Fallujah: Remember the Alamo?

Kelvin S. Rodolfo

04/29/04 "ICH" -- Often in history, an overwhelmingly superior army surrounds, defeats and may even annihilate a community of people who more or less willingly die -- for whatever reasons. In the Middle East, one such particularly heroic and revered epic is 72 AD Masada, where the zealots chose suicide over Roman capture. 

But by winning, the besiegers may lose their war, to a people, like the 19th Century Texicans, aroused by that great defeat to fight fiercely in its memory. We can only hope that the U.S. leadership recognizes this, and is holding off an all-out attack on Fallujah accordingly. So far, however, the fruit of their thinking does not encourage such hopes.

Fallujah is not going to surrender. People fight fiercely in the defense of their home turf, and most fiercely in defense of their religion. Many mujaheddin WANT to die, gloriously taking as many Americans with them. Bush got it right the first time: he has indeed launched a crusade, with all the bad connotations the word has for Muslims. The frightening thought is that they may well be right. Certainly, some good ol' American Protestant fundamentalists are convinced it is so. 

An epiphany tonight: We may already be living in World War III! Duh! Literally christened the War Against Terror in the aftermath of the September 11 atrocities, a war with a religious flavor and all the frenzied, hateful slaughter that people can inflict in the name of their God. Like the medieval Crusades, but fought with lethal technologies honed to horrendous efficiency over the last half millennium.

If this is indeed WWIII, and if we survive to look back and formalize its history, some may argue that it only really began some time after 9/11. Perhaps some later event morphed it from being merely last year's USUK Iraq invasion into a genuine global conflagration. My candidate for that event would be Bush's backing on April 14 of Sharon's decision to keep the West Bank settlements and deny Palestinians their decades of longing to return to homes in Israel, igniting global islamic passion. 

But, should it proceed, the event of 2004 best remembered by Muslims will not be the pact between two men too old for combat, it will be the siege of Fallujah. And in the Middle East, memories of great martyrdoms and defeats and victories last a long time. Doesn't Channukkah celebrate, among other things, the Maccabee defeat of the Syrians more than a century before Christ? I've often wondered how the Syrians observe Channukkah . . .

Prideful of our superior technology, and in the great hate born of 9/11, we have forgotten that essential ability of truly great warriors: To put themselves in the place of the foes, study them, try thinking as they do, empathize with what they must be feeling. A wartime perversion of the Golden Rule, so to speak. Why did Fallujah, Najaf, the year-long Iraqi resistance following Bush's "Mission Accomplished" catch him, his warhawk ideologues, and the generals by surprise?

In our great hate, so cynically manipulated against Iraq by our leaders, we have temporarily lost the American tradition of rooting for the underdog. But what can the rest of the world see at Fallujah but an Islamic David against the ruling Goliath? 

There is little doubt that the U.S. Marines, some of the best-trained, most disciplined professional killers the world has ever known, armed with the only weapons of mass destruction present in that unfortunate country, including total command of the skies, can easily "kick ass" in Fallujah, kill Iraqis in the tens or hundreds for every one of their own dead. If unleashed, the Marines can obliterate the resistance, just as General Antonio López de Santa Anna defeated and slaughtered the Alamo defenders. 

Fallujah: Remember the Alamo?

Kelvin S. Rodolfo

04/29/04 "ICH" -- Sadly, our military leadership has been the very best recruiter for the resistance. The Pentagon denies it, but there is little doubt that we have already killed hundreds of women and children in Falluja, thereby inflaming people with a tradition of revenge. And by refusing to let EVERY ADULT MALE UNDER 48 to leave Fallujah with his women and children, how can each not now be a guerilla? 

We Americans proudly "remember the Alamo", less than two centuries later. Our history is very short; Iraq is the "cradle of civilization". Should Bush see fit to bring the Fallujah siege to bloody completion, Iraqis will "Remember Fallujah" for millennia. Crusades can last a long time; those that began a thousand years ago lasted four centuries, counting the Christian naval victory over the Ottomans at Lepanto in 1571. 

Bush and cohort may still have to learn that they are fighting not terrorist states, but activists of a global faith with members that number a billion -- two for every three Christians. Extremists can flit in and out of any nation in the world, including our own. Our vaunted military might, invincible against nations, cannot eliminate the crude tactics and weapons of multitudes bred by the arrogant wielding of military force against weak nations and small cities like Fallujah.

It's all up to Bush, God help us. Ironically, this Texan is Fallujah's equivalent of General de Santa Anna, but is too disdainful of history to see it. So much for a Yale education. I fear that he only knows that if he desists from a total onslaught, he will lose by displaying weakness, for the cowboy, a chicken in youth, is a hawk, now that he is too old to actually fight himself. Please, God, make me wrong. God, help Iraq, God, help America.

Copyright: Kelvin S. Rodolfo <krodolfo@uic.edu>