The cowboy Bush.
Bush thinks he is protecting the old west from the Indians. He is chasing down the renegades. He retells atrocity stories of Indians raping and scalping settlers.
Terrorist is the term used to describe a broad array of individuals,
groups, peoples, religions, nations who disagree with us. It is a vague
categorization of anyone who we want to target. It is Zarqawi, Bin Laden, and a plethora of other Middle Eastern names of individuals that we can't pronounce- but it is also a label for nations- Iran, for example. It is a confusion of facts and lumping together of many differing factions and political arguments, national interests and fundamentally, religious beliefs. Terrorism, in this old west, cowboy and Indian contest is synonymous with Islam. As simple as it was to caricature the Indians as non-Christian pagans who had to be either saved or destroyed, converted or corralled, that same oversimplification applies today in Bush's and by extension, America's, attitude toward Islam.
When Americans, or at least the ones who spoke mostly English, thought all Indians were hateful and evil terrorists, it was relatively easy to send the troops after them, relatively easy to exhibit blindness and dumbness to the tragedies of Wounded Knee and the thousands of other slaughters and desecrations that we visited on an entire people who we had so easily demonized. Indeed, it was not so hard to do. There were so few of them compared to the Europeans who felt a divine right to their land.
The cowboy Indian war this President has unleashed has much larger
ramifications. There are a lot of Indians out there. Today as we look back and see the cruelties we brought on those tribes, out of Manifest Destiny, greed, or political popularity, the injustice of it all is apparent. But nevertheless at the time they were no better than the terrorists of today.
In fact the word Terrorist is just as applicable in the old saying the only good Injun is a dead Injun. The Indians of America were identifiable, spoke strangely and unintelligibly, looked and sounded and acted very different from regular Americans. And so, the images we have of terrorists are also different from us, or at least the guys in the suits at the microphones.
This is a dangerous time. We have demagogues who proclaim freedom as the goal, and believe it sometimes, while we are trying to establish a military presence in the Middle East. We have demagogues who gloss over the real differences in those grievances against us to smear them all with the label terrorist- evil and hateful destroyers of freedom. It is a kind of religious fanaticism in itself to take the attitude that God has blessed us, and the hell with the rest of you. But that is what comes across from the superficial analysis of the world situation through the eyes of the cowboy Bush.
Iran, the next target of our righteous zeal, is daily caricatured in the most extreme and harshest colors. They deny the holocaust; they want to destroy Israel; they are building nuclear weapons to attack America. In fact there are those in Iran who would definitely fit in this abstract painting, but it is not the summation of the nation. There are arguments in Iran itself about these very issues. Ahmadinejad, the president, has called for a historical review of the Holocaust. He has asked why the Europeans, who burned the Jews, sent them to Palestine instead of giving them land in Europe? Interesting questions, and it would be enlightening to hear the historical analysis by thoughtful and objective students of history. I don't believe it was practical to send the Jews to places in Europe, and it was easy to fulfill their desire to go back to their ancient home, and a lot less contentious to send them to the desert where there was not an organized and militarily strong opposition nor an organized media to thwart or hinder such a move. But that is my take. Let us hear all sides and at least clear the air. Perhaps settlements could be made by paying for the land expropriated. But I digress.
It is frightening to contemplate the Iranians having a nuclear weapon. It is frightening to think that the Israelis have one, too. The Mutually assured destruction that kept the Cold War alive and kept it from being a hot war seems not to apply in the middle east because we assume that since many fanatical, fooled, duped, or crazy individuals are willing to blow themselves up, then maybe entire governments would be willing to do the same. This conclusion, which I believe to be false, is a result of the demonization and loose use of words like terrorism.
If we applied the golden rule- and looked at the world as if we were
walking through it in others' shoes, we might conclude that the only way Iran can keep either the Western powers, namely the US, or Israel from attacking it is to have some kind of deterrence. In fact, all the nations we have branded as evil or terrorist might be thinking the same thing- and obviously based on the pre-emptive attack on Iraq these fears are totally justified. Would we sit back and wait for the turn of events while a war-like nation with the hugest arsenal the world has ever seen is threatening our destruction?
The Indians didn't have a choice. And we won that war with the evil savages who did not recognize our God. Now it's different. Iran can't turn off the spigot of oil to us because it doesn't sell us any oil. But it can leverage that power with Russia and China. We are playing a dangerous game with a small-minded man at the helm who sees the world in blacks and whites, good and evil, us vs. them, freedom vs. terrorism, Cowboys vs. Jets. It is a game to be won, and we will not stop till we win it. And then he can stand mano a mano up to his Dad, and say -see, I can do something right! as the ashes around him smolder and the children and mothers soft weeping become only a forgotten memory as the KBR bulldozers are off-loaded from the C17s.
