Image courtesy of The Bush Center under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
There is no question that democracy is not taking root in Iraq – but only a question of who will reign over the rubble. In any event, we are there, and as Bette Davis said so succinctly in the movie, Beyond the Forest, “What a dump!”
Like Alice, George W. Bush wandered into Wonderland, without a clue of what he would do once he got there. The creatures Alice encountered in Wonderland smelled better than any of the ones in Islam – where the big trick is to find a way to stay upwind of them. Gas masks don’t always cut it.
Still, some argue that Iraq is a good place for a war as any, if only because there isn’t much of one going on there at the moment. Anytime it looks like our troops will get hard-nosed, Bush orders an outbreak of compassion, which suffocates anything the military might accomplish. Conveniently, as a sign of his mawkish good will, before sending them to Iraq, he considered having most of our troops neutered and de-clawed. He reassigned the Green Berets to be crossing guards, and assigned commandos to duty as meter maids. Bush has already put the Iraq fracas in the history books as the American military’s most embarrassing war.
Our troops should have been dispatched to Iraq with these five standing orders:
[1] Hurt somebody.
[2] Reduce all holy cities to holy ashes.
[3] Frisk all babies’ diapers for concealed howitzers.
[4] Wear your boon dockers inside a mosque as a sign of your disrespect for Allah.
[5] Don’t drink the water.
Islam is the religion of peace that has turned the Middle East into Satan’s Rumpus Room. As Moslem scripture has it, Allah is God and Mohammed is his sniper. Muezzins yowl from their minarets while looking down the sights of their AK47s. Islam is not a religion – it’s a pernicious infection. Everyone it has killed is still dead.
After 9/11, Bush proclaimed heroically that he would not negotiate with terrorists. It turned out the Bush Administration does not negotiate with terrorists anymore than horny businessmen do not negotiate with prostitutes. In Fallujah our diplomacy taught the military that forbearance is the uglier sister of delay. The traditional Army dogma “hurry up and wait” was revised to read, “Delay is where it’s at.” In the hymn, Christian soldiers are urged to march. In Bush’s Army of Compassion, they bivouac in the suburbs of Fallujah, release their clips, and practice how to make a soufflé in a mess kit in the field. Had Bush been President during World War II, the Marines would still be bobbing in the surf off Iwo Jima.
The Arabs should have been carpet-bombed from their own flying carpets. Our troops should have been given the order to not only fire at will, but at whim. Instead, our intrepid troops outside Fallujah were ordered not to fight, but to stand ready to hold their officer’s flak jackets in case two tank commanders got into a fight over a disputed parking space. Somewhere along the line, George W. Bush was bitten on the neck by the ever-inert Dudley Do-Nothing, whose modus operandi is neither fish nor cut bait, and, when in doubt, blame Israel. Any time it looked like there was going to be a wave of righteous anger, Bush spilled over with compassion – which inevitably gummed up the treads of our tanks.
We are mired in a kind of compassionate nihilism due mostly to Bush’s bizarre conviction that there is no such thing as a real enemy. Hence our soldiers’ only real enemy is friendly fire, and, unlike those penny arcade mechanical bears that march back and forth, when shot at, they shoot back. This gallantry allows our troops to die, while our President maintains the approval of his conscience. Bush has not learned that being defeated is not the same as being a nice guy. Will somebody please call Dr. Laura to explain the difference to him? (I, myself, am not disappointed in Bush, as my expectations of him never rose above his ability to reach a stalemate at a critical moment. George W. Bush is so often disparaged for his lack of mental acuity that I will forego an inner prompting to pile on, except to observe, one thing American politics doesn’t need in the White House is another Tommy Smothers.)
MUSLIM – PRISONERS OF LOVE?
It is time to end the handkerchief twisting over the kinky goings on in the prison at Abu Ghraib. What’s the big deal? We have seen weirder shit than this on Saturday Night Live. With all the bearded men milling about in gaily colored jumps suits, Abu Ghraib looks less like a prison than Leisure World for assassins.
The conventional wisdom is:
With the exception of those brief sexually nonconforming interludes, for the most part the terrorists were treated humanely. If it weren’t for the body searches and the forming of nude pyramids, the prisoners wouldn’t have had any social lives at all. Body searches are the way most Muslims celebrate their holidays. Such bestial behavior goes on all over Islam – especially during Camel Appreciation Week. Moreover, Arabs don’t care about what’s going on behind their backs, as long as it goes on while they’re facing Mecca.
The irregularities in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo might well have been inspired by George Bush’s much advertised compassion that brought to their detention some humane touches. E.g.
While stripped and having their apertures probed, the guards would play a recording of Julie Andrews singing “Getting to Know You”.
Detainees were allowed a once a week connubial visits with a goat.
Married prisoners were given a monetary allowance to hire someone to beat their wives while they were away from home.
In Guantanamo, inmates were provided with air dehumidifiers to make it easier in the damp Caribbean climate to keep their opium pipes lit.
Lonely Al Qaeda prisoners were issued pamphlets supposedly indorsed by Susan McDougal that instructed them on how to keep their shackles from rattling during masturbation.
During interrogations inmates could only be thrashed with a pussy willow.
Guards were careful to see that inmates did not become constipated as a result of having their turbans over-wound.
These prohibitions did not entirely deter objections about the cuisine. The prisoners’ most frequent complaint was “The chef doesn’t sauté the maggots the way my mother used to.”
The patients in the infirmary griped that the enemas were too sweet. (Medical complaints were invariably unjustified, since the inmates came from Islamic countries where the doctors don’t know the difference between a paramedic and a paranoiac.)
Inmates occasionally caught cold due to a draft coming through a hole torn in the chain link fencing.
Some Taliban prisoners considered it cruel and inhuman punishment when the Commandant announced to the prison population that he was calling off the Charles Manson look-alike contest. (The nearest thing to actual abuse was forcing prisoners to sit through a movie called The King of Comedy starring Sandra Bernhard and Jerry Lewis.)
American prisons have become mills for conversion to Islam. People enter prison as felons and emerge as Muslims, or enter as Muslims and come out as felons. In either case, it is considered a lateral move and the prisoners emerge with a feeling of fulfillment. At all events, in American penal institutions the disparity between the two is statistical idiosyncrasy. At last count, the Moslems outnumbered the murderers, although it was by a narrow margin.
Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo notwithstanding, American prisons are as dense a congestion of the world’s Muslims as are currently to be found. San Quentin is a religious assembly line whose conveyor belt of fanatics empties directly into Osama bin Laden’s rumpus room. You can become a member of Al Qaeda without relinquishing your prestige status as a career criminal. Attica has more Moslems than downtown Damascus. It is said among prison guards, “Show me a kaffiyeh and I’ll show you a “lifer” under it.
COMPASSION – WHAT IS IT?
Soldiers say it is important to know your enemy. The terrorists enemy has proved easier to analyze than the gummy homogeneity of the Bush Administration, whose consistency is somewhere between marzipan and wet cement. The Sunni Triangle should have been a platform for Iraqi surrender. Inevitably, Bush made it into a hot bed of compassion. Iraq has congealed into puddles of leniency for the insurgents. To demonstrate his limitless capacity for compassion, Bush might ordain that in future combat all Americans must die from friendly fire. From that perspective, we are assured that the Crusaders died for nothing.
Compassion is the Hamburger Helper of human emotion. It ordains, should a terrorist be run over by an American tank the compassionate thing to do is drag him home and slip him under the front door. Bush wants us to leave our aggressive inclinations in the barracks and take our charitable ones to the battlefield. The objective of a compassionate war is not to win or lose, but to suffocate your antagonist under a blanket of good will.
Moreover, compassion is an exercise in under-reaction. Those Marines who are veterans of that stifling fiasco at Fallujah are still asking each other, “Where were you when the compassion hit the fan?” Compassionate people cannot be humane without advertising it. In due course these humanitarians will wear identifying clothing declaring just how ostentatiously humane they are – motivated by that same compunction that prompts Hibernians to wear t-shirts that say “Kiss Me – I’m Irish”.
Bush has not learned the lesson that Muslims are like mosquitoes. Show them compassion and they live to bite another day spreading their moral malaria to men’s souls. Innocent people are having their heads chopped off, yet the tapioca pudding of Bush’s compassion has not hardened into a need for retribution. Even more grotesque than the decapitation, is the President’s ritual message of comfort to the kin of these victims of Bush’s “religion of peace.”
(Islam’s clergy has explained that their Deity, in his benevolence, ordained decapitation as a blessing for the alleviation of migraine. The loss of a head is a small matter to the street Arab who doesn’t use it that much anyway.) After the Islamic barbarians beheaded Nicholas Berg, an American President worth his mettle would have rolled out the Enola Gay. A well-situated nuclear device would bring new urgency to the phrase “leveling the playing field.” The total decimation of Ramallah or Teheran and Islamic Fundamentalists might construe the devastation as a sign of, shall we say, American plain speaking.
[Note: Surprisingly, this unpalatable porridge called compassion did not originate with Bush. Complaisance to villains is the modus operandi of American liberal politicians and their serial insult to the American people. It became suspect to the free world that in World War II fifty million people died for nothing, when John F. Kennedy, a magnanimous lover of America’s enemies, forgot about those white crosses on the beach at Normandy and proclaimed, “Ich bin ein Berliner”. (Ich bin ein hypocrite would be more to the point.) Kennedy’s undoing may be that the guy behind the grassy knoll had a brother executed by the Waffen SS at Malmedy, or a sister cremated in an oven at Auschwitz.]
The race is on between Compassion and Affirmative Action to see which is the more compelling agent for undermining Western civilization. The demographics are against us. No matter how many Islamic terrorists we kill, there are always more fetuses wearing dynamite belts, scraping their way down along the walls of the fallopian tubes on their way to contaminate the world. The clock is ticking off the end of civilization and Arab ethno-psychosis is the sizzling fuse that Bush hopes to extinguish with the moistness of his compassion.
It is time we made terror an export rather than an import. Mr. President, compassion has had its day. Genghis Khan is back in town.