The Zen of War
On the second gulf war
The zen of war
March 2003
It is a strange time to be in America. We have March madness, American idols, Oscars and an annoying little war in the Middle East. On contraire, what makes living in America fun is traveling across the country in times of war. So I observe the ‘shock and awe’ campaign at DFW airport as a Cognac salesman flirts with the bartender at Chilli’s. She is wearing a t-shirt that has Margarita Madness as a caption, on it. The cognac salesman flirts with her and asks, “Oh that’s funny, can I get one of those?” The Texas size margarita glasses have a frozen concoction that has transformed the agaves based liquor into a pop culture phenomenon. The bitterness of the Sonora desert plant that blossoms once in seven years and then nurtured into the liquor of Gods, has been made into a mass market designer drink, just like the history of the Sumerian civilization and land of Gilgamash is bombed and looted into submission, so that Qualcomm can introduce 3G network in Iraq. Beyond the Tequila sunrise, through the frosty glass, a bloodless war (for Americans) is conducted for a TV audience, as lives are ruined and guts spilled on the plains of Karbala and Baghdad, one is reminded of the fecundity of power and the first city of the world, Uruk, only a few hundred miles away. And I think of times and wars in America, and unfortunately even as a recent immigrant there have been many.
I arrived in Boston on a one-way ticket from Karachi, via Doha, Qatar, Paris and London on Gulf Air. It had taken me 3 days to get there, as the flight was delayed in Paris due to unaccompanied baggage and all of us had to go on the freezing runway to identify our belongings. Threats of terrorism on a flight from the Middle East were very real even in those days. In London, I missed my connection to New York and booked myself on a flight the next day and proceeded to make myself comfortable for the night in Heathrow airport. That was not to be, as I was rudely told by a security men that the airport was closing and I would have to leave. I did not have a visa for UK, but somehow I convinced the passport officer to give me a day visa so that I could spend a night in London before my flight. That night, with all my belongings, two full size suitcases and a briefcase (I kid you not), I made my way by the London underground to a hotel in Gloucestershire in the cold rainy London night. I was lost and was guided by a elderly English couple who personally took me to the entrance of the hotel and wished me good luck. Their good deed saved me from breaking down and crying on the cold streets of London, but also made me realize that outside airports, the western world was filled with kind and caring people.
It was 3rd January, 1990 when I landed in Boston Logan airport to start my BS in Engineering at Arizona State University. The Aretha Franklin look-alike INS officer was convinced that the picture on my passport was not mine and she made me wait and squirm for a couple of hours. In line with me was a pony tailed Irani man who although spoke and looked American was being treated with the same special respect. Needless to say I missed my connection to JFK and ended up spending the night at a Hilton, courtesy of TWA. My first night in America, I tuned to CNN for pictures of a pock marked desperado being harassed and escorted by the American Special. 24,000 U.S. troops had seized control of Panama City in an attempt to capture Noriega after a U.S. soldier was killed in Panama. Noriega surrendered himself to U.S. custody and was transported to Miami, where he was later convicted of drug trafficking.
It was a pity that all my life I had dreamed of watching MTV, ABC and Miami Vice and all I got was a 3rd rate war by Bush I.
My time at ASU was brief. Due to bad grades and flighty concentration, I applied for a transfer to University of Kansas. In December I packed my bags and took a PIA flight to Karachi to attend a friends wedding. I came back through JFK and was treated with less suspicion as I came off an airplane smelling of biryani and gold leaf cigarettes. I flew to Phoenix, picked up my belongings and caught a flight to Kansas City on the eve of 13th Jan 1991. As I rode into a desolate wasteland of snowed out Kansas on I-435, I experienced the first snowfall of my life and checked my bags into a Days Inn. That night I watched CNN again as the Gulf War I started with much anticipated awe and wonder. Peter Arnett, Scud missiles, Tomahawks and Saddam Hussien, Baghdad, Kuwait and collateral damage were added to the glossary. That night the fire bombing started and CNN’s world wide audience watched the power and the glory of the American empire, all nicely package into digestible news bytes.
Next day there was more snow on the ground and I called a cab as I could not carry my suitcases to my new apartment. My roommates were 2 Bengali boys who like myself did not have a car. As the bombing continued and glazed eyed reporters tried to cover their excitement by trying to appear concerned, my cabbie arrived and helped carry my bags to the cab. He was an African American who asked me where I was from, I said Pakistan.
“Damn near the war, aren’t you?”
“Yes, we are, very close, people are very afraid”
“They should be, those fuckers are big,” he said eluding to the bombs, “but hey we have to protect our oil supply”, he added smiling. It was refreshing to know that he was not uninformed in the politics of the Middle East.
Soon, the war was forgotten as I washed dishes at Oliver hall, struggled with Electrical circuits, looked at co-eds with mournful looks of a basset hound. That year, I experienced March madness as University of Kansas went all the way to the NCAA finals, but lost to Duke and I was demoralized at the cruelty of this world. The war was soon forgotten and I was caught in a whirlwind of platonic loves, Bengali and Ethiopian mannerism, Hegel’s Phenomenology, Sarte’s existentialism and my failure as a student and a lover. Lawrence was a quite university town which nurtured students with mid western simplicity, stoic protestant values, augmented by a liberal sense of John Brown’s skepticism. America the imperialistic behemoth was just an illusion as I enjoyed the benefits of being in the belly of the beast, like Jonah in the old testament. On thanksgiving that year, I made a trip to the Ozarks with Pakistani friends and in one grocery store in some hillbilly town near the border of Arkansas around Mark Twain national forest, we were greeted by vulgar posters of Saddam Hussien various orifices serving as a bulls eye for a target practice range.
Not that I cared about Saddam, in fact most of us realized that he was a dictator who was better off dead. But then Muslims knew of this before he attacked Kuwait. We knew how he had attacked a weak and fractured Iran, bombed them with chemical weapons (now called WMD’s), got involved in a never ending war that claimed millions of lives, destroyed peace in the region, all with the backing of Hejaz(Saudi Arabia), France, Russia and the United States of America. I remember kneeling down in the teachers lounge in 7th grade at my school in Karachi listening to my Urdu teacher, Sir Bashir (Urdu) and Sir Hashmi (Religious Studies) lament about the Iraq-Iran war. The shame of it, a Muslim fighting another Muslim and how this war will weaken the Muslim ummah for the next 100 years. I spend two hours kneeling down for doctoring my test report card, but instead of pain and shame I felt excited to be privy to such interesting adult conversations. It was the first time that I remember Sir Bashir cursing, and he was cursing Saddam Hussein, and was gently reminded by Sir Hashmi that curse Saddam if you want but refrain from using the name Hussein, as it is the name of the prophets’ grandson.
That day in the Ozark grocery store, as Muslims we all felt the distasteful display of American bravado and found it offending. The sheltered lives in our home away from home, in a little town named Lawrence were as real as we wanted to believe. We proceeded to pay for the can of jalapeños and frozen chicken, while my friend Imran stuffed a skillet under his sweater and I stole a butcher knife. The skillet was bigger then his chest, but he walked out of the store cool as cucumber and we made a meal out of the ‘gathered’ groceries by the full beam of a Mazda 626 as our hunting had failed us miserably. I still can’t decide what asinine confidence made us not pack provisions for the trip, as we had never hunted before.
After Gulf War I ended, I learned in-depth details like the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter lying about Iraqi troops throwing babies out of incubators, the cost of Depleted Uranium (DU) and gulf war syndrome, the 100,000+ Iraqis who died due to the Allied bombing on the infamous Highway of Death. We learned about Gen. Colin Powell going head to head against the Dick Shady and Donald ‘the duck’ Rumsfeld and advocating a stop to the massacre that was best described by Roger Waters of Pink Floyd as ‘ the bravery of being out of range’. The war stopped, but was soon followed by crippling sanctions against the Baghdad regime, which resulted in 500,000 plus fatalities for the Iraqi children. When the American foreign secretary of state Madeline Alltoobright was asked whether the sanctions were justified, she replied, it was well worth the price. Just like iron ladies of old, she lived up to the anecdote that the female of the species is more conservative then the male, case in point, Indira Gandhi, Golda Mier, Margaret Thatcher, Benazir Bhutto, Condaleeza Rice.
The nineties came with great hope, the Berlin wall falling, republicans out of office after 12 years, and a wave of optimism. But wars continued, as events kept forcing America to take sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict. The after effects of the GW I was the first bombing of the world trade center and the permanent stationing of US troops in Hejaz. This also established a ‘no fly zone’ over Iraq which basically made the Iraqis lose control of the southern and the northern part of their country, and the US and UK planes continued routine patrolling and bombing of any ‘targets of opportunity’ and preemptive strikes. So in effect, the Persian Gulf War never ended with sanctions and bombing continuing.
Things did get better for a while. An Elvis impersonator played a saxophone on Arsenio Hall show and it can helped an aspiring candidate become a US president. William Jefferson Clinton, a small town boy, whose mother was a single parent and a nurse, came from a low income family, and in his brief life had shaken hands with President Kennedy as a boy, won a Rhodes scholarship, smoked pot and protested the Vietnam war. During his presidency, we got to know the life and times of Monica Lewinsky, the evil face of Osama Ben laden, the dot com culture, the internet revolution and above all unrivaled economic expansion. Everyone was happy, people worried about the President stuffing cigars into nubile girls beavers, instead of the President stuffing tomahawks up the arse of hairy middle eastern men
President Clinton was not an angel. Just like every American president he had his own share of wars. The first one was Somalia where the downing of one helicopter in Mogadishu gave us Blackhawk down and set the tone for true grit Hollywood style. The war in Somalia resulted in 19 Americans dying the streets of Mogadishu. While the book explored topics like the needless arrogance of the special forces who used to go boar hunting and Blackhawk helicopters and wore the tusks like African chieftains, as well as the insensitivity of the troops as they rode in helicopters with their feet hanging down onto the Somalians.
Next came Kosova, the good war. The war that saved lived. The war that pressured the Serbian genocides to give up killing innocent men and children, and raping women. It came to late, after the world watched in horror as Sen. Dole promised that he will not let the Bosnians have arms to protect themselves, thereby giving the Serbs the go ahead to kill and maim. Finally, when they started the same in Albania, the Clinton leadership, aching for a safe war and a good decent distraction launched an all out air campaign to rid the city of Sarejavo of all bridges and power plants. USAF lost one plane, a super secret F-117 stealth fighter and ended up bombing the Chinese embassy the very next day. According to NSA sources, this one was the only sortie planned by CIA on rumors that the wreckage of the F-117 had been transported to the Chinese embassy. An apology was of course forth coming. I watched this from televisions in Buck town as a I sipped bear and tried to be a righteous person and spreads the word about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Sabri brothers as the kings of Qawalli.
The altruistic campaign continues. It has seldom been changed, however this time around there is no need to hide the real meaning under code words, or rather the lack of it. ‘Operation Iraqi freedom’ is blatant in its purpose, just like ‘Infinite Justice’, later changed to ‘Enduring Freedom’ as the moral majority voted that only the almighty can provide infinite justice. As a lightweight military history buff, I remember the operational names from previous operation, coded in secrecy to cloak the meaning, confuse the enemy and keep them guessing. Operation Marketgarden, 007, Agent 69 comes to mind. All these seems like 20th century novelty items in the times of CNN where the main battle is to win the hearts and minds of the global Diaspora. Therefore, operation are not meant to be secrets, but blatantly poignant about their purpose. Another way of looking at it would be that the name is deceiving, as this war in not about Iraqi freedom, weapons of mass destruction or Al-qaeda, but about the oligarchy, dollar vs euro, the lucrative rebuilding contracts, the cowboy attitude of showing to the rest of the worlds, especially those fucking Muslims and those yellow bastards the simple message, ‘don’t mess with us’ and last but not least, the essential ‘Bag-Dad’ complex. Like ancient Oedipus of old, Bush II has to show his father that I am better then you by far. I not only are revenging your defeat against Clinton by defeating his protégé, I am going one step further but wiping out criticism you faced for a Persian Gulf war which went no where. Essentially, the American fascination with putting the USA in Usama, the Damn in Saddam and the Dad in Baghdad is a showing not just of imperialistic adventurism but also shallow commercialism
The closing years of the 20th century seem distant and memorable like the Eisenhower 50’s. I know that someday, the 90’s will replace the 50’s as the time when the Gen Xers enjoyed the potential of what American can be. Was it a coincidence that there was a huge budget surplus during the Clinton years and that the stock market rose to dizzying heights? The Presidential visit to China and India, the Oslo peace accord between Israel and Palestine, the good Friday accord between the IRA and the protestants and the disarmament of the central Asian republics. At home optimism was rampant, job were plenty, VC’s were hungry for ideas to fun and companies hired gorilla recruiters. The big debates were on saving social security and introducing a better health care system and guaranteed Medicare for seniors. While the chicken hawks and silent majority cursed our savvy southern belle, the world ate up Clinton. This was the American the world wanted to see, intelligent, humorous, good natured and with a twinkle in his eye. Even if he did mischievous behavior, you know that he would win your heart over by his raw passion and pragmatic resolve. This president served as the role model for Tony the Blair Bitch project and Gerheart Schroder.
Marilyn Young, new York History professor makes an interesting quip about the ‘frazellator’, a handheld computer held by US soldiers that has 1000 Arabic phrases programmed into it. The phrases range from ‘how are you’, to ‘get out of your car’, ‘get on your knees’ and ‘drop your pants’. The only problem with this cutting edge babble fish is that it does not know how to respond to the Arabic responses. This is American fighting men in a nut shell. One can only hope that America can avoid the short comings of an empire and live up to the potential that the world saw in Star Trek, a truly global community led by American innovation and the ability to disassociate themselves from frivolous bickering.
Alas, just as in 1991 during GW I when Kansas made it to the finals and lost to Duke, we had a repeat performance in 2003. This time, the Jayhawks lost to Syracuse. As much as I love the Kansas Jayhawks, I am almost afraid of the next time they go into the NCAA finals. Is the world ready for GW III?
The zen of war
March 2003
It is a strange time to be in America. We have March madness, American idols, Oscars and an annoying little war in the Middle East. On contraire, what makes living in America fun is traveling across the country in times of war. So I observe the ‘shock and awe’ campaign at DFW airport as a Cognac salesman flirts with the bartender at Chilli’s. She is wearing a t-shirt that has Margarita Madness as a caption, on it. The cognac salesman flirts with her and asks, “Oh that’s funny, can I get one of those?” The Texas size margarita glasses have a frozen concoction that has transformed the agaves based liquor into a pop culture phenomenon. The bitterness of the Sonora desert plant that blossoms once in seven years and then nurtured into the liquor of Gods, has been made into a mass market designer drink, just like the history of the Sumerian civilization and land of Gilgamash is bombed and looted into submission, so that Qualcomm can introduce 3G network in Iraq. Beyond the Tequila sunrise, through the frosty glass, a bloodless war (for Americans) is conducted for a TV audience, as lives are ruined and guts spilled on the plains of Karbala and Baghdad, one is reminded of the fecundity of power and the first city of the world, Uruk, only a few hundred miles away. And I think of times and wars in America, and unfortunately even as a recent immigrant there have been many.
I arrived in Boston on a one-way ticket from Karachi, via Doha, Qatar, Paris and London on Gulf Air. It had taken me 3 days to get there, as the flight was delayed in Paris due to unaccompanied baggage and all of us had to go on the freezing runway to identify our belongings. Threats of terrorism on a flight from the Middle East were very real even in those days. In London, I missed my connection to New York and booked myself on a flight the next day and proceeded to make myself comfortable for the night in Heathrow airport. That was not to be, as I was rudely told by a security men that the airport was closing and I would have to leave. I did not have a visa for UK, but somehow I convinced the passport officer to give me a day visa so that I could spend a night in London before my flight. That night, with all my belongings, two full size suitcases and a briefcase (I kid you not), I made my way by the London underground to a hotel in Gloucestershire in the cold rainy London night. I was lost and was guided by a elderly English couple who personally took me to the entrance of the hotel and wished me good luck. Their good deed saved me from breaking down and crying on the cold streets of London, but also made me realize that outside airports, the western world was filled with kind and caring people.
It was 3rd January, 1990 when I landed in Boston Logan airport to start my BS in Engineering at Arizona State University. The Aretha Franklin look-alike INS officer was convinced that the picture on my passport was not mine and she made me wait and squirm for a couple of hours. In line with me was a pony tailed Irani man who although spoke and looked American was being treated with the same special respect. Needless to say I missed my connection to JFK and ended up spending the night at a Hilton, courtesy of TWA. My first night in America, I tuned to CNN for pictures of a pock marked desperado being harassed and escorted by the American Special. 24,000 U.S. troops had seized control of Panama City in an attempt to capture Noriega after a U.S. soldier was killed in Panama. Noriega surrendered himself to U.S. custody and was transported to Miami, where he was later convicted of drug trafficking.
It was a pity that all my life I had dreamed of watching MTV, ABC and Miami Vice and all I got was a 3rd rate war by Bush I.
My time at ASU was brief. Due to bad grades and flighty concentration, I applied for a transfer to University of Kansas. In December I packed my bags and took a PIA flight to Karachi to attend a friends wedding. I came back through JFK and was treated with less suspicion as I came off an airplane smelling of biryani and gold leaf cigarettes. I flew to Phoenix, picked up my belongings and caught a flight to Kansas City on the eve of 13th Jan 1991. As I rode into a desolate wasteland of snowed out Kansas on I-435, I experienced the first snowfall of my life and checked my bags into a Days Inn. That night I watched CNN again as the Gulf War I started with much anticipated awe and wonder. Peter Arnett, Scud missiles, Tomahawks and Saddam Hussien, Baghdad, Kuwait and collateral damage were added to the glossary. That night the fire bombing started and CNN’s world wide audience watched the power and the glory of the American empire, all nicely package into digestible news bytes.
Next day there was more snow on the ground and I called a cab as I could not carry my suitcases to my new apartment. My roommates were 2 Bengali boys who like myself did not have a car. As the bombing continued and glazed eyed reporters tried to cover their excitement by trying to appear concerned, my cabbie arrived and helped carry my bags to the cab. He was an African American who asked me where I was from, I said Pakistan.
“Damn near the war, aren’t you?”
“Yes, we are, very close, people are very afraid”
“They should be, those fuckers are big,” he said eluding to the bombs, “but hey we have to protect our oil supply”, he added smiling. It was refreshing to know that he was not uninformed in the politics of the Middle East.
Soon, the war was forgotten as I washed dishes at Oliver hall, struggled with Electrical circuits, looked at co-eds with mournful looks of a basset hound. That year, I experienced March madness as University of Kansas went all the way to the NCAA finals, but lost to Duke and I was demoralized at the cruelty of this world. The war was soon forgotten and I was caught in a whirlwind of platonic loves, Bengali and Ethiopian mannerism, Hegel’s Phenomenology, Sarte’s existentialism and my failure as a student and a lover. Lawrence was a quite university town which nurtured students with mid western simplicity, stoic protestant values, augmented by a liberal sense of John Brown’s skepticism. America the imperialistic behemoth was just an illusion as I enjoyed the benefits of being in the belly of the beast, like Jonah in the old testament. On thanksgiving that year, I made a trip to the Ozarks with Pakistani friends and in one grocery store in some hillbilly town near the border of Arkansas around Mark Twain national forest, we were greeted by vulgar posters of Saddam Hussien various orifices serving as a bulls eye for a target practice range.
Not that I cared about Saddam, in fact most of us realized that he was a dictator who was better off dead. But then Muslims knew of this before he attacked Kuwait. We knew how he had attacked a weak and fractured Iran, bombed them with chemical weapons (now called WMD’s), got involved in a never ending war that claimed millions of lives, destroyed peace in the region, all with the backing of Hejaz(Saudi Arabia), France, Russia and the United States of America. I remember kneeling down in the teachers lounge in 7th grade at my school in Karachi listening to my Urdu teacher, Sir Bashir (Urdu) and Sir Hashmi (Religious Studies) lament about the Iraq-Iran war. The shame of it, a Muslim fighting another Muslim and how this war will weaken the Muslim ummah for the next 100 years. I spend two hours kneeling down for doctoring my test report card, but instead of pain and shame I felt excited to be privy to such interesting adult conversations. It was the first time that I remember Sir Bashir cursing, and he was cursing Saddam Hussein, and was gently reminded by Sir Hashmi that curse Saddam if you want but refrain from using the name Hussein, as it is the name of the prophets’ grandson.
That day in the Ozark grocery store, as Muslims we all felt the distasteful display of American bravado and found it offending. The sheltered lives in our home away from home, in a little town named Lawrence were as real as we wanted to believe. We proceeded to pay for the can of jalapeños and frozen chicken, while my friend Imran stuffed a skillet under his sweater and I stole a butcher knife. The skillet was bigger then his chest, but he walked out of the store cool as cucumber and we made a meal out of the ‘gathered’ groceries by the full beam of a Mazda 626 as our hunting had failed us miserably. I still can’t decide what asinine confidence made us not pack provisions for the trip, as we had never hunted before.
After Gulf War I ended, I learned in-depth details like the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter lying about Iraqi troops throwing babies out of incubators, the cost of Depleted Uranium (DU) and gulf war syndrome, the 100,000+ Iraqis who died due to the Allied bombing on the infamous Highway of Death. We learned about Gen. Colin Powell going head to head against the Dick Shady and Donald ‘the duck’ Rumsfeld and advocating a stop to the massacre that was best described by Roger Waters of Pink Floyd as ‘ the bravery of being out of range’. The war stopped, but was soon followed by crippling sanctions against the Baghdad regime, which resulted in 500,000 plus fatalities for the Iraqi children. When the American foreign secretary of state Madeline Alltoobright was asked whether the sanctions were justified, she replied, it was well worth the price. Just like iron ladies of old, she lived up to the anecdote that the female of the species is more conservative then the male, case in point, Indira Gandhi, Golda Mier, Margaret Thatcher, Benazir Bhutto, Condaleeza Rice.
The nineties came with great hope, the Berlin wall falling, republicans out of office after 12 years, and a wave of optimism. But wars continued, as events kept forcing America to take sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict. The after effects of the GW I was the first bombing of the world trade center and the permanent stationing of US troops in Hejaz. This also established a ‘no fly zone’ over Iraq which basically made the Iraqis lose control of the southern and the northern part of their country, and the US and UK planes continued routine patrolling and bombing of any ‘targets of opportunity’ and preemptive strikes. So in effect, the Persian Gulf War never ended with sanctions and bombing continuing.
Things did get better for a while. An Elvis impersonator played a saxophone on Arsenio Hall show and it can helped an aspiring candidate become a US president. William Jefferson Clinton, a small town boy, whose mother was a single parent and a nurse, came from a low income family, and in his brief life had shaken hands with President Kennedy as a boy, won a Rhodes scholarship, smoked pot and protested the Vietnam war. During his presidency, we got to know the life and times of Monica Lewinsky, the evil face of Osama Ben laden, the dot com culture, the internet revolution and above all unrivaled economic expansion. Everyone was happy, people worried about the President stuffing cigars into nubile girls beavers, instead of the President stuffing tomahawks up the arse of hairy middle eastern men
President Clinton was not an angel. Just like every American president he had his own share of wars. The first one was Somalia where the downing of one helicopter in Mogadishu gave us Blackhawk down and set the tone for true grit Hollywood style. The war in Somalia resulted in 19 Americans dying the streets of Mogadishu. While the book explored topics like the needless arrogance of the special forces who used to go boar hunting and Blackhawk helicopters and wore the tusks like African chieftains, as well as the insensitivity of the troops as they rode in helicopters with their feet hanging down onto the Somalians.
Next came Kosova, the good war. The war that saved lived. The war that pressured the Serbian genocides to give up killing innocent men and children, and raping women. It came to late, after the world watched in horror as Sen. Dole promised that he will not let the Bosnians have arms to protect themselves, thereby giving the Serbs the go ahead to kill and maim. Finally, when they started the same in Albania, the Clinton leadership, aching for a safe war and a good decent distraction launched an all out air campaign to rid the city of Sarejavo of all bridges and power plants. USAF lost one plane, a super secret F-117 stealth fighter and ended up bombing the Chinese embassy the very next day. According to NSA sources, this one was the only sortie planned by CIA on rumors that the wreckage of the F-117 had been transported to the Chinese embassy. An apology was of course forth coming. I watched this from televisions in Buck town as a I sipped bear and tried to be a righteous person and spreads the word about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Sabri brothers as the kings of Qawalli.
The altruistic campaign continues. It has seldom been changed, however this time around there is no need to hide the real meaning under code words, or rather the lack of it. ‘Operation Iraqi freedom’ is blatant in its purpose, just like ‘Infinite Justice’, later changed to ‘Enduring Freedom’ as the moral majority voted that only the almighty can provide infinite justice. As a lightweight military history buff, I remember the operational names from previous operation, coded in secrecy to cloak the meaning, confuse the enemy and keep them guessing. Operation Marketgarden, 007, Agent 69 comes to mind. All these seems like 20th century novelty items in the times of CNN where the main battle is to win the hearts and minds of the global Diaspora. Therefore, operation are not meant to be secrets, but blatantly poignant about their purpose. Another way of looking at it would be that the name is deceiving, as this war in not about Iraqi freedom, weapons of mass destruction or Al-qaeda, but about the oligarchy, dollar vs euro, the lucrative rebuilding contracts, the cowboy attitude of showing to the rest of the worlds, especially those fucking Muslims and those yellow bastards the simple message, ‘don’t mess with us’ and last but not least, the essential ‘Bag-Dad’ complex. Like ancient Oedipus of old, Bush II has to show his father that I am better then you by far. I not only are revenging your defeat against Clinton by defeating his protégé, I am going one step further but wiping out criticism you faced for a Persian Gulf war which went no where. Essentially, the American fascination with putting the USA in Usama, the Damn in Saddam and the Dad in Baghdad is a showing not just of imperialistic adventurism but also shallow commercialism
The closing years of the 20th century seem distant and memorable like the Eisenhower 50’s. I know that someday, the 90’s will replace the 50’s as the time when the Gen Xers enjoyed the potential of what American can be. Was it a coincidence that there was a huge budget surplus during the Clinton years and that the stock market rose to dizzying heights? The Presidential visit to China and India, the Oslo peace accord between Israel and Palestine, the good Friday accord between the IRA and the protestants and the disarmament of the central Asian republics. At home optimism was rampant, job were plenty, VC’s were hungry for ideas to fun and companies hired gorilla recruiters. The big debates were on saving social security and introducing a better health care system and guaranteed Medicare for seniors. While the chicken hawks and silent majority cursed our savvy southern belle, the world ate up Clinton. This was the American the world wanted to see, intelligent, humorous, good natured and with a twinkle in his eye. Even if he did mischievous behavior, you know that he would win your heart over by his raw passion and pragmatic resolve. This president served as the role model for Tony the Blair Bitch project and Gerheart Schroder.
Marilyn Young, new York History professor makes an interesting quip about the ‘frazellator’, a handheld computer held by US soldiers that has 1000 Arabic phrases programmed into it. The phrases range from ‘how are you’, to ‘get out of your car’, ‘get on your knees’ and ‘drop your pants’. The only problem with this cutting edge babble fish is that it does not know how to respond to the Arabic responses. This is American fighting men in a nut shell. One can only hope that America can avoid the short comings of an empire and live up to the potential that the world saw in Star Trek, a truly global community led by American innovation and the ability to disassociate themselves from frivolous bickering.
Alas, just as in 1991 during GW I when Kansas made it to the finals and lost to Duke, we had a repeat performance in 2003. This time, the Jayhawks lost to Syracuse. As much as I love the Kansas Jayhawks, I am almost afraid of the next time they go into the NCAA finals. Is the world ready for GW III?
posted by Samurai Zauq at 11:10 AM
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