Ice in the Soul: An Empire At Peace?

You've gotta have a fairly good imagination to come up with three cartoons and a column every week, so Ted Rall's latest column shouldn't be such a surprise. He's trying very hard to help Americans understand why Iraqi insurgents target fellow Iraqis. And he's doing it by hypothesizing an allegorical invasion of the USA by an overwhelmingly more powerful military power: errr... Iceland!?!?!

At first many Americans are happy to see Bush arrested and put on trial, but it doesn't take long before we start to miss him. Promises of rapid rebuilding evaporate. Two years after saturation bombing has leveled Washington, Los Angeles, New York and other major cities, the rubble is overrun with rats and wild dogs. America's natural resources--coal, lumber, oil--are shipped back to Iceland without recompense. Unmarked checkpoints spring up everywhere, transforming a drive to the 7-11 to get water--faucets are dry--into a potentially lethal exercise. Icelandic troops conduct house raids to take away Americans' guns. Since there's no electricity for streetlights, the night belongs to gangs, who rape and hold women for ransom. There are no jobs, unless you count working for the hated police force of the puppet regime, the Unified Nordic Republic of Icelanderica. UNRI lackeys ride alongside Icelandic storm troopers to point out the homes of "terrorists," who are bagged, beaten and dragged off into the night, never to be seen again. Most of the victims are innocent civilians, of course, but the Icelandics don't speak English. They mistakenly trust their toadies, who use their authority to act on personal grudges.

These collaborators, as Karl Rove would point out, are fair game--for attacks by American resistance fighters. As in "V." And "Red Dawn."

A few years pass. The Icelandic government turns over nominal "sovereignty" to its puppet American regime, but nothing changes on the ground. The checkpoint shootings, mass arrests and chaos continue unabated. Almost everyone has lost a friend or family member to the war. There's an "election," but members of the prewar Democratic and Republican parties are barred from participating. America as we know it has been rubbed out.

The humiliation is total. Icelandic forces pass out decks of cards depicting the faces of former senators, governors and generals. They shoot deposed leader George W. Bush's twin daughters and air images of their bloody, mutilated faces on state television. They print photos of Bush, haggard and obviously abused in his secret prison, wearing nothing but underwear.

Adding to the anger of patriotic Americans is the willingness of the rest of the world to forget what has happened. Other nations, including former prewar allies like Great Britain and Italy, reopen their embassies and post ambassadors to the "new America." The United Nations recognizes the collaborationist regime as legitimate and meets with its appointed leader, a man unknown in America because he spent his entire life in exile in Iceland. Carpetbaggers (the collaborationist press calls them "entrepreneurs") pour in from abroad, scheming to line their pockets by prolonging Americans' misery and poverty. Aid groups and other NGOs seeking to help hungry and homeless Americans mean well, but their presence reinforces a sense that things are back to normal--and the collaborationist media points to their presence as tacit endorsement of the occupation.

Obviously the U.S. nationalist insurgents don't want to kill civilians. They prefer that foreigners stay out of occupied America so they can focus on driving out the Icelandics, but naive and greedy intruders ignore their warning not to associate with the puppet regime. Leaders of the resistance are forced to make a brutal choice. They can kill a few diplomats here, a few aid workers there, but since executions serve no purpose as warnings unless their horror is publicized, the American patriots choose to distribute videotapes of the killings. Similarly, they warn their countrymen not to join the collaborationist police forces. But there's only one way to ensure that the jobless won't sell out their country in order to feed their families: suicide bombers who take out as many traitors as possible.

Rall says the only alternative would be for these hypothetical "Americans" to accept that "there will never, ever again be a land of the free and home of the brave where the United States used to be".

I disagree - there are always alternatives to deadly violence. I can sympathise with the Iraqi insugents' motives, but killing innocent people is a long way from blowing up an oil pipeline. Unfortunately, now is a time of extreme violence in Iraq, and anyone who cannot command an aggressive mob (or at least a potentially aggressive mob) has little say in the political arena. But it will not always be this way.

Indeed, the violence of the Iraqi insurgents - as Rall points out - is already a major PR disaster for them, alienating both fellow Iraqis and foreign observers alike. Similarly, the obscene violence of Falluja, Gitmo and other scenes of American atrocities have alienated observers from the USA's side. Violence begets violence, and both sides lose. But the real losers, always - ALWAYS! - are the innocent people caught in the middle of these warring forces.

Polls in Iraq consistently show that ordinary Iraqis want two things above all else: terrorists out of their country (there were none before the invasion, remember) and the US "coalition" forces out of their country. This is the real voice of the Iraqi people. Let us listen to it.

People like Rumsfeld and Cheney, of course, will say that the USA cannot withdraw or the "terrorists" will take over the country. If this were true, it would only be as a result of their own violence and lies. But it is not even true: if the USA withdrew from Iraq tomorrow, Iraqis would settle their own scores.

There would be violence, of course, but there is violence today in any case, and no sign of an end to it. With the US forces gone, Iraqi insurgents would turn on the next obvious enemy: the foreign jihadists. My bet is they would make short work of them.

Then there would be the power struggle of forming a new government. Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds would align along tribal lines - but they are doing that already. A civil war could ensue, but we are getting closer to that by the day in any case. My bet is that the country would rupture into three parts, at great human cost.

But it would be the Iraqis' choice, they would be in control of their own country (however chaotic it may remain for some time) and there would ultimately be an end to the violence. As it is, there is no end of violence in sight.

FOOTNOTE: You know, I used to read a lot of Confucius and other Chinese philosophers from that era. And I never understood why their discussions of personal growth were always interlaced with edicts about the role of government. But this Iraq War has enlightened me. What's that quote...?

The way never acts yet nothing is left undone.
Should lords and princes be able to hold fast to it,
The myriad creatures will be transformed of their own accord.
After they are transformed, should desire raise its head,
I shall press it down with the weight of the nameless uncarved block.
The nameless uncarved block
Is but freedom from desire,
And if I cease to desire and remain still,
The empire will be at peace of its own accord.