Jon Stewart: The Middle East is getting out of hand. What should America do?
Bassem Youssef, Egyptian comedian and satirist: Well, for example... nothinga. The Daily Show, February 9, 2015.
Since real footage of our wars is hard to come by today and we've fallen asleep to their Hollywood simulations in which we look good, I wonder what Americans would say if they saw unedited footage of US drone attacks, for example at one of the many weddings or funerals we've seen misjudged as a gathering of terrorists and reduced them to "trodden bugs", as those who launch our missiles call them. The idea that we'll be safer if we wipe out a bunch of innocent worlds with a few bad guys hiding from the face of the earth and that it won't increase the number of our enemies is insane, as is the belief that the horrific atrocities of others become acceptable when carried out by our side.
All this should be clear to our leaders in Washington, but apparently it is not. President Obama has submitted his request to Congress for a new three-year authorization of the war against ISIS, which would continue airstrikes and "limited" combat operations, despite the failure of our previous attempts in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. It may make our wars legal, but no less stupid.
What Česlav Miloš said about the last century already applies to this one: "Woe to him who thinks he will be saved by not participating in the tragedy." Millions of Americans apparently still think so, even after 11/XNUMX and all the wars we've fought since and are still fighting. Television footage and photographs do not convey the true extent of the destruction and death that hit New York that day. A person should have stood under the twin towers at least once to understand their incredible height and size. I saw them live, but it took me months to really understand what happened. Even when the second plane hit the towers, it never occurred to me that they might collapse. When they collapsed, I couldn't believe my eyes. People said afterwards that everything was like a movie. We left the darkness of the movie theater, shook ourselves with the chills, and returned to our lives. I was hoping that the Americans finally understood what it was like to be bombed.
I have always been amazed at how one warring party ignores the killing of innocents by the other. People who wouldn't even step on an ant don't care what horrors are done to others in their name. This heartless attitude becomes even more offensive when you think of those terrified people in New York fleeing through smoke and fire from the collapsing towers. In the days after the attack, our commentators and politicians demanded swift and brutal retaliation, without too much concern about who was guilty and who was innocent. In other words, let's bomb the bastards regardless of who gets killed - and whether one day the bombed might want revenge.
After 11/11, it was said that nothing would ever be the same in America, and that turned out to be true. What has not changed is our conviction that we are called to eradicate all evil in the world. We would rather wait for the Taliban to shave their beards and allow their wives and daughters to wear miniskirts than for our leaders to stop being militant addicts. Thus, no one in Washington cares about the suffering we have caused to societies and countries in the Middle East and elsewhere, nor does anyone think about the causes of hatred and desire for revenge against us in the Muslim world. In our version of history, the tragedy of September 2001, XNUMX, when the hijackers took so many people to their deaths, happened because they despised our values and freedoms, while the tragedies we cause in other countries are just the collateral damage of our sincere desire to let's free them. It is fortunate that we Americans do not notice what we do to others; otherwise we would risk losing the precious image of ourselves as exceptionally moral and innocent people, and seeing ourselves as disgusting hypocrites.
I remember that in the days after 11/2003, I found improvised posters about the missing people on the flags, telephone booths and walls of New York, with a photo, a brief description and the additional information that Henry (or Mary) was last seen on the first floor and, what was even more touching - if that's possible - I met distraught women with photographs of their missing husbands and sons stopping passers-by and asking them if they had seen them. The stench of carnage in the air and so many agitated people circling reminded me of the streets of Belgrade that looked and smelled like that after the Allied bombing in World War II. The most horrible thing about killing innocent people is that they never stop. Watching our airstrikes on Baghdad in XNUMX, I knew that they would probably not kill Saddam and his generals, but the unfortunate
Iraqis who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the bombs started falling.
Forget the trillions of dollars we've already spent on these wars, forget the thousands of dead and maimed Americans, forget the many more dead and tens of millions displaced from countries we needlessly destroyed and whose theological and territorial disputes we should not have entered into - let's see if this whether our bombs and our army will succeed and whether we will finally be welcomed as liberators throughout the Middle East. Let your dreams go. But because our corrupt political class loves war, because war fills their coffers with money and makes them feel strong and righteous - there will be more counterproductive wars, even though sooner or later it will drag us down.
(The New York Review of Books; Peščanik.net; translated by: Z. TRKLJA)
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