9/11 Twenty Year Anniversary

 I had planned on offering a follow-up to my prior blog on abortion, when 9/11/2021 rolled by.  Looking from my balcony at night, I noticed a large searchlight going directly up to the sky, from the direction of DC.  It turns out that was the local area’s tribute spotlight honoring the Pentagon crash.

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I was working as an attorney for a sole practitioner (law firm with only one owner, no partners) whose office was across Route 123 from the Fairfax County (Virginia) court complex.  The Boss himself was down in Richmond for a bar meeting, so it was just me and one of the secretaries.   Sometime in the morning, the secretary notified me that “a plane hit the World Trade Center” (North Tower, 8:46 a.m. EST) and set up the firm’s small TV set, with rabbit ears, to watch the events unfold.  Sure enough, another plane hit the second tower (South Tower, 9:03 a.m.), a third plane hit the Pentagon (9:37 a.m., west side of the building), and a fourth plane crashed somewhere in rural Pennsylvania (10:03 a.m.) once the passengers figured out what was going on and charged the cockpit to take down the hijackers, at the cost of their own lives.

Before the second tower was hit, one of the news reporters remarked that “maybe” [the first] collision was an accident.  But you could see the plane flying directly AT the tower – obviously the pilot was deliberately targeting the tower itself.  When the second tower was hit, any lingering doubts should have been over.

What was really bizarre was watching the towers themselves actually collapse.  Before that point it was more along the lines of, “well, someone hit the building and put it on fire.”  The collapses really were the nail in the coffin.  Those collapses not only doomed the people still inside the buildings, but also the rescue crews who had been trying to save the buildings and the people inside.  The final death toll for all four attacks comes in to just under 3,000. 

Back in summer 1988 we visited NYC, and we got to visit the World Trade Center.  I found it underwhelming, compared to the deck at the Empire State Building (eighty sixth and one hundred and second floors), as the windows are back from the edge of the building.  While I was disappointed that the rebuilt WTC building was a single one instead of a pair, at least its observation deck is much better.

Living in Northern Virginia, Rosslyn to be exact, I had driven past the Pentagon too many times to count, most of them being past the face of the Pentagon (1 out of 5) which was struck on that day.  For awhile thereafter, the hole was there, but has now long since been patched up.

The major impact, so to speak, of 9/11 was to pull EVERYONE together.   Here was a terrorist act so brutal and compelling, our own generation’s Pearl Harbor, that even cynical liberal Democrats – at least most of them – were bludgeoned into sincere patriotism.  When it came to chasing down Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, we were united.  For that matter, foreigners who were inclined to distrust us and look down on us, now took pity on us and we had effectively a blank check to seek revenge.  We liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban, tracked down and killed Osama Bin Laden (on Barack Obama’s watch) and soon after took Iraq away from Saddam Hussein.

Back home, Bush Jr. pushed through the Patriot Act and set up the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba to make sure Harold and Kumar weren’t planning any attacks.  Part of the danger of the attacks was goading us into becoming a police state – which we avoided – and overstepping our mandate, which we arguably did in Iraq. 

I don’t recall being any MORE or LESS upset by 9/11 than anyone else.  My hearing was still substandard, so volunteering for military service was no more possible than it was in 1986 when I graduated from high school and could not get into ROTC – or the National Guard.  I had no qualms or dispute about the Afghanistan operation, nor the subsequent Iraqi operation.  I suppose “liberation” still rings truer than “invasion” because notwithstanding our subsequent ball-dropping on nation-building in both countries, we were liberating each from a vile regime: the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq.  Of course, the then-threatened weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein supposedly had never materialized, and many would argue that we knew they did not exist when we invaded.  “Donald Rumsfeld” is a name I hear mentioned in that context. 

Did we know it would happen and let it occur?  Well, there were stories that the FBI received reports that the 19 flyers were learning to take off but not land the planes.  I don’t believe anyone has proved, conclusively, that the administration had clear and convincing evidence that 4 jets would be hijacked and crashed into major targets.  These were innovative, unprecedented attacks.  The 1993 WTC bombing may have lulled us into a false sense of security, writing off the terrorists as more inspired than competent.  But a slew of other bombings overseas should have put us on notice that not all terrorists were buffoons.  Bringing back Pearl Harbor, many accused FDR of sitting on evidence of the attack to allow it to go through, but the actual intelligence we had was only that the Japanese were up to something- the fleet maintained radio silence on its way to Hawaii and we had no actual warning of the attack – until it actually occurred.  Fortunately for us, our four carriers were out at sea and escaped the attack. 

The bigger picture is this:  when we ARE attacked, and are legitimately the victim of the attack, how do we respond?   After Pearl Harbor we fought back against the Japanese.  Oddly, Nazi Germany declared war on US, not the other way around.  Nonetheless, we managed to defeat both Axis countries and fight wars on both fronts simultaneously. 

With our recent withdrawal from Afghanistan, obviously the question is: did we waste our time there?  I think the real answer is not that it was a mistake to go in there to begin with, rather the follow-through was botched.  A recent article profiling various US troops who served there from 2001 to the present shows an inconsistent approach to destroying the Taliban.  “Clear and hold” is supposedly the optimal strategy, but that ultimately means you need to surround the enemy completely.  It seems the Pakistani border was too porous to allow us to close it off completely, meaning the Taliban could hide there until we lost patience and left.  Sadly, the Pakistanis themselves were complicit in harboring the Taliban.  How much we could actually accomplish without their full cooperation is a big question.  If anyone has the answer, by all means let me know.   

The biggest success story at shutting down an insurgency was Malaysia, but there the Brits had the ability to shut off the entire country and the rebels were ethnic Chinese, not Malayans.  In Vietnam we did not have the prerogative to shut down Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam up to the Chinese border.  In Iraq, we deposed Saddam but had no plan on what would replace his regime.  Bottom line is, FOLLOW THROUGH.  Do not exceed the moral authority we earned when those Towers collapsed. 

Finally, here’s a discussion of KSM, man behind 9/11.  Unfortunately it seems the FBI and CIA did NOT coordinate effectively.  My impression is that KSM decided to taint his confession to whatever he was actually responsible for by taking credit for many other things he probably had nothing to do with.    

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confessed to being the 9/11 mastermind. 20 years later, he’s still awaiting trial (yahoo.com)

Nine Eleven

 

Wow, the date itself gave me the topic!  How convenient.

At the time I was working as an attorney for an older, experienced sole practitioner attorney in Fairfax, Virginia, hereinafter “Bill”.   Bill was down in Richmond that day for a bar meeting.  One of the secretaries came in my office and told me, “a plane hit the World Trade Center”.  [North Tower, 8:46 a.m. EST]  A reporter suggested this might be an accident, but the footage showed the plane flying directly at the tower.  Soon enough, the second plane hit the second tower [South Tower, 9:03 a.m. EST], the third plane hit the Pentagon [9:37 a.m.], and the fourth plane crashed in western Pennsylvania [10:03 a.m.], brought down by the passengers themselves storming the cockpit, one passenger calling his wife to advise her the circumstances and to say goodbye to her.

My girlfriend at the time, Leila, lived in Pentagon City and worked in Rosslyn, a commute which took her past that face of the Pentagon, but she was at the office when the plane hit. 

I think I speak for everyone who remembers that day that we were ALL angry and upset.   This galvanized everyone, even Democrats who didn’t care much for President George W. Bush.   When he decided that we would liberate Afghanistan from the Taliban and track down Osama Bin Laden, he had pretty much unanimous support.   That’s why I’m puzzled by some people on the Book of Faces alleging protests in support of the people responsible for 9/11.

Where I live, Skyline at Bailey’s Crossroads, has a large segment of Muslims.  Whether they’re Sunni or Shi’ite, I don’t know.  None of them have given me any problems.  Nationwide, Muslims are 1% of the US population, 3 million out of 330 million.   The Fort Hood guy and the Boston Marathon bombers were Muslim, but we have plenty of homegrown, non-Muslim screwups blowing things up and shooting people. 

The liberation of Afghanistan went fairly smoothly (October 7 to December 7, 2001), but the Taliban simply retreated to the hills, and in parts of neighboring Pakistan, and continue to cause problems – helped by bounties from their erstwhile opponents the Russians.  Osama Bin Laden himself was taken out in 2011 by US forces – under Barack Obama’s administration. 

Two years later, upon GWB’s insistence (later disproven) that Saddam Hussein and his regime were involved in the 9/11 attacks, we invaded/liberated Iraq.   There, the much-vaunted Republican Guards vanished into the hills and we took the country fairly quickly – March 1 to May 1, 2003.  Then a protracted guerilla war erupted, presumably those Republican Guards taking to the hills instead of facing us directly.  Saddam Hussein himself was captured in December 2003, hiding in a bunker in the ground. 

Aftermath.  As noted, 9/11 certainly unified the country behind GWB and public support for the liberation of Afghanistan was fairly widespread, if not unanimous.   Saddam Hussein’s connection with 9/11 was somewhat more tenuous.  Ironically, one of the justifications for the invasion, that Saddam had “weapons of mass destruction”, later turned out to be bogus, and Saddam’s own generals, when our invasion began, asked him to deploy these alleged weapons – only to be told by him his hints of having them were merely a bluff to prevent the US from invading.  D’oh!   I do recall that support for the Iraq invasion was far less widespread than the previous operation in Afghanistan.  Partly this was due to tempers calming down over the two year period between 9/11/2001 and 2003, and partly was a suspicion that GWB was overplaying his hand on the matter.  Much of the goodwill we earned on 9/11 was squandered by our invasion of Iraq.  Having said that, I’m not seeing any domestic sympathy or support for the Taliban in 2020 or any time earlier – or for Al-Qaeda, for that matter.

Conspiracy.  Yeah, I zone out on the conspiracies that “9/11 was an inside job”, “jet fuel can’t possibly melt the internal structure of the WTC tower”, etc.  I put those in the same category as “the Civil War was about states’ rights” for credibility.  Getting back to that Suicide Pact book I’m reading, I’ve yet to reach Posner’s analysis of the Patriot Act; if 9/11 was orchestrated by the CIA or US forces as an excuse to impose a form of fascism on us, ostensibly to fight terrorism, we’d see something like a fascist regime in our country.  As yet, that hasn’t happened, but much of what Posner talks about concerns holding alleged terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  Circa 2020 the main fascists are the President and his “he’s an asshole who gets things done” supporters who believe both the President and the police to be infallible.  Anyhow.

Gilgamesh

I recently finished reading the Epic of Gilgamesh, as “interpreted” by Stephen Mitchell (Gilgamesh, A New English Version).  Mitchell cannot read the cuneiform, Sumerian, or Babylonian language and did not have access to the original tablets, so what he did was simply reinterpret what prior authors had done, resummarizing it in a more coherent and sensible fashion than the prior attempts.  The initial work, however, was most of the heavy lifting: the original tablets had been lost for thousands of years and only found in the 1800s by various archeologists digging around in what we now know of as Iraq.  The original scholars had to decipher a dead language in a unique alphabet with no one around to help them out.  Eventually they put the pieces of the puzzle together and figured out what we could consider the “epic” of Gilgamesh, a fictional hero dating back 5,000 years ago or more.  Parts of it, concerning a great flood, coincide with parts of the Old Testament of the Bible.

 Gilgamesh was the ruler of Uruk, a large city southeast of Babylon and northwest of Ur.  The cities of this area and of modern Iraq follow the so-called “fertile crescent” of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.   

 “It’s Good to Be The King”.  Apparently Gilgamesh’s leadership style was heavy handed and unpopular.  Among the most objectionable of his policies was assertion of the right to take the virginity of new brides.  As we know, it was only relatively recently that even modern, industrial Western societies abandoned the presumption of virginity at marriage.  Presumably this was the case in Iraq 5,000 years ago.  Gilgamesh demanded – and received – the prerogative to be first to bed the bride; the groom had to wait patiently while the King nailed his wife.

  I’ve never been married, but from what I can tell, grooms are as likely to be nervous on their wedding nights as brides.  Any groom less than 100% confident in his abilities as a lover will probably appreciate a virgin bride who has no basis for unfavorable comparison.  This is completely negated by having your new bride get nailed by none other than the Hero King Stud, Gilgamesh himself.  How can you follow that?  So I suspect it was the grooms of Uruk who were more upset with this policy than the brides.

 The unhappy citizens of Uruk pleaded with the gods to send them some relief from this terrible man upsetting their wedding plans.  The gods sent a somewhat unfinished product, Enkidu. 

Enkidu is described as a virtual duplicate of Gilgamesh, though a bit shorter.  He starts off as a wild man living in the wilderness, running around with animals, naked, unclothed, “raised by wolves” so to speak.  In this condition he’s not particularly suited to his job of fixing the Uruk problem.

 Ishtar & Shamhat.  The temple of Ishtar was run on a very interesting basis.  The priestesses, far from being celibate nuns, were in fact sacred prostitutes who supported the cult by sleeping with the congregation or the general public for a fee.  Presumably this was considerably more effective (and popular) than bake sales or raffles.  One of the priestesses, Shamhat (there’s a feminine name) is assigned the task of civilizing Enkidu.

 She approaches Enkidu, strips naked, and begins masturbating in front of him.  This gets his full attention, and he proceeds to “get the idea” for the next full week.  After this marathon lovemaking session (apparently making up for 20-something years of abstinence in the wild) Shamhat shaves him, dresses him in elegant clothing, and feeds him “people food” (including a good amount of beer, which he likes).  At this point he is “civilized” and the animals no longer recognize him as their buddy – similar to the bachelor hooking up and alienating all his single buddies. 

Bromance.  Enkidu enters Uruk, and right away there is trouble.  Sure enough, he and Gilgamesh fight, with destruction following around them – I’m imagining that commercial where the robots fight and smash up the guy’s apartment while he casually and indifferently moves from room to room and cooks and eats his bachelor food.  Finally Gilgamesh prevails, but only after Enkidu had put up a big fight.  They emerge from the ruckus as best friends…maybe a bit more than that (Mitchell’s footnotes observe that the tablets imply a romantic relationship exists between the pair).

 Humbaba.  For some reason Gilgamesh gets it into his head to go west to the forests of Lebanon to defeat a mighty volcano monster called Humbaba.  The elders of Uruk, and Enkidu, think this is a really bad idea and try to dissuade him, with no success.  He goes off west, and persuades Enkidu to follow along.  Having done so, now he starts having second thoughts – a series of terrifying nightmares – and it’s up to Enkidu to change his mind and interpret the dreams with a very counterintuitive and implausible but positive spin (maybe Enkidu should have been a lawyer). 

 They meet Humbaba, who is just as fearsome and powerful as they feared, but somehow they are able to reduce him to begging for mercy.  While Gilgamesh is inclined to spare his life, Enkidu persuades him to finish off Humbaba.  This earns him a curse from the gods, whose “plan” apparently was for Gilgamesh to defeat, but not kill, Humbaba.  Enkidu comes down with a nasty, mysterious illness which strikes him down in the prime of life.  This stuns and demoralizes Gilgamesh (see below).

 Ishtar & the Bull.  When they return to Uruk, the love & war goddess herself, Ishtar, courts Gilgamesh.  But Gilgamesh is not impressed, and he rebuffs her advances with zero tact or discretion.  Basically his argument is: every lover you take, you eventually grow tired of and dispose of in a particularly nasty fashion.  You sent one of your ex-BF’s to Hell.  Thanks, but I’m not interested in winding up like they did.  Incensed, as you can imagine, Ishtar gets the gods to send her a Bull to fight Gilgamesh to punish him for his arrogance, but Gilgamesh kills the Bull and laughs in her face. 

 Enkidu Dies.  As noted, Enkidu suffers a disease which weakens and kills him; despite having faced down Humbaba and the Bull, Gilgamesh is powerless to save his friend from this threat, and loses him.  When his prayers and grief fail to save Enkidu or resurrect his cold, inert, lifeless body, Gilgamesh soon realizes the same fate ultimately awaits him someday.  He becomes obsessed with learning the secret to immortality.

 Upnaptishim.  Gilgamesh seeks out the sole mortal to have gained immortality, Upnaptishim.  Here is the Bible angle:  Upnaptishim is the epic’s equivalent of Noah, who survived a mighty flood by building a huge ark and filling it with pairs of animals.  Ultimately this man tells Gilgamesh, “I’m sorry, but one day you will die.  Everyone dies.  It’s part of life.  I can’t fix that or give you immortality, no one can.  All I can tell you is to enjoy life as much as you can, while you can.”  End of story.

Iran-Iraq War

More obscure wars, but this one is a bit more recent – within the lifetime of anyone likely to read my blogs.  Yet again I take inspiration from Osprey, this time its Essential Histories volume entitled The Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988 by Efraim Karsh.

 Background.  Up until the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, Iran and Iraq had an uneasy peace; they were rivals but neither attempted to invade the other, and they had understandings (e.g. the 1975 Algiers Agreement) about what would otherwise be contested territory to the south.   In particular, Iraq’s Shatt-al-Arab waterway was its sole access to the Persian Gulf.  Iraq was also nervous about Iranian support for a growing Kurdish insurgency, especially since much of Iraq’s oil producing areas were in the Kurdish part of the country. 

 February 1979.  Islamic hotheads took power in Iran – and took hostages from the US Embassy, which pissed us off and embarrassed Carter, doing much to ensure Reagan’s election in November 1980.  In July 1979, Saddam Hussein took power in Iraq.  Things started getting ugly, and both sides decided they really didn’t like each other.

 September 23, 1980.  Iraq invaded Iran and captured (from north to south along the border) Qasr-e-Shirin, Mehran, Musian, Susangerd, Khorramshahr, Aabadan, and Fao – and took full control of the Shatt-al-Arab.  All this territory was right across the border and less than 100 miles into Iran.  In December, Saddam Hussein announced that he would not advance further but simply keep the modest territory gained.  

 Late 1981, early 1982.  Iranian offensives drove Iraqi forces off Iranian soil, liberating Bostan, Susangerd, and Korramshahr, and invaded Iraq.  Iran now had the upper hand. 

 From 1983-86 Iran pursued several more offensives which captured modest amounts of Iraqi territory in the north (east of Kirkuk), center (west of Mehran), and south (near Basra).  In 1985 Operation Badr succeeded at capturing part of the Baghdad-Basra highway.  As with Saddam’s earlier achievements, Iran’s incursion into Iraqi territory was modest.

 1988. Iraqi forces, now better supplied, drove Iranians from Iraqi territory.  August – ceasefire.

 Supplies.  Iran inherited the Shah’s military, which had been US-supplied.  Ironically, the Israelis (!!!) helped keep them stocked in spare parts (e.g. F-16 tires), part of which was the Iran-Contra deal.  The Israelis considered Saddam Hussein to be the bigger threat than Iran and were happy to help the Iranians kill off Iraqis.  They even went so far as to bomb an Iraqi nuclear reactor in June 1981.  Libya, Syria, North Korea, China, Taiwan (they agreed on one thing!), Argentina, South Africa, Pakistan, and even Switzerland supplied Iran.

            For its part, Iraq was mainly supplied with Warsaw Pact equipment.  While the USSR had initially imposed an arms embargo on Iraq, after the Iranians started winning they changed their minds and opened the spigot:  200 T-55 and T-72 tanks, and SA-6 surface-to-air missiles, followed by T-72 tanks, Scud missiles (remember those?) and MiG-21, -23, and -29 fighters.  The French also supplied Saddam heavily with its own arsenal of weapons – on credit, up to $5 billion by 1986; little wonder the French had a vested interest in seeing Saddam remain in power in 2003.  Egypt, Spain, Italy, Britain, and Brazil also supplied Iraq with weapons. 

            Of course, few forget the US’ support for Saddam at this time, though this took the form of agricultural credits.  For the US, the memories of the Iran hostage situation were firm in our memory, and while no one really liked Saddam, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, so our hatred for the Iranians fueled our support for Saddam.

 Pasdaran.  This was Iran’s paramilitary militia, mostly infantry with very little heavy weapons support and little or no armor.  Iran subscribed to the “human wave of crazy fanatics” school of warfare which Iraq countered with the “Russian tanks and chemical weapons” school of warfare.  Of the two, the latter proved to be much more effective in the long run.  Iran’s military successes seemed to depend on the extent to which it relied on the Pasdaran or conventional armies to get its point across, generally more successful with the latter than the former.

 Chemical Weapons.  The Iraqis earned the dubious distinction of being the most prominent and infamous (though not exclusive) power to use poison gas since…World War I.  Mustard gas and nerve gases were used against Iranians and Kurds, both groups which were ill-prepared to resist chemical attacks.

 War of the Cities.  Each side had air forces and a civilian population highly vulnerable to air attack.  Baghdad and Tehran both suffered heavily in the war.  Each side was also heavily dependent on oil revenue (“it’s the oil, stupid”) and targeted each other’s facilities as a means of inflicting economic damage on each other.

 Persepolis.  This is the only movie I’ve seen which addresses this war.  It’s an animated film about a young Iranian girl, Marjane Satrap, who grew up in Iran during the war.  She likes Iron Maiden and prefers Western culture, spent time in Europe during part of the war, but was back in Iran during some of the air raids on Tehran.  She was not a big fan of the theocracy; the movie also describes some of the fanaticism which occurred in Iran.

PPSH-41

I’ve never had the pleasure of firing this gun, or even holding one in real life, but it sure is impressive. This is the PPSh-41, the top submachine gun of the Red Army during WWII. It fired a 7.62x25mm pistol round at 900 rounds per minute. Although a 35 round box magazine was available, and was more reliable, the ubiquitous 71 round drum magazine, copied from the Finnish Suomi submachine gun, was considerably more common and popular. Approximately 6 million of them were produced during WWII, and entire units of the Red Army were equipped with it. It was the ideal weapon for close-quarters street fighting in Stalingrad, though once the distances opened up, the more advanced German Stg-44 assault rifle became more advantageous – provided there were enough Germans left alive to fire them. With a capacity advantage of more than 2 to 1 against the the Germans’ MP40 (with its 32 round box magazine), the PPSh-41 gave the already more numerous Red Army soldiers a definite edge. For their part, the Germans adapted the PPSh-41 to 9mm, and even attempted a double-stack magazine setup for the MP40, which worked as poorly as you can imagine.

After WWII, the PPSh-41 was supplied to North Koreans, Chinese, and other communist countries. Pictures circulate of rebels in Hungary in 1956 using them, and early in the Vietnam War, before the AK-47 became the standard weapon of the VC and NVA, it was used by those forces.

Remarkably, long after the AK-47 has captured our attention – thanks to the PLO and countless other terrorist groups adopting it as their signature weapon – the PPSh-41 made a comeback, in the most unlikely context. US forces in Iraq, involved in street fighting, have adopted the PPSh-41 and have been using it there - even fitting high-tech laser aiming systems obviously not available to the Red Army in WWII. Only the Danish Madsen machine gun has more staying power over the years – from 1903 to at last being retired by the military police of the state of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, as late as 2008.

Joyeux Noel

The true story of the “Christmas truce” of 1914 in WWI. On Christmas Eve, somewhere on the trench lines where a Scottish unit was stationed next to a French unit, peace broke out between the two sides. A German opera singer and his fiance (also an opera singer) sang for both sides; the troops came out and shared stories, alcoholic beverages, and pictures; and on Christmas Day they buried their dead and played some football. They could walk around No Man’s Land without worrying about shooting each other. Needless to say, the top brass considered all this “treason” and forbid this from ever happening again. Sure enough, it was GOOD for morale and BAD for the war. How can you shoot at men you’ve talked to in person just hours before? How can you go on when you can see how stupid the war is? When you see you have more in common with the poor soldiers on the other side than with the idiots running the war on your own? And imagine if this “truce” had occurred all the way up and down the trench line, from Switzerland to the English Channel. The war would have been over immediately; they would have faced a wholesale mutiny on all sides, German, French and British. It doesn’t take too much to imagine the soldiers telling the officers, “fuck you, if you and the top brass want a war, you can fight it yourselves!”

Clearly, soldiers who took enemy trenches could see that their foes lived in as much misery and filth as they did. Watching your own soldiers get wiped out by “friendly fire” drove home how much damage they were doing to each other. For the life of them, the soldiers could not grasp what the war was all about. Even had they been astute enough to have some idea of the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo, that still wouldn’t explain why Germans, French and British were slaughtering each other in France. Why not just let the Austrians and Serbs murder each other – assuming the Archduke’s life was worth even that?

In “All Quiet on the Western Front”, the German soldiers casually speculate on the reason for the war. Although (with a few exceptions) they’re fairly bright soldiers, they still come up with blanks. Even the dull soldier has the common sense to realize, “I’ve never even MET an Englishman until I fought them in the trenches, and I dare say many of them would say the same about us.” Time and time again the soldiers realize, “I have no particular beef, gripe, complaint, or grudge against the opposing side, either as an aggregate country or against enemy soldiers in particular.” How can they? They’ve never even met each other.

WWII was a bit different. There, suddenly, they had ideology to motivate them – ideological motivations which were mostly absent during WWI. The Germans were motivated by regular nationalism (most Wehrmacht personnel), National Socialism (Waffen SS), and anti-bolshevism (all of them); add to this the remarkable multi-national nature of the Waffen SS, somehow able to recruit French, Belgians, Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, etc. (former enemies!) to fight against the Russians – hell, they got RUSSIANS to fight the Russians. Again, testimony to how brutal and unpopular Stalin and the Soviet government was that there was no shortage of not only Ukrainians and other ethnic groups, but even Russians, willing to fight for the Nazis against the Red Army. For their part, the Russians were motivated by their own nationalism (for most soldiers of the Red Army) and communism (for the minority). The Allies were motivated by abstract notions of freedom and liberty; and the moral indignation became even fiercer once US troops began liberating concentration camps and discovering what the Germans were really up to all this time. The Japanese sincerely believed in their own country’s destiny to rule Asia and defeat the caucasian US/European powers. Of course, WWII was also a dynamic war, with no stalemates on any front. Men died, but in the course of attacking and defending, not this business of thousands dead for a few inches of strategically inconsequential mud. The front moved too fast for soldiers to worry too much about how their enemies were dealing with it.

And in Iraq today there is no connection between the US troops and the insurgents they fight against. The insurgents don’t see us as normal human beings trying to make Iraq a better place, we’re just occupiers. And our troops aren’t inclined to view the insurgents as normal human beings trying to liberate their own country, they’re just a bunch of sick fucks (which they are). The cultural and religious differences are too much between the sides to permit the kind of fraternization which occurred in No Man’s Land on Christmas Day in 1914, to occur in Iraq today.

Consider this, too: in the US, we have Protestants, Catholics, Jews, etc. all living together peacefully without killing each other (Northern Ireland is a different story). Yet in Iraq there is civil war beween Sunnis and Shi’ites – sects of the SAME RELIGION! If Sunnis and Shi’ites can’t get along with each other, how can Muslims possibly relate to, much less peacefully coexist with, other religions? More directly, how can the Muslim insurgents ever relate to the US soldiers? We’re talking about fanatics by their nature. But at least us Americans and Europeans can enjoy our own peace and Christmas.