July 09, 2007
Like something out of Greek mythology
Victor Davis Hanson does such a stellar job saying what I’ve been thinking, that I don’t see any point to reinventing the wheel.
Greek mythology often encapsulated an entire culture's worst fears and depravities — and over centuries of story-telling became ever more complex and layered and bizarre.
But what is strange about reading Michael Yon's graphic descriptions from Iraq is that al Qaeda (or its kindred) seems almost in a single generation to be outdoing a millennium of savagery present in Greek history and myth.
You have to go to Thucydides's Mycalessus to find a parallel of wiping out even the animals of a small village.
On Friday, Yon reported that al Qaeda served up a son for dinner to his own family— a barbarism reminiscent of Atreus (hence the "curse" on the House of Atreus) cooking (sans feet and hands) and then serving his twin brother's sons to their unsuspecting father Thyestes. So Yon reports a revolting modern-day Thysestean feast:
The official reported that on a couple of occasions in Baqubah, al Qaeda invited to lunch families they wanted to convert to their way of thinking. In each instance, the family had a boy, he said, who was about 11-years-old.
As [U.S. Army] LT David Wallach interpreted the man's words, I saw Wallach go blank and silent. He stopped interpreting for a moment.
I asked Wallach, "What did he say?"
Wallach said that at these luncheons, the families were sat down to eat. And then their boy was brought in with his mouth stuffed. The boy had been baked. Al Qaeda served the boy to his family.
What is striking about all this savagery—whether with the filmed beheadings of Westerners in Iraq to the recent flaming Johnny Storm human torch at Glasgow, screaming epithets as he sought to engulf bystanders and ignite his canisters — is the absolute silence of the West, either distracted by Paris and i-Phones or suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome and obsessed with Guantanamo.
It is hard to recall an enemy so savage and yet one so largely ignored by rich affluent and distracted elites as the radical jihadists, as we have to evoke everything from mythology to comic books to find analogies to their extra-human viciousness.
For a self-congratulatory culture issuing moral lectures on everything from global warming to the dangers of smoking, the silence of the West toward the primordial horror from Gaza to Anbar is, well, horrific in its own way as well...
The ability of anti-war (and anti-American) Americans to ignore the brutality of our enemies – while simultaneously finding innumerable ways to blame us for their savage ways – is astonishing.
Feeding a family their own son? Barbarism and cruelty rivaling anything in history or mythology is happening right now, and the only sane answer is implacable, irresistible force; breaking the spirit of the enemy with the steel of our men’s weapons, no surrender, only a pig fat-coated grave. These are the unlawful combatants the ACLU and its fellow travelers would grant full access to the U.S. courts; they deserve only a swift battlefield execution, a more merciful end than the one they gave the inhabitants of the Iraqi village decimated by Al Queda – and ignored by the MSM.
Exhibit A of the press' failure is the continuing resistance of said MSM to follow-up on Michael Yon’s reporting (cited above); he’s this century’s Ernie Pyle, and nobody is providing better –- hell, even comparable –- coverage of the fighting in Iraq, to their everlasting shame.
You have a duty as an American voter to try and better understand facts on the ground; reading Yon’s dispatches is a good start.
Posted by Mike Lief at July 9, 2007 11:51 PM
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Comments
Barbarism and cruelty? Of course it is, just like the wilds of the jungle where insects and beasts of all sorts compete for space, power and food. We cannot be everyone's savior or big brother and we shouldn't. These savages have killed one another for more than 1,000 years. We wont change anything and haven't. When we leave Iraq and Afghan we will leave a killing field for the media to write about.
Posted by: Sven at July 11, 2007 08:46 AM
I think you have to separate the anti-war leftists from pragmatists who believe that our current strategy in Iraq has no chance of eliminating this type of barbarism.
Given the Geneva convention and the rules of war that we accept and place upon our troops, our troops have no prospect of eliminating the villainous element that can drop its weaponry and blend back into city streets. The United States is not Rome. Our military can defeat another army in the field or liberate a society from a foreign force. Our military is not designed, however, to fight a local insurgency that is largely accepted by a significant percentage of the populace. We are attempting to instill democratic government in a society that is stoutly Islamic. There is no principle of the separation of church and state in Islamic or sharia law.
Adopt the tactics used by Roman and European armies of conquest and success is possible. Will we do this? Certainly not.
I'm not sure how success would even be defined in Iraq. If we achieve some level of a functioning democracy, I am assuming that the butchers described by Yon would still be living and breathing and walking the streets.
Unconstrained by the rules of war, insurgents are free to kill doctors, intellectuals, political leaders and anyone else that fails to share their vision of an Islamist, Sunni, Shiite or anti-Western state. We have selected a "win the hearts and mind" strategy that is simply unable to compete against the immediacy and certainty of the violent deaths dealt out by insurgents.
The U.S. may have to accept that the reason that Iraqi government officials apathetically go on vacation while our troops die fighting in their streets, has much to do with the fact that they do not share our vision for their society. Shiites have no burning desire to co-exist with Sunnis, Sunnis have no burning desire to co-exist with Shiities, Kurds care little for Shiites or Sunnis and so on and so forth.
The writing is on the wall that our neo-con leaders may have massively miscalculated in their assessment of what would happen after Hussein was removed from power.
Our troops have won the undying gratitude of the American populace. Our leaders however, need to candidly assess the situation on the ground and conform to reality. However, evil Hussein was, he did provide artificial stability in Iraq. Now that he is gone, we may have to allow Iraq to reach it's natural state of equilibrium after the free for all and blood letting runs its course.
As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for. The push for Democracy in Gaza brought us Hamas. In Iraq it has delivered sectarian anarchy.
Posted by: Bill H. at July 15, 2007 11:40 PM