April 28, 2006
COMMENTARY: Rumsfeld’s Inferno: The Date from Hell in Hell
By Cicero
Special to Huntington News Network
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| Cicero
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Rome had a large-sized Legion in Judea that the Jews had resented from day one. The anti-Roman feelings were particularly exacerbated during the reign of the half-crazed Emperor Caligula, who in the year 39 C.E. declared himself to be a deity and ordered his statue to be set up at every temple across the Roman Empire, including the occupied land of Judea. This led to a massive revolt in 66 C.E. that ended up in the complete destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple, giving rise to even more vehement hatred against the Romans that fueled a never-on-the-wane resistance throughout time.
The Roman Imperials could not bring themselves to understand that force alone never brings long-term peace and stability, something that can only be built upon understanding and tolerance of other cultures. Well if they had come to that understanding we might still be speaking Latin today.
Now it is our turn to choose between learning a paid lesson from history and paying for an expensive lesson that extends from the present to the future.
The Imperial Majesties sitting on Emperor Bush’s cabinet seem to have made the choice for the Nation. Most recently, Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary Condoleezza Rice just had a “date” in Baghdad, the wrecked Capital of the God-forsaken nation of Iraq that very much smells the odor of hell these days.
These two protagonists were making joint appearances to give the appearance of the beginning of stability in the war-torn zone by playing up the US support of a new Iraqi government. Dr. Rice was quoted by the New York Times on April 26, 2006 as reassuring the world that “… Iraq now has its first permanent government, … a government of national unity and it gives Iraq a real chance to deal with the real vexing problems that it has faced,” but she forgot to mention that one of those problems is exactly the lingering US presence in that country.
Dr. Rice is certainly not the only one who appears to be more interested in rhetoric than reality. Praetor Rumsfeld with his imperium has the unmitigated superciliousness to affirm the US public that things in the devastated nation of Iraq are “…making impressive progress”, a line that he has been sticking to since the beginning of this nefarious war. In his statement in 2003 Emperor Bush also cheered that the “…war is over….” But since then more than 2,000 US soldiers have died in Iraq with an aggravation of problems ranging across the board from a completely shattered security system to a paralyzed oil and power infrastructure, to hideous corruption within the government and in particular, escalating sectarian hatred and violence.
Stemming from a bed of hatred fermented for over twelve hundred years, sectarian violence has been proliferating unchecked in the Iraqi history to climax in the mass killing of Kurds and Shiites by the Sunni leadership of Dictator Saddam Hussein. To think that we can turn around this insane hatred merely by our presence in the country is ludicrous. Like the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland it is up to the people there to decide if they want to, and when they want to end it; No country alone – England or Ireland and certainly not any foreign power – could annihilate such feud even with the imposition of a formidable military presence.
King Canute of England who, according to legend, used the example of the sea to demonstrate the limits of power; he gathered a group of followers on the beach and commanded the sea to keep back – to no avail, of course; he finally cried out: “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power…” Emperor Bush and Praetors Rumsfeld and Rice should take this statement to heart and hopefully that will help them make a bit of sense of what they are doing to the whole world.
Apparently a strong proponent of imposing our form of government upon other nations, Praetor Rumsfeld has not only directly run the show of conflict in Iraq but also taken over the program of reconstructing this oil rich country – a nightmare for the people in Iraq and the United States alike.
In the meantime time, the propaganda machine of the Department of State has tried to make believe that this main issue of reconstruction, along with an array of smaller glitches, have all been sorted out with Praetors Rice and Rumsfeld being “very pleased” with their cooperation on rebuilding the country. .
Let this duo go on being pleased with their cooperation on transforming the ancient country of Iraq into a wrecked land of inferno for its people and our soldiers and those of our allies. At the end of the day, no posturing could change the fact that the sectarian violence in Iraq – or any other countries in a similar situation – will simply go on haunting the land and anyone who set their feet on it until the people of all factions there realize they must seek a common ground to bring the insanity to a halt – a conundrum that unfortunately can not be solved by any blind dates.
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Editor’s Note: In the 1952 movie “Five Fingers,” James Mason played the valet of the British ambassador to neutral Turkey during World War II. He was a German spy who went by the code name “Cicero.” His intelligence information – including the date of D-Day – was excellent, but fortunately for the Allies, the Germans didn’t believe him, thinking him a double agent. The film was based on real events. The alternate title of the movie is “Operation Cicero.” The Roman political figure, orator and philosopher Cicero was a champion of the traditional institutions of the Roman Republic and the enemy of autocracy, including the politics of Julius Caesar and Pompey.
