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I'm not saying "smash everybody." Just last night, in fact, I turned a commercial airline pilot captain/federal air marshall who was packing an H&K doomsday pistol loaded with some sort of bullet that will pass through a human target but won't continue flying into a window or cabin wall, because that would:
a) de-pressurize the plane and maybe bring it down, or
b) blast a hole in the cabin wall that would widen from air-suck until a whole side panel went bye-bye, which would almost certainly bring the plane down with far too much rapidity and far too sudden a landing, or
c) both
(bear in mind, all this was according to the cap'n, who is a genuinely excellent person, even when he shows off his Federal concealed carry "I-can-just-shoot-your-whole-ass-off-if-I-feel-like-it-and-make-up-a-story-later" license to use deadly force..."in defense," it said, which strikes me as a very malleable standard, but meh, I don't fly his airline anyway. ;) )
So, we got to talking while performing the Ritual Gulping of Brown Liquor Out of Small Glass Containers (amen), and he gets into what I now call "Iran Rant #3," which I've heard sixty-seven-thousand times in the last year..."Nukes"..."Dangerous"..."9/11"..."They're killing our troops in Iraq"..."They want Iraq for themselves..."
At which point I raised one index finger and said, "Yeah, but...may I ask you a question?"
"Fire away," he said.
"Do you know the difference between Sunni and Shia?" I asked.
"Nope," he said, completely unruffled, as though I'd asked if he knew the difference in atomic weight between rubidium and cesium; he couldn't have cared less, which was cool cuz a) I got the chance to explain it, and b) his lack of information is due to Bush & Co. (who don't know the difference either, from what I understand), TV news that has no real news, and crappy newspaper reporting to boot, so I didn't blame him or consider him un-smart...and, oh yeah, I got to explain it, i.e. "Opportunity To Run Mouth At Speed." Glorious. :)
"Why is that important?" he asked.
"Is the difference between Protestant and Catholic in Northern Ireland important?" I asked.
He was fully Irish. He got it. He got it in Technicolor.
The rest took me less than two minutes:
1. Dawa and SCIRI were the Iranian terror orgs that bombed and killed all those Marines at the Beruit Airport in '83 (after which Reagan "cut and run" out of the Mideast at light speed...and then invaded Grenada)...and now Dawa and SCIRI are the dominant majority organizations in the Iraqi government..."Why would Iran want Iraq for themselves?" I asked. "They already have it. They own it. Iran and Iraq are Shia; Saddam was Sunni, and the Sunnis are 23% of Iraq's population. The Shia in Iraq are 63% of Iraq's population, ideologically and religiously aligned with the real rulers of Iran...and when that "democracy" we promised came along, the Shia voted themselves and all of Iraq right into Iran's hip pocket."
2. Osama bin Laden is Sunni, al Qaeda is generally a Sunni crew, but both are Wahabbist Sunni...
"Wha habba?" he asked; "Super-duper right-wing religious," I replied, "the truly scary sect that a lot of people conflate with all the many millions of non-Wahabbi Muslims on the planet; the vast majority of Muslims, in fact, don't want to live like it's still the 7th century and women don't exist and all the gospels make Leviticus sound like Jim Morrison booze-poetry by comparison..."
"Hussein was Sunni, bin Laden is Sunni...sounds like they really might have been working together, eh?" he said. "On spec, it sounds sensible," I replied, "but for a few things. Hussein was not faithful to Islam in any way. He used the language of faith to bullshit an already beaten-down population. To Osama, that's a deadly insult right there: using the Prophet's teachings only to hold power and BS the mob? Also, Hussein spent thirty years killing every Wahabbist he could get his hands on; there were laws in Iraq that decreed, in paraphrase, "Wahabbist = shoot in head." No exceptions.
After Hussein invaded Kuwait, OBL went before the Saudi king and asked for assistance so he could reform his Afghani army, and asked if he could use that army against Hussein. The king said no and no, which was when OBL truly broke with Saudi Arabia (except for the financing to be found there), and besides, the king had invited and allowed US troops to guard Mecca and Medina, MECCA AND MEDINA!!!, allowed women to go around un-bourkaed, and furthermore allowed women to drive cars...so to OBL, the king was scum, America and Israel sucked, etc...butthe point was that OBL wanted to attack Hussein with his old badass army of mujeheddin warriors...yeah, the ones who kinda defeated a superpower decisively and comprehensively. OBL was no ally of Saddam; if Hussein had given him weapons, OBL would have used those weapons on Hussein.
3. Sunni Wahabbism is the state religion of Saudi Arabia...hmm.
...enough storytime for now, but I got him. Tossed in a little bit of the old black magic: "During Bush's January 2003 State of the Union speech, he claimed that Iraq had 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons (which is one million pounds) of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent, plus 30,000 munitions to deliver the stuff, mobile biological weapons labs, and uranium from Niger for use in a robust nuclear weapons program."
Shoots. Scores. No ripped lungs. I think... ;)
P.S. This was early 2002, and I was ready to run through brick walls...so.
:toast:
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