By Howard Bloom
The American public—you and I—have become tired of our war in Iraq. We want out.
We are tired of the expense, tired of the humiliation, tired of the waste of human lives, and tired of fighting a war over weapons of mass destruction that were never there.
Our solution? According to the Syrian Arab News Agency, SANA,"Robert M. Gates, President Bush's nominee to become the next secretary of defense, called for diplomatic engagements with Syria and Iran…." And according to SANA, Gates is by no means alone. SANA says that both Colin Powell and the Baker Commission are also weighing in heavily for "talks" with Iran and Syria—in other words, for turning over Iraq to nations that have declared themselves our enemy.
Most of us seem convinced that Iraq has reached a point of violent degeneration so severe that even Iran and Syria will have enormous difficulty returning the country to calm. Who are we kidding?
The odds are very good that the grisly daily trickle of tortures and murders in Iraq have been staged deliberately to drive us out of Iraq and to let the Iranians in.
More important, in moments of choice like this, it's critical to understand your history. Both Syria and Iran have a proven track record of putting down violence far more severe than the bloodshed in Iraq today. They have both produced peace with a simple tool—a violence far greater than that of the trouble makers. Far, far greater.
Hafez al-Assad, father of Syria's current dictator Bashir Assad, had a violence problem on his hands when he took over the government of Damascus in 1971. Assad was an Alawite—a member of a tiny Shiite minority—in a nation that was 75% Sunni. What's worse, the folks who really wanted to rule Syria were Islamic fundamentalists, Islamic militants, the very sort of people we now call "terrorists."
How did Assad stifle the violence of these opponents? How did he do it so powerfully that he was able to rule for 29 years and hand Syria over to his son, thus establishing Syria's first dynasty in roughly 1,250 years? He sent his military to Hama, the central city of the fundamentalists, leveled the town center, and killed between 10,000 and 20,000 of those who opposed him.
And how did Iran's Islamic fundamentalists in 1979 and the early 1980s deal with the fact that many who had joined them in Revolution of 1979 wanted a secular government, not a reign of mullahs and ayatollahs? According to one Iranian dissident group, IranianVoice.org, they killed "hundreds of thousands" of those who opposed their imposition of an absolute theocracy.
In other words, to stop the killings of 3,700 per month in Iraq—an unacceptable figure—we want to hand Baghdad and its environs over to two regimes whose means of ensuring peace is far greater mass murder...mass murder that follows the advice of Mohammed, a prophet who said that "slaughter" was preferable to "tumult and oppression" (Qur'an, chapter 2, verse 191).
Another bit of history may come in handy here. In 1973, we pulled out of Viet Nam to stop a shedding of blood we could no longer stand. We had lost 57,000 soldiers. The Vietnamese had lost far, far more. But folks like me went to Washington and marched over and over again against the Vietnamese War.
What came of our efforts? The mass killing of between one million and three million Cambodians, a mass murder we refused to cover in our media until it was too late to stop a thing, until the deaths were irreversible. In other words I, as a peace activist, was an accomplice to mass murder.
Is that the kind of peace that any of us—Iraqi or American—want for Iraq?
Mr. Bloom,
I am 20 years old and have been reading everything you've put out. I have been hoping you would write online aswell, I'm an inspired painter and I thank you.
Keep us all updated
Abdu Santiago
Posted by: Abdu Santiago | January 13, 2007 at 08:05 AM