Analogies
by Keith Shirey
8/8/06


I've been attempting to create analogies that will hopefully illumine the United States' disaster in Iraq.  I came up with three which may be helpful

I Just viewed the first episode of "The Wire" from HBO On Demand.  In it this ghetto youth talks this cop about a dice game played every Friday where this guy from the 'hood, named Snot, waits until there's a lot of money on the ground and then he always grabs it and runs.   The guys in the game chase him, always catch him and beat the crap out of him.  The cop asks him why they let him play in the games in the first place.  The kid responds, "Because this is America, you got to do it." The conversation takes place while the two guys look at the dead body of Snot.

It strikes me that America is like Snot.  It goes into Korea, Viet-Nam, Lebanon (where all of the marines died), Iraq, etc.  Like Snot, it never learns and has the crap beat out of it.   But, dumber than Snot, it keeps pouring money into the (war) games it never wins while taking heavy losses. "Hey, this is America, you got to do it."

If somebody asked America why it never learns from its mistakes, and America had a voice, it probably would answer that "...we'll beat the odds next time, and, besides, this is America and it has to do it, we've got to own the pot."  But if America were not compulsively driven to grab the resources of other countries it wouldn't have the snot kicked out of it by other countries.  Like Snot's addiction to stealing money from the game, America, seems doomed to get beat up because of its addiction to oil.

Another analogy which comes to mind is the relationship of the French composer Henri Babaud to his contemporaries Ravel and Debussy.  The later two are very much alive, but Babaud is practically dead, in terms of their music living on.   Perhaps Rabaud's "Marouf, Cobbler of Cairo" is played once every decade on a classical music station, but all music lovers, for example, know "Debussy's Danses Sacree et Profane."

The problem with Rabaud as a composer was that he was a musical reactionary.  Unlike Ravel and Debussy, he had no interest in new musical ideas; in fact he detested them.  The United States, like Rabid, is dying because it cannot adapt to and accept new ideas in the areas of foreign policy, military strategy, economics, and in the area of alternative energy sources.

Now I'll attempt final analogy.  Are we truly the world's great superpower? While the United States possesses awesome power, it behaves like a lumbering giant. It started with Korea.  Like a stupid giant stumbling in the dark, we fell into a war we could not win.  It was a new kind of war...  a war based upon limited objectives, with limited forces committed to battle piecemeal, in order to inflict such pain on an enemy to force him to the conference table.   But the giant lost.  North Korea now menaces the giant. Vietnam was the same, with the added dimension of fighting a gorilla insurgency.  The pathetic giant lost.

The giant was shaking with excitement has it lumbered into Iraq. "Ah," it thought, "now I can heal my wounded pride and get over my Vietnam syndrome." But the warmth of the glow of the possibility of redemption was soon cooled by the cold realities lurking beneath the Iraqi desert.   Like its adventure in Vietnam, it was battered and bruised.  It lost also in Iraq to another gorilla insurgency.   The occupation is now all over except for the unnecessary cruelty and deaths. What his limited objectives were one cannot say because it has come up with such confusing, contradictory rationales. But the giant that is America has again been given a terrible, bloody nose.

Now the giant is fearful that the North Koreans might make a "dirty bomb." Since it knows they are heavily engaged in exporting missiles and missile technology to middle eastern and sub-continent countries like Iran, Yemen and Pakistan, it is deeply concerned that once they have produced an arsenal of nuclear weapons along with the missiles to deliver them,  they may export such weapons to other rogue nations.  The same is true of Iran.

But since this giant has such a sorry record of diplomacy and has relied on limited warfare with limited, and sometimes unclear, objectives it is fumbling and stumbling worse than ever.  The giant's brain has been spoiled by televised pictures of smart bombs going down elevator shafts, and it expects its wars to be "clean" with no harm to itself.   That is not the way wars work.  Obviously, the giant is so terrible at fighting these kinds of wars, and even ignorant as to why it fights some of them, it needs to find some other way of achieving its goals.  It calls itself "Christian" but does not know the teachings of The Prince Of Peace.

One is reminded of Isaiah's 59th chapter  "The way of peace they know not; and there is no judgment in their goings: they have made them crooked paths: whosoever goeth therein shall not  know peace.

"Therefore is judgment far from us, neither doth justice overtake us: we wait for light, but behold obscurity; for brightness, but we walk in darkness. 

"We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes: we stumble at noon day as in the night; we are in desolate places as dead men.

Few realize how deeply the ignominious withdrawal from Vietnam, the frustrating hopelessness of the war hurt the giant's pride.  If he weren't so damned dumb and clumsy he wouldn't have gotten into a similar mess in Iraq.  But the giant is prone to violence and anti-intellectual, unless it needs "scholars" who also possess a violent temperament.  It also is devoid of historical memory, other cultures and languages, and has little knowledge of geography

But if Vietnam wounded the giant's pride, the shame, if not self-loathing, of his misadventure in Iraq, it is frighteningly clear, may induce a blind rage. The giant, so fat-bellied that can't undergo a MRI scan, traumatized by failure, pained by confusion and uncertainty, unable to think clearly with a pall of failure clouding his brain, enraged by the emotional toll taken by being hated throughout the world, dead to reason and blind to history he may unleash his mighty power and, in the process, stumble down the road to self destruction.