After Catch 22, what number fits London bombers and Baghdad ‘liberators’
It saved the Germans the trouble and the Yanks got paid for what the other side would have done anyway.
Whoever said war had to be fair? It’s a bloody, barbarous business whose ultimate aim is to kill efficiently. Why should it have to make sense?
When I read that part of Catch 22, I thought to myself that Heller had lost all credibility, even given the outrageously offbeat nature of the plot of his anti-war blockbuster.
But he wasn’t so far out at all. Life imitated art in London on July 7 when British citizens blew up more than 50 fellow Britons to satisfy the poisoned ideology of militant Islamic fundamentalism. Al-Qaida and its offshoots have translated one of the greatest tragi-comic episodes of black humour in world literature into a far from humorous reality. The murderous deed had a perverted logic of its own.
Why send teams of suicide bombers half way across the globe to strike your enemies when you can brainwash people in a targeted country to kill their fellow-citizens?
Not that the Americans or the British government can occupy the high moral ground on the London attacks or any other violent assault on western civilisation. At a time when savage and corrupt dictatorships are oppressing whole nations in many parts of the world, Britain and America focus only on ‘liberating’ the victims of a dictatorship in a country that just happens to be oil-rich and strategically important to Western interests.
The first major ex-government department to be ‘liberated’ by the Americans in Baghdad was the oil ministry.
Gosh! The unfortunate Iraqis working there must have been just crying out for justice, freedom, and democracy. More so than even the inmates of the terrible prisons where Saddam kept all his least favourite enemies of the state.
Forgive my cynicism, but I would admire the liberation of the torture chambers in Iraq a great deal more if the heroes liberating them hadn’t replaced Saddam’s torturers with their own.
The Abu Ghraibs of this world, with their images of leering, arrogant prison guards humiliating inmates have done more to inflame the passions of extremism than the rantings of a thousand mad mullahs. Then again, maybe it’s nature’s way of letting us know that the human beast never really changes.
The problem with being liberated without your actual permission is that there’s always a catch.
Should we give it a number?
John Fitzgerald
Lower Coyne Street
Callan
Co Kilkenny
