Tuesday, March 18 2003 @ 02:37 PM GMT
By Roger H. Lieberman
Decades from now, historians may be debating exactly when America’s age of freedom and prosperity came to a crashing end. There is a very good chance that the wiser among them will write that the end came, not on September 11, 2001 – the day the World Trade Center was destroyed, but on March 17, 2003 – the day George W. Bush set in motion the most unprovoked act of aggression by one sovereign state against another since Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.
As I write this, the United States is poised to enter uncharted realms of infamy. It’s armies – once revered as saviors of the Free World – will join the list of history’s rampaging hordes. This is a dark day for the human species. How utterly disgusting for Bush and his “allies” to pick St. Patrick’s Day – when we remember the brave freedom struggle of the Irish people – to declare their high-technology pogrom against the Iraqi people. I have been combing my various historical texts in search of an appropriate parallel to the impending carnage in the Middle East, and I have found an exquisitely poignant one – an empire-building megalomaniac who massacred whole cities in his quest for riches and power. His name was Genghis Khan.
In the 13th Century, the horse-riding warriors of the Mongolian steppes struck fear into the hearts of civilized people throughout Eurasia – Russians, Chinese, Indians, Persians, and Arabs. It all began, unassumingly, in the year 1206, when a consortium of Mongol tribes elected a man named Temujin as their “khan” – supreme ruler. He took the name Genghis, which means “universal”, and proceeded to send his armies striking in all directions.
According to contemporary Persian historian Rashid ad-Din, Genghis Khan is said to have extolled conquest with blood-curdling bluntness: “Man’s greatest joy is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize all his possessions, leave his widows weeping, ride his horses, and use the bodies of his women”. (It is not much of an imaginative leap to picture Bush’s neoconservative buddies sharing similar sentiment.) By the time of his death in 1227, Genghis had extended Mongol dominion over northern China and most of Central Asia. He had also earned a reputation for piracy and mass-murder comparable to that of Hitler and Stalin – indeed, his last recorded decree was the genocide of the Tibetan kingdom of Xi Xia.
By the mid-1200s, Genghis Khan’s sons and grandsons had engulfed Russia, Afghanistan, Persia, Korea, and the Caucasus – in all these places, repeating their mentor’s pattern of pillage, slaughter, and ravaging of civil society. The stage was now set for what became, perhaps, the Mongols’ most infamous act. In 1258, an army commanded by Hulagu, enlarged to nearly 150,000 men by conscription from conquered Georgia and Armenia – what today would be called a “coalition of the willing” – set its sights on the Abbasid Caliphate, the splendid Muslim kingdom centered in modern-day Iraq.
When Caliph Mustasim of Baghdad sent an army to confront the Mongols, Hulagu broke a dam on the Tigris River, cutting off the Abbasid retreat, and slew 12,000 men. A terrible siege of Baghdad followed, in which the Mongol army fired palm-tree logs from catapults into the city – foreshadowing the cruise missiles of a later age. But the real nightmare began when the walls were breached. Now in possession of the greatest city in the Arab Middle East, the Mongols preceded to destroy both it and its people. No one knows how many civilians were murdered in cold blood, but, by all accounts, at least several hundred thousand – and perhaps over a million – lay dead in the aftermath of Baghdad’s destruction.
There is very good reason to recall this black period in history at this time. It is not an exaggeration to compare what may very soon take place in modern Iraq to what this land suffered at the hands of the Mongol hordes 750 years ago. For today, in military circles, a very fascist little phrase is being used, in a noxiously casual manner. The phrase is “Shock and Awe”. It is no longer a secret that the US military, as the opening salvo in its rape of Iraq, plans to drop 3000 bombs and missiles on this ancient land.
The immediate result of such an attack has been described as a 21st Century Dresden, referring to the infamous Allied fire-raid in World War II, which killed tens of thousands of German civilians. Never in history has so powerful a nation displayed such groundless, wanton bloodlust as we do now. Never in history has a country with such positive potential as America gone so monstrously astray. The men and women in our government who have brought us to this moment are war criminals, whom I hope will one day stand trial for their actions, as did the Nazi mass-murderers at Nuremburg.
Add to all this madness the equally reprehensible actions of Bush’s “silent partner” in Gulf War II – Zionist Israel. Under the cover of America’s war build-up, Ariel Sharon’s regime has, day by day, shifted his government’s policy toward the Palestinians from vulgar apartheid toward outright ethnic cleansing. Israel’s military thug apparatus mutilates what remains of Palestine – starving its people, destroying their homes, and, now, deliberately killing American peace activists risking their lives to stop them. If a true American hero can be found at this bleak hour, it is surely the martyred Rachel Corrie, of Olympia, Washington - a true young defender of all that America once stood for – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Let us all try our best to retain some optimism that America will eventually find its rightful destiny as a partner in a world community of nations, dedicated to justice and peace. Surely our country must discard militarism and bigotry sometime.
For all conquests of blood and iron are fleeting, and in vain.
Even the ferocious horsemen from Mongolia, the heirs of Genghis Khan, eventually found their destiny in peace and integration with the cultures they once blighted. In China, Kublai founded the Yuan Dynasty, and greeted Marco Polo on his landmark journey. In India, the Moguls contributed a dazzling chapter to the subcontinent’s venerable history. And in the Middle East, they became just one more ingredient in the rich melting pot of peoples.
Your war will win you nothing lasting, Mr. Bush. What a shame so many will die before that realization finally penetrates your thick, and tragically small, cranium.
