The Ming Report

AN EYE FOR AN EYE

June 17, 2003 - ``If we don't move forward, if we don't take this opportunity, if we don't punch through this current wave of violence, then where are we?' We're nowhere -- with two peoples killing one another day after day after day.''

Colin Powell was speaking of Israelis and Palestinians and the Bush Administration’s resolve to follow its roadmap to peace; but his remarks apply just as accurately to Iraqis and Americans or Afghanis and the international forces occupying that country or to the Irish and the British conflict that has endured through decades of “peace plans”. Day after day after day we kill a few of them and they kill a couple of ours. We exchange ten eyes for every one lost. The loss of one tooth is repaid with a mouthful in the pursuit of peace. In Iraq and Afghanistan and, alas in Israel and Palestine, we will find no peace at the end of an imbalanced teeter-totter of terror.

We can occupy Iraq and Afghanistan with our more lethal technology. We can shake our swords, pound them against our shields and threaten our enemies real or imagined; but we cannot defeat the true-believers. All we can do is kill them, sow their bones as dragon’s teeth, and reap the harvest as their number is increased by our own husbandry.

Our adversaries call us Crusaders and not just because of the President’s unfortunate choice of words as he declared our War On Terrorism. We are called upon to make war upon a theocratic movement that seeks to impose its view of God on the rest of the world by force. It is ironic that the one nation on earth founded upon secular democracy, finds itself leading a crusade to defend the faith against the infidel while at home it is pushed toward a theocracy of its own.

In Israel and in Ireland the conflict of faiths is unremitting. Violence in the name of God ebbs and flows but never ceases. In Belfast and Beirut true-believers defend their sins by claiming the imprimatur of their view of God. By what ever name they call upon Him they claim Him theirs is a God of death and not of life.

If mankind is destined to defeat the appeal to terror it will not be with a renewed worship of a God of Death but with the dedication to the extension and enhancement of life.