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The Drums are beating. By James G. Fabiano The drums are beating. Our nation is unified as it has never been unified since Pearl Harbor. American flags are seen everywhere and are being displayed by everyone. Our people are having a love affair with our nation because of a horrendous event that occurred on the 11th of September 2001. We will have our revenge. We must have it because of the thousands of innocent American lives that were lost. We think we know where the guilty are hiding and we think we know what nation is allowing the guilty ones to be sheltered from the world. But, is what we think we know true?
I received a copy of E-mail the other day from one of my colleagues at school. It was from Toivo Kallas who works at the Department of Biology and Microbiology at a university. I don't even know the name of the university. It was from his college roommate, Tamim Ansary. In the E-mail he explains that his friend is from Afghanistan and, "even though he lived here (in the United States) for 35 years he has never lost track of what's been going on over there." Mr. Kallas took the time to write this e-mail so that he could share a few of the thoughts of his friend with anyone who will listen. "I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I fervently wish to see those monsters punished." "But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who captured Afghanistan in 1997 and have been holding the country in bondage ever since. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a master plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think 'the people of Afghanistan' think 'the Jews in the concentration camps.' It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They wee the first victims of the perpetrators. They would love for someone to eliminate the Taliban and clear out the rat's nest of international thugs holed up in their country. I guarantee it." "Some say, if that's the case, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban themselves? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, damaged, and incapacitated. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan - a country with no economy, no food. Millions of Afghans are widows of the approximately two million men killed during the war with the Soviets. And the Taliban has been executing these women for being women and has buried some of their opponents alive in mass graves. The soil of Afghanistan is littered with land mines and almost all the farms have been destroyed. The Afghan people have tried to overthrow the Taliban. They haven't been able to." "We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble with that scheme is, it's already been done. The Soviets took care of it. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? There is no infrastructure. Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that. New bombs would only land in the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. (They have already, I hear.) Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans; they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would be making common cause with the Taliban - by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time." "So what else can be done, then? Let me now speak with the true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. I think that when people speak of 'having the belly to do what needs to be done', many of them are thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. They are thinking about overcoming moral qualms about killing innocent people. But it's the belly to die, not kill, that's actually on the table. Americans will die in a land war to get Bin Laden. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Alden's hideout. It's much bigger than that, folks. To get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. The invasion approach is a flirtation with global war between Islam and the West." "And that is Bin Alden's program. That's exactly what he wants and why he did this thing. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. At the moment, of course, 'Islam' as such does not exist. There are Muslims and there are Muslim countries, but no such political entity as Islam. Bin Laden believes that if he can get a war started, he can constitute this entity and he'd be running it. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in Muslim lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong about winning, in the end the west would probably overcome-whatever that would mean in such a war; but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden yes, but anyone else?" I don't have a solution. But I do believe that suffering and poverty are the soil in which terrorism grows. Bin Laden and his cohorts want to bait us into creating more such soil, so they and their kind can flourish. We can't let him do that. That's my humble opinion." It was a letter I did not want to read. It put something into my mind that I thought my sorrow, anger, and patriotism would never allow. It made me wonder if revenge was the correct way to react or was this type of reaction exactly what the monster Bin Laden wanted? Last weekend my wife and I joined some friends in Portland for dinner. We all wanted to get away to simply get away. As we were waiting for our meals I noticed an elderly man dressed in white, pass by the front of the restaurant. He was wearing what appeared to be a white circular hat. I later found out that he was an Islamic priest. On the other side of the street I also noticed a young man carrying a large American flag in order to promote our newfound patriotism. For a microsecond they seemed to come together. I told my friend that I wished I had a camera but in reality I didn't need one because I will never forget what I had just witnessed. History has probably already been written. It is an established fact that we will be hitting Afghanistan and its people hard. I now wish I had never read the E-mail that made me question the wisdom of this history.
The End
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