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WEEKLY COLUMN:
JDM vs the WORLD

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FINE PRINT

Wednesday, March 19, 2003:

I remember hearing a while back that Saddam Hussein enjoys American films. I’ll go out on a limb, however, and guess he never watched Rocky III. In case you missed it, too, that’s the one where Rocky Balboa learns the truth about his string of successful title defenses—it turns out his opponents were nothing but has-beens, guys who couldn’t’ve beat him on their best day let alone his worst. In other words, in boxing parlance, the champ got soft.

Then along comes Clubber Lang, a legitimate contender played by Mr. T, who not only says he means business but proves it by beating Balboa within an inch of his fictional life.

Here’s why I think that Saddam skipped this flick: Because if he’d seen it, he would’ve known that Mr. W—much like Mr. T—means business when he says he means business.

He should’ve known that George Bush wouldn’t spare him an inch. He should’ve known that the so-called cowboy president would hold him accountable for transgressions past. After 12 years of getting soft on UN resolutions, he allowed staunch support from Old Europe and the Hollywood Left to convince him of his own safety. The onus is on him, not President Bush. It’s his own fault for falling back on empty gestures.

Even up to the final two days of diplomacy, when he heard Bush’s 48-hour “Loser Leaves Town” challenge and refused to heed the warning, Saddam made one miserable miscalculation after another, until finally making one too many. If he thought Bush would blink, he thought wrong—something he found out the hard way this evening as the Second Gulf War came roaring through Baghdad.

It all began with what’s been hailed as a whimper not a bang. But when a 2000-pound bunker buster lands smack dab in the middle of your war room roundtable, that’s the kind of whimper you’d do well to avoid. So, even though we’ll have to sift through the ashes before we know if this “target of opportunity” was, indeed, the knockout blow, this guy’s out on his feet and ripe for a fall.

And as Rocky Balboa once told Apollo Creed, there ain’t gonna be no rematch.

Actually, after this encounter, there ain’t gonna be no Saddam. For what it’s worth, I pity the poor fool.

Thursday, March 20, 2003:

Hockey fans at a Montreal Canadiens home game today loudly booed the American national anthem, shortly before the New York Islanders skated to a spiteful 6-3 victory. Take that in your croissant and stuff it, Canada.

What is it about the French language that gives people beer muscles, anyway? Does anti-Americanism have a high alcohol content or something? And wasn’t anyone watching when Jacques Chirac stumbled onto the world stage punch-drunk with Security Council power and proceeded to make a mess of himself? Isn’t anyone willing to learn from his lesson?

America haters have a habit of taking bigger swigs than they can swallow. This is fact.

Oh, and speaking of choke artists: Among the 1000+ war protestors arrested in al-Qalifornia today were a bunch of Bay Area buttheads who, get this, purposely puked to show how sick they were of war. Talk about beer muscles, this is the same kind of kindergarten crap that earns you one free night in the slammer when departing the local bar.

If I may give credit where credit is due, however, I must say I admire these people for being equal parts ingenious and immature. It’s no easy task, I assure you. I know because I’ve tried. Save for the vomit, though. That part’s just sick.

But I can’t say I don’t understand where they’re coming from. I mean, if this war ties their tummies in knots, then they must know how the rest of us feel about them. They want the war to stop, and we want them to do the same.

Sure, they’re entitled to disagree with the cause, but, in case they haven’t noticed, the debate is over now. War has begun. What’s a protest going to prove at this point? It’s not like we’re going to stop halfway through.

And I’m not buying any of this “I support the soldiers but not their mission” stuff. Put whatever spin on it you want, but you can’t root for one while jeering the other. On the fields of war, soldiers and missions are one in the same. Life and death, success and failure—it’s all intertwined. If you don’t support how the mission was molded lo these last few months, fine. But the last few months are come and gone, and we’re at war now. You either support America or you don’t.

The protestors would be well-served to put down their picket signs and head back to class. If they’re lucky, maybe they’ll learn something, or even make meaningful lives for themselves. It’d sure beat standing around all day with nothing better to do than regurgitating “No Blood For Oil” and A.N.S.W.E.R.’s other guttural socialist sound bites.

Friday, March 21, 2003:

The sound and the fury of America’s Shock and Awe campaign started today, with enormous explosions tearing through the Baghdad sky. It was pretty serious stuff, but it wasn’t pretty.

Don’t get me wrong: Saddam deserves these bombings. But while it’s nice of us to give him what he asked for, I haven’t got it in me to jump up and down about it. I refuse to become what I hate. I was both shocked and awed by the sight of Palestinian women and children dancing in the streets and passing out candy upon learning the fate of the World Trade Center. I’m not too interested in returning the favor—or party favor, as it were.

While I’m on the subject, though, there’s something I wrote on September 12, 2001, that’s been bothering me for months now. I said “screw their children, screw their women, screw every last one of them,” and I wrote it in direct response to the candy debacle mentioned above. In the heat of a moment unlike any other in my lifetime, I meant it. I even stand by it inasmuch as it felt appropriate at the time. I don’t believe I was right for feeling that way, though. I don’t believe women and children ought to be screwed. I also don’t believe they ought to be raped and murdered, which is why a war that removes Saddam Hussein is just in word and deed.

I went on to write of the 9/11 cheerleaders, “These aren’t people. People don’t cheer at makeshift morgues and mass graves. These are soulless murderers. These are animals. With the ring of a bell they’d salivate and destroy us like the Pavlovian dogs that they are.” From where I stand, to delight in the bombs now falling over Baghdad would make us no better than the scoundrels we’re up against. But again, that doesn’t mean the scoundrels haven’t earned said bombs. You’d better believe they have.

War sucks sometimes.

I’m just thankful I live in a country where the military actually cares about civilian casualties, as opposed to a country where civilian casualties are considered the ultimate goal. Judging by the Iraqis seen swatting a poster of Saddam with their shoes, the women and children of Iraq are apparently thankful for this American ideal, too. 

Saturday, March 22, 2003:

Jacques Chirac promised yesterday that he’d exercise France’s veto power should the US and UK propose a Security Council resolution regarding plans for a post-war Iraq. With all due respect, if President Bush and Prime Minister Blair bring the UN back into the picture, then that’s what they get.

I don’t care how much Chirac says he’s committed to peace. This guy has shown little to no concern for the well-being of average Americans and Iraqis, and that’s not the kind of peace we need.

And, I might add, his allegiance to old buddy Saddam is a big reason why we’re in this war in the first place.

Chirac was so proud of himself last fall, when France played a key role in phrasing Resolution 1441. He had no qualms with “serious consequences” back then, because, like Saddam, he thought it was an idle threat at best. But worst of all, when he realized Bush and Blair were serious about those “serious consequences,” he rounded up Gerhard Schrsder and Vladimir Putin, formed a coalition of the unwilling, and only further encouraged the Butcher of Baghdad to stay his defiant course—all the while stabbing his biggest ally in the Bush administration, Colin Powell, in the back.

Chirac’s message to Saddam was clear: The Americans are all talk and no walk. So, just imagine what Saddam must’ve thought of the French president’s pep talks when we walked in and bombed him on Wednesday. I’ll bet it went something like, “With friends like Chirac, who needs enemies?”

Now he knows how we feel.

Sunday, March 23, 2003:

As if war isn’t already ugly, in and of itself, things seemed to get particularly brutal for coalition forces today.

First, Sergeant Asan Akbar was shot and detained by fellow Americans after rolling grenades into tents where other servicemen slept. One was killed, fifteen others injured. You’d like to believe each and every American on the battlefield is a hero, but this Akbar guy is a world-class jerk. I hope they hang him by his, ahem, soldier.

Second, and even more repulsive, was Al Jazeera’s decision to broadcast a tape showing smiling Iraqis playing with the minds, and thereafter bodies, of captured American combatants.

There’s a bit of a controversy brewing over whether Americans should see the footage of Iraqis torturing our boys. I say we should. It won’t be easy to watch, of course, but we need to see it. We need to see what it looks like when Americans shed blood for the fate of freedom itself. It’s something we haven’t seen much of since the news networks pulled all the 9/11 stuff off the air. We need to see it again. We need to see what it looked like when we overthrew colonial rule, when we beat ourselves up over slavery, and when we saved Europe from itself twice in as many World Wars. We need to see what Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness look like, not in action on the average city sidewalk or by the open door of your local grocer’s freezer, but by the strange light which only death and darkness can provide.

Al Jazeera’s gatekeepers fall back on Guantanamo Bay as cause for airing the POW murders. Likewise, since we gave the Camp X-Ray kids ethnically sensitive meals, and since the Iraqis gave our guys bullets in the head, I say we need to see this footage so we can see exactly what we’re up against. We need to see what the scum of the Earth looks like in living, breathing color.

And we need to see what kind of person fakes surrender just to ambush his captor. Because that’s what the Iraqis on this tape did, you know. But in a weird way, their deception was like a metaphor for Gulf War II.

I mean, how do you think stuff like this happens? The fact that we’re knee-deep in the sands of time fighting on our tiptoes just to please the anti-war movement doesn’t help. It’s great that we’re willing to turn the other cheek sometimes, but, according to my calculations, we’ve just about run out of cheeks to turn. I don’t want to sound like a monster here, but it’s time we abandon political correctness as a military strategy and just start kicking some ass already. We ought to offend as few people in the Middle East as possible, and we ought to kill even fewer, but touchy-feely euphemisms won’t win wars—only B-2 bombers will.

America’s Mr. Nice Guy act has been fun, but the show’s over and there’s nothing left to see here but the truth: America has consistently fought for the freedom of a world chock full of folks unwilling to fight for themselves. How many more nations must we rebuild after wars we’ve got nothing to do with? How many more debts of gratitude must we absolve? How much longer must we pay the price for other people’s problems with our own blood?

For all that America’s given the world, look at what we get in return. We get sniveling, yellowbellied swine like those who maneuvered against us in the Security Council. We get thousands of protestors in cities that couldn’t’ve survived WWII were it not for us. We get the dust of 3,000 dead CEOs and firemen, with an accompanying lecture on how we shouldn’t fight back.

Terrorism, wanton protests, diplomatic hypocrisy—these are the knives that the POWs died trying to remove from America’s spine. Should we tell the world to go whistle? No. Not necessarily. But we shouldn’t let the world twist its knives so hard.

The anti-American attitudes found in places like France, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Kuwait have got to stop. If they want us to defend them the next time pure evil comes to town, then by God they’d better back off when we’re busy defending ourselves. After all that we’ve done to lift up the poor and oppressed, if people want to kick us while we’re down, then we reserve the right to remake this world as we damned well see fit.

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