March, 2003

Our Shock & Awe Iraq war policy has indeed been shocking and awesome, but the shoe is on the other foot. We, the invaders, are in shock that the Hussein regime didn't crumble like a failed wall and awe as well, for the sturdiness and resolution of the defenders.

Invaders?

Defenders?

We were never prepared to be invaders, we Americans. Promised a welcoming committee throwing flowers, we dressed our attack in another color and called it the long-awaited deliverance of freedom and democracy. But it seems no one was waiting. Or, if they are, they're a small and well hidden minority.

It may yet turn, these are early days.

But we had in mind those faded photographs of Yank soldiers in World War II, leaning out of their Jeeps to weeping crowds of liberated French, throwing flowers, kissing the boys from America. But we came to France as liberators in a world gone mad with seven years of Nazi occupation and the Nazis are not in Iraq. There are only Iraqis in Iraq, no matter how closely we liken Saddam to Hitler and it's their country, no matter how we see it with our Western eyes.

Their country.

We've tried this westernizing of the east before. Elevating the Shah of Iran to a stage built by America, he held it for a while, even brought some progress to his country. But the Shah's secret police put the Gestapo to shame. Willing as he was to torture and jail and kill those who opposed him, it was Islam brought him down. We don't have the stomach for torture and prison and killing, or at least we never have before. So I wonder how we plan to operate in this ‘protectorate' position we've carved out for ourselves. The Czech Republic, where I live, was once a ‘protectorate' under the Nazis. It didn't work, the Americans looked the other way at Yalta and Potsdam as Czechoslovakia fell to the communists for forty years.

The Muslim world follows Islam. And Islam characterizes all non-Muslims as infidels. Like it or not, understand it or not, wish it otherwise or not, we are an invading infidel army. If the Iraq war is to be successful, however one defines success, an invading and occupying infidel army has to be vicious, tyrannical and heavy handed.

Isn't that our complaint against Saddam Hussein?

This war was sold to us as ‘regime change' involving one man. Bush claimed we'd not go to war if Saddam fled into exile. How hollow that sounds as troops weary their way toward Baghdad, facing a military and civilian population that fights for a country as well as a religion.

We may well conquer the country. Certainly we have the means and may have the will, although that remains to be seen. But we will never overcome being branded as infidels and like Protestant England, may never come to terms with Catholic Ireland. Those two religions (and both are Christian) have devolved to unending guerilla warfare. What hope is there for Islam and Christianity in this context?

It's hard to say if George Bush is shocked, impossible to detect awe in Don Rumsfedl's face. But America is a different matter and scarcely two weeks into the war the editorials are already questioning what we're doing and why we're doing it.

The Iraqis are not questioning at all. They have a plan to guide them, a fervor to see through the worst of times.

It's called Islam.

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