Wolf:    We must attack Iraq, Mr. President.  She is big enough for our purposes.  We need to hit it hard and fast.  When the statue of Hussein falls, the thud will reverberate the walls of Jerusalem.  Fear and doubts that will sprout within the Arab world will twice make our enemies think before attacking us on our own soil again.  Our success will suppress the will of the Muslim youth; they will further dislike their rulers. 

 

Bush:    What evidence will we sell to the American public to buy their silence and continued allegiance to our presidency?

 

Wolf:    Sell them Fear, Mr. President. Make them afraid of others and they will listen.  Make them angry to others and they will listen.  Fear and anger make all men prudent and deaf to reason.  People will accept anything, if they believe it will make them safer.  Make Iraq scary and you will have Americans on your side.  They will be putty in your hands.  We can justify invading Iraq along multiple fronts.  Saddam was kind enough to have invaded Kuwait and Iran.  Shout centrifuges, and people will see a full-blown nuclear weapon detonating at one of their cities.  This alone

 

Col:      Mr. President, haste does make man stupid as well.  We must not lose the world when and if we strike first.  And what of nations that may copy us? Huge countries fighting over strips of land may blow each other up.

 

Fool:    But did we not, Mr. President, invade America? Did we not drive the Indians away from our towns? How then are we different from these terrorists? I mean it would be one thing, if we no longer do that, but what about our incinerating civilian Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; hasn’t the U.S. murdered more people than the terrorists?  We punish and keep the world in check, but who punishes the U.S.?  Who keeps us in check?

 

Wolf:  What are you suggesting Fool?  Don’t we have a right to defend ourselves?  I suppose you want us to beg for mercy towards the terrorists.  Oh please do come and bomb us, and after that we will not even clean up the mess, because we deserve it.  Is that what the world expects from the U.S.?  Are they resentful of the power we have?  Previously, we have had one major enemy the USSR.  We had no time to worry about being wholly fair to other nations while dealing with this enemy.  Not all can be treated fairly in this world.  It is impossible.  Filth is our origin, and while washing ourselves, we are bound to dirty others.  All of us are unclean.

 

Fool:    A criminal does not have a right to defend itself against the state even if he can, and if the U.S. has perpetrated crimes against other nations, just because it can defend itself does not make it that it has a right to do so.

 

Wolf:    There are no rights Fool.  Only Privileges.  We will defend ourselves because we can.  Our past matters not to us.  Our future matters not to us.  Nor does the world matter to us.  Only our survival matters to us.

 

Fool:    The U.S. must argue its case within the tenets of Justice; we must hold ourselves to the same standards we hold others.  If the U.S. has had criminal behaviors in the past then it should impeach and prosecute its commander in chief for the sake of the global community.  Why did you support Saddam and not remove him from office earlier?  Isn’t it criminal to have let him gas his people?

 

Wolf:    We did not want to risk a civil war, just as is happening right now.  We did not want the Ayatollah who called us the Great Satan to acquire more resources and suppress the moderate Iraqi people and force them to conform to his laws; laws which we disagree with and that goes against the grain of our constitution.  The world is too small for more than one ideology to exist.  Either we are right and must make everyone like us, or they are right and they must make everyone like them.  The Ayatollahs and we are both alike.  They want to Islamize the World, and we want to Americanize it.  Though the sad thing is we too are as regulative as they are, but we disagree the extent to which they prosecute their ends and the manners through which attain them.  We do not stone adulterers; nor do we whip them.  We never will.  We allow men and women to mingle; they don’t.  In some very basic matters we differ.   We will not allow such fascists to rule the world; but we will.

 

Fool:    Aren’t we fascists ourselves for imposing our will and ways of the world?

            And why do you hide behind vagaries like Islam and America?  Which Islam, and which America do you mean?

 

Wolf:    Aren’t they? And I mean what I mean; you know what I mean.

 

Wolf:    But what of our actions that result in the deaths of innocent civilians abroad that are meant to prevent the death of our citizens?  Are you denying the concept of self-defense?  If we make the case that Hussein was already on his way to acquiring weapons of mass destruction and that we are confident he would sooner or later use it against other Arab states and our own country either by himself or through selling them to others who hate us, then should we just wait for him to strike first knowing he intends to appropriate all the Arab lands for himself.   

 

Iraqi:    When you placed the sanctions, you killed our children.  How can you say terrorists are criminals when you yourselves are the greatest of criminals on earth? 

 

Wolf:    You must first prove we are criminals.  Everything we did abroad was to protect our nation from threats.  If we have to choose the safety of our children over yours, we will.  You would do the same too.  In the very attacks against us, you hint that you also believe in this.  You, too, would choose your children’s lives over ours.  If we do find ourselves in such a situation, neither you nor I have a right to reproach each other.  At best we are simply enemies, neither good nor evil.  Why Ayatollah?  Why do we side with Israel and not Palestine?  Muslim leaders promote a totalitarian government; we do not.  It is out of continued allegiance to our constitution that we side with countries that have a similar constitution to ours.  We cannot do otherwise.  Doing so would be to be untrue to our selves.  And if we do sometimes work with governments that do not adopt our values it is necessity that compels us.  We do not have the resources to fight all bad men simultaneously.  We use bad men to fight other bad men, if we have to.  But eventually we turn on the bad men we used.  We are traitors when we serve a higher good.  And so do they: the terrorists who terrorize our people themselves side with bad people like the Talibans.  The terrorists use the same tactics we use.  They are no better than us.

 

Fool:    And no worse?

 

Wolf:    No, they are worse, because they oppose American Democracy?  Because they have no Whitmans.  Because fundamentalists have no conception of fun.  I do not trust races that cannot dance.  The fundamentalist Muslims cannot.  Why would I want to be like them on that account?  Who can bear seriousness all the time.  We can’t.  They legislate against having fun; we don’t.  That is the difference between Democracies and Totalitarian systems.  Every laugh they must restrain.  Every deed they must scrutinize.  Such self-conscious people!  To heaven with them!

            Since those who attack us profess they love Allah, we will be more than obliged to send them to him.

 

 

Wolf:    I would not want to raise my children in a country that never produces any Whitman, Goethe, Nietzsche, Mozart, and Stravinsky.  Look at Europe.  It has writers and musicians.  Look at Muslim countries today.  What do they have?  Only the Islamic Law!  And a practically unfeasible set of policies at that for the twenty first century.  Muslims are by definition rigid as the truths they espouse they take to be timeless truths.  Individuality in our sense of the term and may be even genuine free-spirits will never emerge.  The best they can hope for is an individual who wholly personifies the Muslim spirit.  But how severe will such a person look to us.  How black and white will he be, we who are used to gray?  We Americans are idiosyncratic.  We do not tolerate rules of that are the strength of the Torah.  They are too strong for us.  We would rather be exceptions.  But in our own way, we too are as strong as those who espoused the Torah.  Americans believe in the values not out of religious convictions but they see it as their own.  As such it is even stronger perhaps than that found in an average religious person.  The atmosphere of religion makes every virtue hollow.  Only a few can articulate the sacredness of religious values.  Is this view of mine borne out of unjust resentment or just anger and despair?  Which is it, Fool?