They love us over there!

Fallujah, Iraq -- Five months after President Bush declared the end of "major combat" in Iraq, the war may indeed be over for most of the country.

But not for Sheikh Mishkhen al Jumaili. Last month, American troops killed nine of his relatives, including his son, in the span of just four days.

"They mean to kill as many Iraqis as possible," said al Jumaili, weeping silently as his younger relatives quietly lowered Beijiya's coffin into the parched yellow cemetery ground.

Bowing slightly over the red velvet cloth that draped the coffin of his cousin Beijiya, al Jumaili said a solemn prayer and wiped his eyes. Then he turned his back and stepped away, unable to watch yet another member of his extended family vanish under heavy chunks of dry clay.

That morning, al Jumaili, an elderly man clad in a long white dishdasha robe, had already buried Beijiya's daughter Amal and son-in-law Zamil, and their 1-year-old son, Heidar.

All were killed the night before, Sept. 26, driving toward Baghdad when American soldiers opened fire at Beijiya's car after it failed to stop at a temporary checkpoint that was preceded by no warning signs.

Two days earlier, he had buried two cousins, Abdul Nasir and Abdul Khadi, apparently caught in the cross fire when U.S. troops shot at suspected resistance fighters. Their bodies rested a few yards away from Beijiya's grave, in two identical tombs draped with Iraqi flags and marked with palm fronds.

The day before that, an early morning U.S. aerial attack on a farmhouse in the village of al Sajr, near Fallujah, killed al Jumaili's sleeping son, Ali, his nephew, Salem, and Salem's son, Saadi. Locals said American officials apologized for the attack, saying it was a mistake.

"Lately they killed too many al Jumaili in Fallujah," said al Jumaili. "All the tribes are suffering. This is murder."

[link|http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/10/06/MN310013.DTL|http://sfgate.com/cg...0/06/MN310013.DTL]

See, if Ali, Salem and Saadi had been killed by the Ba'athists, that would have been a wicked and unforgivable act. Since they were killed by the Forces of Light, and since we apologized handsomely, their survivors are being inexcusably churlish in nursing a grudge. Don't they understand that when we kill Iraqis we're killing them for their own good?

A prediction: we'll be seeing variations of this story next month...and next quarter...and next summer...and unless he's brained by a falling cornice Little Phil's lusty huzzahs for the occupation will not abate by a single decibal from now until then.

cordially,

Unity and self-sacrifice, of themselves, even when fostered by the most noble means, produce a facility for hating. Even when men league themselves mightily together to promote tolerance and peace on earth, they are likely to be violently intolerant toward those not of a like mind.

— Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

Little Phil is on fire for the lord again, it seems, scourging the unrighteous not merely out of personal choler, but because he's engaged in a holy mission on behalf of decent, right-thinking people everywhere ("but especially in the United States"). This odd messianic note, almost always present as a low rumble in his diatribes, from time to time rises as a clarion call: if we charted the intervals, might we descry a pattern of pharmaceutical substances administered or withheld?

By contrast the binary thinking remarked upon here by Ashton and others, and meticulously limned by Eric Hoffer a couple of generations ago, is always quite explicitly present. On one side, in snow-white raiment from the points of their patent leather boots to the crowns of their Stetsons, are Little Phil, the pResident of the United States, loyal and patriotic American supporters of the invasion and occupation, and the oppressed peoples of the world yearning for their own piece of the Pax Americana. On the other, grimly garbed in black to match their shrivelled hearts, are most of iwethey, the pResident's political opposition, holders of American citizenship who presume to question the purity of the nation's intentions or the absolute justice of its cause, most of the population and the political leadership of western Europe, and sundry criminals, terrorists, drug addicts, child pornographers and others given to the indiscriminate embrace of "twisted evil things." Have I left anyone out? In MarloWorld there is no middle ground. To disparage, or even to withhold approval of American actions and policies (which are, being American, ipso facto righteous and just) is to render aid and comfort to the foe. There's Our Team and Their Team, and if you're not on Our Team, then Their Team must be Your Team.

Since this thread began with a news account of some collateral damage in Fallujah ("The day before that, an early morning U.S. aerial attack on a farmhouse in the village of al Sajr, near Fallujah, killed al Jumaili's sleeping son, Ali, his nephew, Salem, and Salem's son, Saadi. Locals said American officials apologized for the attack, saying it was a mistake."), Little Phil's response is rather telling:

So go shed a tear in your beer for those murdering assholes in Fallujah that we've sent to their just reward. (You never should have rooted for them in the first place. Why did you?)

It seems passing strange that American officials should have felt compelled to apologize for killing a couple of murdering assholes, for that is surely what they were: in a properly run MarloWorld, bombs mean never having to say you're sorry, and if we killed them they must've deserved it.

The most effective way to silence our guilty conscience is to convince ourselves and others that those we have sinned against are indeed depraved creatures, deserving every punishment, even extermination.

— Eric Hoffer, ibid

Of course, you may not have realized that you were rooting for the murdering assholes, whether or not cleverly disguised as sleeping noncombatants, any more than you understood that in opposing the US invasion you were extending a blanket unconditional endorsement of Saddam Hussein and all his works and aims, but — there you are: the laws of the marlovian moral cosmos admit of no middle ground. Our Little Phil understands black and white, whereas to speak of grey is to undermine the very pillars of MarloWorld:

Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the modeate who are poles apart and never meet. The fanatics of various hues eye each other with suspicion and are ready to fly at each other's throat. But they are neighbors and almost of one family. They hate each other with the hatred of brothers.

— Eric Hoffer, ibid

I am struck anew, rereading the post to which this one forms one response, at how unsuitable an online avatar Little Phil has chosen. Humphrey Bogart, whose visage he assumes, was politically left-of-center, and to read Raymond Chandler, who created the character of Philip Marlowe, is to enter a world infinitely more nuanced than that inhabited by our own LP. Some of us have chosen to appear here sans cloaks (of course, not all of us are, like marlowe the younger, in the front lines in the War on Terror, preparing vital Powerpoint presentations for use by the brave sales force of Amalgamated Bombdoor Servomotors [a Bermuda corporation] and hence at real physical risk should our secret identities become known to Al Qaeda), but few of the others have chosen so loaded and inapt an iconography for personal use. I might, for example, follow the lead of some of the other members here and abandon the handle I originally enlisted under, rejoining the group as...let's say, as popejohn_xxiii, with a nice thumbnail of late pontiff to accompany my subsequent posts. Would some not register a disconnect when popejohn_xxiii, in one of his peckish moods, savaged poor orion after one of the latter's more fatuous expressions of Christian belief? Just so, if Little Phil really feels as though a hardboiled private eye best suits him as an online persona, I should think that author Mickey Spillane's would be a more congenial mindset than Raymond Chandler's. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the new, improved and eminently more logical public identity for our man: Mike Hammer!

But marlowe, as we must, I suppose, persist in calling him, is not to be reasoned with. He is right; we are wrong; end of story. Hasn't he alluded to a period of youthful folly in which he held beliefs he now repudiates? That would be of a piece with the rest, and brings to mind one last bit of Hoffer, which has in the past struck me as nailing, utterly, the egregiously thuggish David Horowitz of the Then and of the Now:

The fanatic cannot be weaned away from his cause by an appeal to his reaon and his moral sense. He fears compromise and cannot be persuaded to qualify the certitude and righteousness of his holy cause. But he finds no difficulty in swinging suddenly and wildly from one holy cause to another. he cannot be convinced but only converted. His passionate attachment is more vital than the quality of the cause to which he is attached.

[edit: typo]

— Eric Hoffer, ibid

cordially,

Marley, Bill, that was Marley's ghost (played in 1951 by Michael Hordern, who was never to my knowledge mistaken for Bogart).

cordially,