Coastal
Post Online
June, 2003
Harvesting The Dragon's Teeth
By Edward W. Miller
"Our fathers and ourselves
sowed the dragon's teeth. Our children
know and suffer the armed men."
Stephen Vincent Benet
While the Saudis survey the massive
destruction of their American worker's quarters in Riyadh, and bury their dead,
Americans, warned earlier to leave that country, were hastily escaping by the
planeload from King Faud's Kingdom. A few hundred miles to the west and close
to the Mediterranean shores in Morocco, hundreds of natives and tourists,
crowding the streets of Casablanca were suddenly blasted by a series of suicide
bombings which targeted a Jewish cemetery, Jewish Community Center, Belgian
embassy and the Hotel Safir. Initial head counts showed 41 dead and over 100
wounded.
Mohammed Nabil Ben Abdallah,
Morocco's minister of communication characterized the suicide bombers as
"young Kamikazi commandos, mostly in their 20s," adding "We are
convinced that they are part of a cell with direct ties to an international
network..." ( SF Chronicle 18 May)
James Hall, foreign editor for THE
SCOTSMAN on May 19th, wrote: "US officials have told the US press they
believe Osama bin Laden's operation now has regional commanders in Yemen,
Pakistan, the Philippines, and Chechyna. Saudi Arabia has four or five Al Qaeda
cells, they believe." "Though key figures have been arrested amid
huge publicity, US experts are now saying the key positions vacated by these
men are being 'backfilled' by a new generation."
Meanwhile in Israel, on May 18th, a
suicide bomber blew himself up in a bus in downtown Jerusalem, killing seven
and wounding at least 20 and shortly thereafter a second suicide bomber blasted
himself near the entrance to the village of Dahiya el-Barid not far from
Jerusalem. On the following day five suicide bombers, one of them female,
likewise sacrificed themselves in Israel. Sharon, scheduled to fly to
Washington to meet with president Bush, canceled the trip and closed the
borders between the Occupied Territories and Israel, keeping some 20,000
Palestinians from their jobs.
The editor of Israel's Tel Aviv paper
HA'ARETZ, commented: "If there is one lesson Israel can impart to the
Americans, it is that every occupation is appalling, that it tramples the
occupied and corrupts the occupier." Meanwhile in Afghanistan, America's
puppet president, Hamid Karzai, remained holed-up and powerless in his Capital,
Kabul, while in the Afghan town of Meymaneh, assassins with their turbans
wrapped to hide their faces ambushed a convoy on a main streetā executing Rasul
Beg, mid-level militia commander while igniting one of the fiercest battles
between rival warlords ever waged in this northern town. The gunfight lasted 20
hours, killed 13 people including an 8-year old boy.
"That battle... is in many ways
the woeful tale of Afghanistan 18 months after the fall of the Taliban and the
instillation of the Karzai interim administration. Despite military and
financial support from the United States and its allies, the Afghan government
has been unable to assert its authority over a country driven by ethnic,
religious and cultural differences and shattered by decades of war." As
competing militias recruited soldiers the number of gunmen increased
dramatically as did the crime rate. In three weeks there were 20 armed
robberies in town. (Washington Post) In a speech broadcast on state television
May 18th Karzai threatened to resign if "fractious governors"
continued to keep the customs revenues due his central government, adding that
his civil servants and security forces had not been paid since March. (Assoc.
Press)
History tells us Afghanistan can be a
dangerous neighborhood for the unaccustomed
westerner. Around the turn of the last
century when the British attacked Afghanistan with an expeditionary force. they
marched triumphant into Kabul... The following evening, heading southward towards
Kandahar, as their troops filed through a narrow mountain pass, Afghans
descending from the heights above with knives and rifles, butchered the entire
regiment of 16,000 men. Only the regimental surgeon, riding a fast horse, survived to tell the story.
News from Iraq these days suggests
that Washington, while planning its military capture of Saddam's country and
envisioning an enthusiastic response from Iraq's liberated people, never
consulted the readily available history of previous "liberators."
In May 19 New York Times, Eric
Schmitt and David E. Langer report: "The looting, lawlessness, and
violence that planners thought would mar only the first few weeks has proved
more widespread and enduring than Bush and his aids expected and is threatening
to undermine the American plan." Though on March 16th Vice President Dick
Cheney said : "We will in fact be greeted as liberators," No one in
Washington anticipated the degree to which chaos would undermine the central
goal of presenting the United States as a liberator."
The Times reported that not only did
the retired Army Lieutenant-General Garner, charged with both the physical and
political rebuilding of Iraq clash with his top administrator Barbara Bodine,
but when Garner with his entourage arrived in Baghdad he found "no functioning e-mail, no way for
outsiders to reach them by telephone, no cars and drivers to get them around
the city and no interpreters." Bodine has since been sent back to
Washington. Garner in his taped testimony to Congress (May 13th) listed 11
"major goals" to be accomplished before he leaves Iraq on June 15th,
saying "The next 30 to 40 days is probably the critical period."
Lieutenant-General Garner and his
Washington bosses should have reviewed the British experience in Iraq. As John
Glancy outlines it in THE GUARDIAN (April 13th) "No-one , least of all the
British, should be surprised at the state of anarchy in Iraq. We have been
there before." Glancy calls Iraq "the product of a lying empireā
carved duplicitously from ancient history." Because British thwarted Arab
hopes, "anarchy and insurrection were there from the start."
Glancy reports the British responded
to Iraqi resistance with poison gas attacks and bombing. "When the Iraqi
tribes stood up for themselves we unleashed the flying dogs of war to
"police them." Terror bombing, night bombing, heavy bombers, delayed
action bombs (particularly lethal against children) were all developed during
raids on mud, reed and stone villages during the League of Nations
Mandate" ...which ended in 1932. In the summer of 1920 an uprising of
100,000 Iraqis lodged against the British was thwarted as the RAF flew missions
totaling 4008 hours, dropped 97 tons of bombs and killed nearly 9000 Iraqis.
Churchill, Glancy reported, "was particularly keen on chemical weapons,
suggesting they be used "against recalcitrant Arabs as an
experiment."
The ongoing so-called
"terrorism" reported in countries across the globe , from the Mideast
to Aceh in Indonesia, reminds us that the human animal will not quietly
tolerate subjugation . Osama Ben Laden has taken it upon himself to lead a
jihad against the brutal subjugation of his Muslim brethren in both Iraq and
the Occupied Territories, and punish the US and Britain for their ten years of
starvation, bacterial and radioactive genocide of Saddam's people, and the US'
support for Sharon's ongoing brutal subjugation of the Palestinians.
The Israelis, who are destroying
their own democracy in a Nazi-like campaign to steal their neighbor's land and
subjugate the Palestinians, bitterly complain about "suicide bombers"
. The Jews conveniently forget their Hebrew ancestors, who, rather than
tolerate a repressive occupation by the Roman Empire , also chose to kill
themselves. The annual Jewish celebration of the Massada celebrates that
massive suicide. Had explosives been available in those days, the Romans might
well have faced Jewish suicide bombers.
As we Americans celebrate MEMORIAL
DAY recalling sacrifices for freedom during a brief 200 years of existence,
lines once read as a monument was raised to our Revolutionary War heroes come
to mind:
"Spirit, that made those heroes dare to die and leave their children free,
bid time and nature gently spare the shaft we raise to them and thee."
Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882