Welcome To the Occupation:
The Rude Pundit had this friend, no longer a friend for various reasons, including the Rude Pundit's propensity for rudeness. Let's call the ex-friend "Mac." Mac was a fun guy, sarcastic, prank-playing, loved the rock and the roll. The problem was that Mac belonged to some intensely fundamentalist Christian religion who had Jesus shoved so far up their asses that they didn't have a church. They'd meet at Mac's house and get in a circle and chant and talk in tongues. The Rude Pundit once accidentally arrived early one Sunday at Mac's house and saw this ritual, and it was a scarring experience not unlike walking in on one's grandparents doing a 69. How do you talk to a friend once you've seen him laying on the ground, convulsing with the Holy Spirit? It's like hearing Patrick Stewart take a long, moaning shit in a stall next to you and then watching him act Shakespeare.
Mac and his family believed that the end of days was coming, that the Beast was about to return to Earth and take away all the water and food. To prepare for that, Mac's father had filled the backroom with boxes and boxes of dehydrated food and bottled water. Enough to last, Mac said, a couple of years until the battle with the beast was done. This was pre-"Left Behind." This was during the Reagan years. And it's not that Mac's family was rich - no, far from it. But who needs money if one believes the Beast is just around the corner?
The Rude Pundit is reminded of Mac and the Beast-proof banquet whenever he sees George Bush and his administration clinging, desperately, to the June 30 handover of power to the Iraqi Governing Council (led, no doubt, by charming Chalabi, that lying thief). This despite the fact that even Republican Senators are doubting the wisdom of that. And so we go about our occupation, squelching dissent just like every occupying force in the history of empires. We label anyone who opposes us "radical," even though if the majority of a country is "radical," then, really, radical is not the appropriate word.
The problem with the ideology behind the occupation seems to be the fear that right wingers have had whenever reality confronts their ideology: root causes are what drives people to crime, to violence, to rebellion, to war. For the Sunnis, the American occupation took away most of their jobs since they were associated with the Baathist Party of Saddam Hussein. Ask some low-level clerk working for the Department of Agriculture how he would feel if a new administration came in and fired him because he had been hired by the previous administration. For the Shi'ites, they're tasting power after years of Saddam and U.S. enforced U.N. sanctions. Of course there's rebellion. Of course there's conflagration all over the country. The Beast is what's released, not what arrives.
Mac's house burned down not long after he showed me the cases of dried meat. The bottles exploded, the food helped fan the flames. No cause was ever found, although the insurance people thought that Mac's father might have set it intentionally because of a failing business. The Beast arrived, and no amount of planning prepared Mac and his family for its wrath.
