Back in Junior High and High School there was this sort of guy who could reliably be made to fight almost anyone, almost at any time. The Spaz. All anyone had to do was walk up to him and say something like, "yo mama better stop wearing that rainbow lipstick because when..." and he would spaz on command, running headfirst at the guy who says it, or as a bank-shot move, the guy that the spaz thinks said it. Looking back at it, he was probably deeply traumatized by events of his past or the realities of his present. It was probably the only way he knew how to react. He always came back for more.
The Spaz is a modern allegory for us-- America and many others aside. This isn't middle school. It's the Middle East this time, and all we do is spaz, spaz, spaz.
"...We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy...All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations... Every dollar of al Qaeda defeated a million dollars, by the permission of Allah... As for the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars." --Osama bin Laden
When this started out, we charged into the Middle East headfirst in a righteous fury. A bunch of Arab guys had run several planes right into our nation's most enduring symbols. Thousands died, and the rest of were deeply shaken by what they did. So we went to Afghanistan, who only recently had finished with the French, British, and Soviets. The Arab guys who first came up with the whole idea were holed up in some caves in the middle of nowhere there. So we killed almost all of them, and many others aside. We spilled our lives and torched our money there.
Then we notice Iraq, who may never have cared for suicidal Quran-banging hillbillies, but was somehow supposed to have nuclear arsenals fit into overhead-bin-sized suitcases, thermoses full of VX gas, and tubes of toothpaste full of plague, all headed our way. So we went there too. And we killed almost all of those guys and many others aside. Lives and money were everywhere traumatic, ignoble wastes. And for nothing but a cabal of desert sadists, some old Russian tanks, some decent oil fields, and a hundred thousand dead, largely blameless, faceless people. We saw existential threats there and everywhere.
Eventually, most of us didn't like what we'd done over there. Here in America we were poor and shell-shocked. So a new president was voted in, and we mostly left Iraq and Afghanistan, somehow still hemorrhaging lives and money over there. Then other Arab guys, and many others from Central Asia and East Africa, who mostly learned from the earlier guys' run-ins with us, tried to smuggle bombs in Gatorade bottles, shoe soles, and underwear. They set off some nasty bombs on European public transit a couple times. They nearly got us in Times Square. And we mostly held back from all-out war.
Since then, several European countries, America and other allies have stopped many, many of these guys. A few have gotten through, and people in the West have died, but we were paying less and less attention to Iraq and Afghanistan, focusing here on ourselves as a nation than as vengeful occupiers of others. Then there were a few civil wars across North Africa and a few in the Near East, with all their associated atrocities and injustices didn't seem to raise our hackles like before. We mostly held back. So they took hostages and they start posting their grizzly deaths on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and a thousand other sites, each with their own millions of viewers, watching agape. And we can no longer hold ourselves back.
Now we're going back into Iraq. We're talking about bombing Syria. We're making secret handshakes with Iran and greasing the palms of generals and sheiks. We're getting pressured to "leave everything on the table" in certain quarters here at home. But we know we're being taunted again. The overall threat of those behind ISIS might be vastly diminished from before, but they are taunting us with every last tool still available to them, scaring the world with viscous, horrific images, doing everything they can to drag us headfirst back onto the battlefield.
Let's be clear. Terrorists can hurt us. Even from afar, with only an IPhone, a kitchen knife, and a black mask, they can disturb us down to our soles. But nobody anywhere these days talks about these guys on the awful scale of nuclear annihilation. Let's not forget that just before we started getting involved in the Middle East, we had passed a generation under the real possibility of billions of lives gone in a final conflagration. Before that, a generation had gone to a war against total world domination, just after a massive economic collapse of their own. Before that there was only more of the same, and worse by many measures before that.
How can we compare the horrors of slightly more distant past with the events of the past thirteen years? It's been nearly an entire history of violence, and our traumas have left us punch-drunk, angry, and afraid. Terrible things may have happened to us in the past, but all it takes is a mama-joke now. These weak, almost childish enemies can get us playing their unending game. This time we have to see that the whole world is no longer at stake here-- there is no need to spaz.
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