Three saints of damnation

Hence, we saw the recent foot dragging by the United States and the United Kingdom when Israel pounded Lebanon for more than a month. The big powers showed the feigned air of exasperated elders who like to wait until a child gets sufficiently thrashed to remember not to start a fight.

That is where the mission of those three great men has faltered. Not to say, it was not the first time. The mission was already faltering in Iraq, a country once held together by a ruthless dictator, now torn by zealous benefactors with too much love. And before you wonder who was trying to blow up 10 transatlantic airplanes, you wonder why Al Qaeda was still around when George Bush had sworn to destroy it way back in 2001?

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The fact is that it would have been a wonderful mission only if it worked. George Bush announced last Thursday that his country is at war with the Islamic fascists. He said the same thing one month short of five years ago, only this time he was careful not to use the word crusade in his speech. But has that war got worse or better since it started?

Actually, the more relevant question is where is this war going? The gyre of confrontation is widening with the gyre of retribution, dragging more countries into the crisis since it started on 9/11. Richard Holbrooke, a former US ambassador to the UN, recently expressed his concern in The Washington Post, listing 14 countries, which are getting sucked into the crisis. He then cautioned that if this situation continued, the Third World War was inevitable.

Others are talking about historical facts. The First World War started when the Serbian nationalists assassinated an Austro-Hungarian archduke. The Austro-Hungarians threatened to wipe out the Serbian nationalists, which provoked the pan-Slavic nationalists, who were working for the Russian czar. When they threatened to destroy the Austro-Hungarian Empire if the Serbs were touched, Germany's Kaiser pledged to take retaliatory actions. France, which had an ant-German alliance with Russia, refused to sit on its hands.

That is how wars spread amongst nations like a neighborhood fracas, when two women arguing in the queue for tap water, drag their husbands, brothers, sons, close relatives and well wishers into the fight. People take sides in these fights like nations take sides in wars unless a crisis is nipped in the bud. In five years since the Twin Tower bombings, the centrifugal force of terror has expanded, while the popular sentiments across the world, particularly in the Arab streets, have heightened against the United States.

So, what does it matter if explosives change from solid state to liquid, while passengers are being increasingly squeezed to take fewer things in their carry-on luggage? Now there will be naked scanners which will even show your private parts! But the real explosives exist in gaseous state, hidden in the fumes rising from the boiling blood of those who are being oppressed.

Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker magazine, who exposed Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam and Abu Ghraib atrocities in Iraq, described a scenario of that oppression on CNN last Sunday. He claimed that the Israeli attack on Lebanon was planned even before the Hezbollah kidnapped the Israeli soldiers on July 12. The US air force was closely working with the Israeli air force for months in preparation for an attack on Iran.

Seymour explained that the United States wanted to wait until Israel had substantially destroyed the missiles which were in Hezbollah's possession. It was for this reason that the White House was not keen to support the ceasefire in Lebanon. Then he suggested that it was something that really should be examined by a Congressional committee, and that it was time to see if the United States was a democracy or not, since the president was doing an awful lot of foreign policy without sharing it with the American people.

That leads to the question about the real intentions of the three saintly men. George Bush lied about WMD so that he could justify the invasion of Iraq, and Tony boy was on his side all that time. George Bush looked for an excuse to attack Iran and both Tony and Olmert have run his errands. As lies heave upon lies, where is the truth behind 9/11?

It may sound a little wonky, but the real cause of terrorism lies in the dark mysteries of those lies. That is why the cease-fire in Lebanon feels like an uneasy calm before the next storm. The war in Iraq will only get worse, Israel will face renewed threats from Hezbollah and Hamas, and the United States will itch to lead a strike on Iran. Meanwhile, Al Qaeda is going to look for new ways to sneak explosives into airports and airplanes.

No comparison but interesting facts. Every time some people threatened to wipe out others, terror was born. The Austro-Hungarians threatened to wipe out the Serbs, leading to the First World War. In the Second World War, the Nazis wanted to wipe out the Jews. Now a coalition of three nations has set out to wipe out the bad guys in Islam.

It will not happen, because one cannot cleanse the world of evil if one harbours evil in one's own mind. That is what the three saints of salvation are going to learn, perhaps after few more wars, more bloodshed and loss of may more lives.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.