A few days ago I soap boxed a bit about the reality of war. The reality of blood, and violence, and the beast within.
Today, we were given a dose of a new kind of reality and a beast that is new to America.
The terrorist.
And if this is who President Bush promised to focus the nations zeal against, then I must ask, why are we not fighting them. It is as if we, soaked in the blood of a thousand civilians and bruised by the rubble of our tallest towers, rose from the bedrock with a shout and charged toward the enemy…..then stopped and turned 90 degrees off course to finish off some old business before REALLY getting down to business. Iraq could have waited another five years while the whole of our resources focused on the enemy we swore to put an end to. Instead we sit with even our national guard (you remember, the boys who signed up to defend our soil ON our soil, sort of an Army Light as it were) slogging in sand ridden tents waiting with baited breath for the REAL Enemy to jump from behind a Mosque that he is not supposed to shoot at and aim an RPG in his general direction. Meanwhile, The Enemy is pouring gasoline on the bodies of four contractors who wouldn’t know an AK-47 from a Red Rider bb gun and stringing the left-overs from a bridge.
Cloaked in rhetoric and a zeal for their cause, they set themselves as the oppressed martyrs. They love God with such sacrifice that they will give even their lives for Him. And in return, he will look down on them with love and welcome them into His arms.
But they do not love their cause or there God enough to show their faces as they gleefully recite their chants. They raise their guns in a defiant middle finger to the oppressive West on grainy videos filmed in dark corners and hidden caves.
But always it is the civilian that they strike at. The unarmed women and children on buses and in malls. They do not stop to ask the faith of the business man that stands next to them before pulling the pin. They do not question the politics of the ambulance driver as he leans into help them from the car, unhinging the switch that will bring him to the place that he spent his life holding others back from. They decry the West for its Satanic lifestyle and its flouting of God in it’s ways. React with shock and outrage at the treatment of prisoners and at the attack on there country.
And they shouted all the louder “Allah Akbar” to mask the hideous screams and the terror of a civilian hostage as they took over a full minute to carve his head from his neck with the skill of a butcher in a pig factory. As the screams turned to bubbling rasps God did not seem so great. The room went strangely silent.
What could anyone say?