But I don’t know how that happens.
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
And I got a bad, bad feeling.
For I can see the American president, desperate to arrest what he at long last grasps is a long slide to ruin, turning to Iran. Some captain sent to patrol in confrontational territory provokes another captain. Shots are fired, men die. Bombs explode. Hamas and Hizbolla are stirred. Israel, threatened, and given a long-awaited opportunity, attacks. The Straits of Hormuz are blocked.
Oil goes to $150. Iraq vanishes from the television screens as quickly as Afghanistan before it. Congress doesn’t know whether to stagger into the street or stand at attention. The president is a wartime president again.
I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin'
None of the other possibilities look much better.
For the streets, now red with blood, could become rivers. Sunni and Shia and Kurd slaughter each other at genocidal rates. The Saudis call on the president in private. This cannot go on, they say. The Turks threaten to calm by force a destabilizing Kurdistan. The Russians put their fingers meaningfully to their lips. The worried rulers of the "moderate" oil states, contemplating the conflagration’s spread, hint that they may have to intervene if Washington does not do something.
Bush announces, "Powell was right. We broke it. And now we own it. Regrettably, liberation will have to wait Bottom line--we invaded it and we conquered it, and now its ours." He halts forty years’ practice of sanctioning the government of client states by locals, and says "You know the trouble was, we just weren’t running the place like a business. And this time it by god will pay for itself."
Two hundred fifty thousand troops deploy. And take over all governmental function. No more letting the locals ruin the place while we stand by. That, they conclude, was part of the trouble, as it had been in Vietnam earlier.
Hey, Rashid. Want a travel document? A business permit? A driver’s license, your trash picked up Thursday, a doctor’s appointment, your brother to get into see the guy who will get his kids into school, your uncle out of jail? Then tell us about the insurgents you know, who they are, where they hang out.
The PNAC crowd is delirious with joy. Empire, at last! But empire comes at a price, you know. Can’t have an empire, you got no emperor. Dissent? Too expensive. Privacy? Civil rights? Fine for countries with fewer global responsibilities. We have a worldwide disaster to avert, here.
Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world
It might look even worse.
American soldiers are kidnapped and tortured by men in Iraqi uniforms, set up by orders from Iraqi commanders. An American diplomat is hanged like Saddam, before cameras and chanting Iraqis. Members of parliament say nothing. "Enough!" bellows the president. And he orders the only surefire, historically proven solution for an insurgency.
The next roadside bomb striking a convoy, the next mortar lobbed into an American compound, is met with a ferocious, brutal response. The president directs air strikes on the offending neighborhood. It is obliterated, burned to ashes. Every last person, down to the babies, either killed or imprisoned.
Fear of the occupiers soon outweighs fear of the insurgents. Occupation forces out-terrorize the terrorists. None dares to defy them. "About time," grumble some in the states. A new Saddam arises, this time one who does not meddle with American interests.
Where black is the color, where none is the number
Or a single officer decides he has had enough. His brave men and women are sitting ducks. And his forces, who cannot even discriminate enemy from friend, are time and again shot and blown up by people who look just like the people they are trying to help.
He knows that all the measures his troops take to avoid harm and to find information from the people have damaged good will toward them more than quelled resistance. Every friend today is only angling for favor, and likely to turn enemy at night. That man walking down the street with a package--is it a bomb to blow them up or groceries for his family?
The soldiers are crazy from the double bind: trust the people, bring democracy. But the context on the ground says do not trust the people, bring order. There is nowhere to escape this trap. Madness is the rule in the field; afterwards, PTSD rates are off the charts.
The commander does not reprimand his soldiers when they kick a detainee. He looks the other way as they take out their frustrations on those suspected of helping those who are firing on them with boots and fists and rifle butts. And then, one day, a situation gets away from everybody, some buddy is killed, and rage fuels rage, a berserk madness clouds the vision like blood and when it has cleared there is Haditha multiplied, a massacre of hundreds.
They would try to hide it, ashamed afterwards. But the word always gets out.
And there are pictures. And the public begins to wonder how young men we are sure are patriots and good boys, whose service we honor, could have done such inhuman things. They understand—war is war, but it shocks them, what was done in their name. And they start to lose their appetite for this occupation. They don’t demand its end, they just turn away, sickened.
It takes months, even years, for the disgust to bring the armies eventually, painfully, home, damaged, resentful, beaten. The Coulters, the Limbaughs, the McCains, the Liebermans cry that the war was lost because the nation’s will was sapped by those who hate America. We complete this new Vietnam that we also fail to learn from.
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
Is there no hope at all? None? Isn’t there always hope?
What if the U.S. Congress said, "Enough is enough.." And gave the force of law to a measure demanding the occupation cease. "We have indeed broken Iraq, but it is beyond any repair we can effect. We have to return it to its owners, with our profound apologies."
The Congress concludes that our troops must come home from Iraq, now, because keeping them there will do them more harm than good, and Iraq more harm than good, and the world more harm than good in both the short and the long runs.
I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin'
But it won’t happen.
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden
Because George Bush is still president. Whose vanity plates on one car read, "Never Wrong," and on the other, "Always Right." It doesn’t matter what Congress might say. Impeach him? Bring it on. He’s got enough lawyers and rubber-stamp friends that he can drag the process out until well past his expiration date.
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
And then, too this is the US Congress we are talking about. And the US media. And the US bureaucratic establishment. Who find no difficulty lecturing Iraqis on the importance of "standing up" to torture, kidnapping, death, and the murder of their families. All for democracy and the rule of law and the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity.
But who all have difficulty standing up themselves to torture (of someone else), to imprisonment (of someone else), to kidnapping (of someone else).
Because they cannot bring themselves to face the deadly horror of being called disloyal, or unpatriotic. Or having their jobs threatened. They didn’t risk anything before. They won’t risk it now.
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall. I wish I could, but I see no light at the end of this terrible tunnel.
