WEEKLY WARNING WORDS
December 17, 2003 - WEEK 13
A Catch
BY DR. BRUNO J. KEITH
Everyone has his price. Does that dubious wisdom of the ancients also pertain to those we officially declared terrorists? At least in two of "our" cases, history can begin to judge the justice of our three wars which purported to aim at catching 3 terrorists and end their vicious mass-murdering inclinations.
Papa Bush might have tried to talk President Noriega of Panama into surrendering to U.S. after an offer of a few million in cash, a safe chateau with a private chapel in Florida and all the security he needed to be protected from his enemies which his drug transfer from Colombia was certain to cause. If the good hood had not accepted the elder Bush's gracious offer, 5 to 10 million dollars to the ones who turned him in alive or dead, would certainly have done the job without our marching back into the Canal Zone and its suburbs and killing a thousand poor creatures whom the Panamanians also considered surplus humanity and obvious "collateral damage" of the lesser Bush war. We never hear of a full accounting of soldiers killed on both sides of buildings and infrastructure destroyed or damaged and the moral and psychological cost of an avoidable unhappy little war.
Strangely, few famous voices condemned our out-and-out plastering a backwards and negligible military complex with high-technical weapons of mass destruction as the first act of radical diplomacy and the avowed attempt at the life or office of just one little punk who had served Papa Bush so well when he was our CIA chief. Nobody called our man a terrorist because this was but a modern-day application of the Monroe Doctrine of 2 centuries ago.
Saddam Hussein had his marble palaces, his dictatorial powers and quite a few dollar millions of his own sucked from his people's labor without love. To make him quit his shaky paradise and his terrorizing the Shiites, Kurds and more liberal Sunnis, would have cost us from 5 to 10 billion if Bush Junior had thrown in a castle in Florida with a beautiful marble mosque and his choice of a thousand relatives who could then have new names, new lives and the precious American citizenship. Such alternate version of our dollar diplomacy would have been unterroristic, relatively cheap and considered overtaxing the value of human lives and the intrinsic value of unbombed electric, water, phone and oil conduits.
Well enough, our heroic Oiler and National Guard pilot got his man out of his mud hole at a low price according to our military - industrial business complex. Maybe only $ hundred billion, some 200 of our and allied corpses, a few thousand Iraqian dead who preferred to go to their Paradise in a hurry and an undisclosed number of civilians of whom only the child cadavers arouse our pity but not our sympathy.
Who cares how many people are homeless, starved, thirsted to death or gnawed at by man-hungry rats? Now we start counting Saddam Hussein's victims by the hundred thousand, and our own by thousands. A few good billions in that terrorist's banks instead would have been the summit-peak of diplomacy, a relatively cheap business deal.
Osama Bin Laden is the worst of the most pious terrorists and a definite threat to U.S. even beyond his grave. Although he sends thousands of his young disciples to an early after-life, he isn't eager to go there himself. His orthodoxy of born-again religion keeps him from accepting a bribe in the low billions. Since he costs us already a 100 billion in Afghanistan alone, it makes sense to offer him a very secret but very great sacrifice of our taxpayers of at least $100 billion for his charities, 2 castles with 2 Mosques in a country of his choice and a new personality, physical, psychological and social. Why did we destroy a land of ruins, ruinous warlords and the nastiest mujahedeens we trained, guided, supplied with modern weapons and put on the renewed warpath under democratic disguise?
No pious Muslim would betray Osama Bin Laden. Nobody would deliver him to us or dare killing him, unless a prize of 10 billion (or 20) was offered for such act of piety. The few who would want to try for the price of prizes, must become U.S. citizens after name and person changes. What privileges we still give to our worst criminals, can still be offered to our mercenary friends who deliver us from evil for plenty of cash and greater security for lesser terrorists. Our own freedom fighters also don't consider the human cost worthwhile.
Week 14 - Dec 24, 2003 - Happy Holidays