year-old unarmed boys] and their job was to rise out of the trench, praising Allah, run across No Man's Land, be killed by the Iraqi machine gunners, then go directly to Paradise, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 dinars. And that's exactly what happened in a battle lasting less than 10 minutes. None of the kids fired a shot or made it all the way to the other side. And when I asked the purpose of this exercise, I was told it was to demoralize the cowardly Iraqi soldiers.
It was the most horrific event I have ever seen, and I once covered a cholera epidemic in Bangladesh that killed 40,000 people.
Waiting those two nights for the attack was surreal. Some kids acted as though nothing was wrong while others cried and puked. But when the time came to praise Allah and enter Paradise, not a single boy tried to stay behind.
Now put this in a current context. What effective limit is there to the number of Islamic kids willing to blow themselves to bits? There is no limit, which means that a Bush Doctrine can't really stand in that part of the world. But of course President Bush, who may think he pulled the switch on a couple hundred Death Row inmates in Texas, has probably never seen a combat death. He doesn't get it and he'll proudly NEVER get it.
posted by Chris @ 11/05/2004 09:21:00 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
I just happened to read that too. The last part was completely disconnected: what makes him think that Bush doesn't know all about that?
Those boys were urged to go by their families. (Source: Iranians I have spoken with about the war.) First, that's completely fucking sick. Second of all, it's a crime. Depending on the level of sane government control, the criminals will suffer retribution -- they will either be
bombed, have their houses bulldozed, or arrested and thrown in jail. That's how we deal with criminals: and that's why there aren't more suicide bombers than there already are.
Lastly, what exactly is Cringely saying? That they have weapons and will use them, even if the weapons happen to be small boys? That we should fear these weapons more than other types? (A small boy can't pack much for explosives.) There's nothing new here: if you have a war, you have saboteurs. They wil blow themselves up, or blow up cars, or blow up oil refineries.
What I get out of the whole thing is that the Iranian army would be no harder to destroy than the Iraqi army, but that we would face a similar level of criminal insurgence. That sounds about right to me. Luckily we have isolated Iran by democratizing the two countries on both sides of it, driving a huge wedge between the Islamo-fascist axis, and we will never need to invade it. All we (or the Israelis) have to do is bomb their nuclear enrichment sites -- what are they going to do, send a bunch of small boys across the border to be machine-gunned? If they declare war on us, their army will be destroyed, and possibly a city or two.
I think they know all this, and therefore see the aquisition of nuclear weapons as their only hope. And there's no way we are going to let this happen if we have any power at all to stop it. The same goes for North Korea. The thing is, and I don't know if they realize this, in the end, they will lose. They will lose because even if they get nukes, they have to smuggle them into the U.S. to get us over a barrel. But what barrel? A similar barrel as the Soviets. Set that thing off, we lose a city, but you lose every last city. The only Persians left alive will not be those in Persia. The ruling Persians are not interested in losing their power, so I don't foresee this conclusion, but we can rule it out entirely by preventing them from aquiring nukes. The same goes for Kim Jong Il.
The bottom line I got from Cringely's article was that forcing American democracy on countries like Iran ain't gonna be easy. We may think we're dedicated to our beliefs, capital-letter words like Freedom, Liberty and Justice, but our strength of conviction is at least matched, if not far out-weighed, by people who would willingly sacrifice their own children in such a grisly way. That's what I think he meant that Bush doesn't, and will never, get.
By the way, why is it so criminal, and deserving of retribution, for Iranians to kill their own children in defense of their own country, but not criminal for American bombs to kill Iraqi children on the same scale in the course of invading and occupying another country? (Never mind that the invasion was essentially a mistake.) That seems hypocritical to me. (I think they're both wrong.)
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