(Our foreign policy editor, Dusty Schoch reacts to the hullabaloo we’re currently enjoying with Bush’s “smart” bombing, and killing Al Qaeda leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.)

As Bush puts on his Alfred E. Newman face and struts his macho pride taking credit for  some dumb soldier’s pushing the button sending two very smart bombs to finish the job his Jordanian oil buddies did when they ratted out their black sheep cousin, so many things come to mind…such as “Lighting matches in haystacks”, “Wagging the Dog”, “Awakening Sleeping Giants”,  “Fulfilling Prophesies”, “Born and Bred in the Briar Patch”.

To begin my ruminations on this diplomatic/foreign policy being packaged as “a killing  blow in Bush’s so-called “war on terrorism”, let me begin by reprising  the absolute first thing I wrote on the subject of Bush’s declared “War On Terrorism” in his address to Congress following 911…you remember, where he declared that there was a war on terrorism being declared and that we’d win it, and that we’d win it by holding responsible those nations “harboring terrorists”.  This is, of course, the historically unparalleled declaration of war by a U.S. President on a tactic. Infamy will record it as “The Bush Doctrine”.

Yes, you read that correctly.  Of course it makes no more sense today than when Bush (at the dictation of Richard Perle and the speech writing of David Frum) finally declared preemptive war on Afghanistan…against “the terrorists”,  the “al Qaeda”, and its Taliban enablers.

Terrorism, fellow Americans, is a tactic…not an enemy. The Sunni Muslim al Qaeda thug Bush just bumped off was not the mastermind of the 911 attack on New York. He’s a Jordanian-born Muslim demagogue, who–just as bin Laden–rose to power among the “insurgents” in Iraq, and Afghanistan.  “Insurgents” are simply those who have risen up and banded to oppose, in the name of Islam and their own sovereign nations, Bush’s unjustified and unprovoked “shock and awe” imperialistic  preemptive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The total absurdity of declaring and waging a “war against terrorism” was something I tried to depict in a parable I penned, a little “Persian Parable” shortly after 9/11/01: It went like this:

“Matches  and  Haystacks”

(An Arabian Allegory)

Let’s consider two combatants contemplating war against one another and make a wager on which will   be victorious before their war begins (“victorious” meaning : “to get the outcome the combatant wants in the war”).

On one side are the  “haystacks.”   They are the common-variety haystacks, made of golden  harvested grass, pitched high in a pile , shining in the sun.  These haystacks want to endure , intact, until their destinies are  fulfilled by deployment into  the service of their makers.  On the other side are the  “matches” – all of them the  self-igniting stick variety, having the general size ,  shape and aspect  of  large needles without eyes.

The ultimate purpose  of all the matches  is to set fire to all  the haystacks.  The easiest way to accomplish this is for the matches  to imbed themselves deep inside  the haystacks , where,  because of their  small size and the haystacks’  greater  mass ,   it is easy  for them  to remain hidden until the call for ignition.  When the call to ignite is given by the leaders of the matches, all the matches in all the haystacks will strike  themselves and go up in flames along with their individual haystack hosts.   Being thusly consumed , however, is no defeat or problem for the matches, who are all trained by masterful match  mentors to believe that when they are immolated in a haystack fire they themselves start, they will be instantly transported – intact and unscathed  into an after life where  they’ll be safe and happy forever -  that being , cushioned amidst the churlish labia and securely-clenched teeth of an aspiring cinema cowboy , sitting on a subservient bale of hay in the non-smoking section of a sushi bar in lower L.A. watching CNN and  waiting for a Hollywood talent agent to phone.

Now for the wager:  When all the matches in the world are safely and securely  ensconced  in all the haystacks in the world, and the haystacks declare war on the matches and threaten to seek them out and set them on fire, tell me ,  where are you going to place your bets?

Well, we know where we put our bets…We bet on Bush…and what did we get?   We managed to ignite a bunch of haystacks all over Islam.  This is the first one we’ve truly burned, though, and this is what’s so important and dreadful about it.  Bin Laden’s still at large.  We haven’t made a martyr of him yet.  We, as yet, haven’t executed Saddam Hussein (although he’s Sunni and  despicable, he’s not Al Qaeda) but probably will very shortly by flimsy proxy.  No, this is the first Islamic terrorist whose power we have expanded one thousand fold by….of course…killing him.  We were all told the story of B’r Rabbit and the Briar Patch, but apparently none of us, especially Bush, learned it.  Smart bombing Abu to smithereens has made him a  martyr in the Al Qaeda cause.  Sending him to Allah. Putting him on the 50 couches with as many virgins. Fulfilling Islamic prophesy. All prophets and martyrs are exponentially more powerful after death than during life. Consider no further than Christ and his Al Qaeda counterpart, Mohammed.

Does Bush really think…Is there any Middle Eastern foreign policy expert stupid enough to advise him that killing a given Islamic leader does anything but bring in…immediately…fresh “insurgent” blood?  Does anyone in the West still  maintain that the 9/11 pilots were “cowards”?  Does anyone with a fifth-grader’s appreciation for Islamic theocracy think that terrorists can be intimidated?  Did our “Shock and Awe” bombardment of Baghdad cause terrorists to flee under any construction of recent history? Hell no. It made foreign (Abu was Jordanian) terrorists immigrate to Iraq and join the “insurgency”….it made Abu “sit up”.

“Awakening a Sleeping Giant”,

Instead of celebrating our “kill”, my fellow Americans, I suggest we, for the first time, turn the homeland security “terrorist” light from green to dark red.  We have finally gone and stepped on a potential  Persian land mine.   It brings to my mind those famous words from an intelligent and prescient Japanese warrior (Admiral Yamamoto) on the morning after his Emperor commanded the bombing of Pearl Harbor … “I fear Japan may have awakened a sleeping giant.”

There are an estimated 5 to 8 million Islamics presently residing in the United States an unknowable number of whom are sympathetic to Al Qaeda “type” terrorism.  Among these 5 to 8 million of our fellow Americans—without any doubt—reside a very lethal number of Islamic “matches” within our uniformly haystack-vulnerable communities. If,  by way of reprisal for Abu’s killing,  a squad of Islamic terrorists decides to car-bomb our local Court House or churches, there is absolutely nothing we will be able to do to stop it …at least every time.

“Wagging the (dead) Dog”

If you missed the 1997 movie, “Wag The Dog”, don’t miss the lesson. It tells the story (and political  strategy) whereby a U.S. President, embarrassed with a public scandal that could kill his approval ratings,  declares war against an innocent and defenseless foreign country to take the media “heat” off himself.   Bush’s approval ratings are as low as Nixon’s Watergate numbers because of the dismal ways he’s running every one of his foreign and domestic projects, from Democratizing Iraq to bankrupting what was, before his administration, the strongest national economy in the world.

Let’s not go for the bait.  Sit down, Abu, and wag your tail in Islamic heaven where it belongs.   Don’t let us wag you down here in the dirt and in the process distract America from the fact that, even if he has a soldier under his command who can make a lucky shot on an inside tip, Bush has declared a disastrous and fictitious war against a non-entity “tactic”, and put America on an impossible mission where, at best, we are giving aid to our Islamic enemies, fulfilling their prophesies that we infidels intend to kill them all, and in the process are  making martyrs out of Islamic demagogues more stupid, evil and fascistic even than our own  G.W. Bush.

Abu is in fact dead.  One match, however, when struck properly, could ignite the whole hay stack. The amber waves of America.  So, for those of you who are swallowing the bait, go ahead and celebrate the killing of Abu.  But while you straws in the western haystack are celebrating the immolation of one Iraqi match,  what are you going to do with the millions of mad  matches in your own hayseed midst?

Dusty Schoch

June 9, 2006