21 February 2003

Short Waves

Oh, the world seems stale this morning. Maybe its me, maybe it is the disorientation of a week under snow. But it seems the news is sliced from the heel of the loaf and is as fresh as the forlorn gray snow still packed on the lifeless cars emerging from the drifts in the apartment parking lot. There was another fatal nightclub fire, this one in Providence, Rhode Island, with over ten dead. The place was called The Station and the band playing was a semi-famous one called Great White. They say pyrotechnics from the show set the ceiling on fire and things went to disaster from there.

Not a good week for nightclubs, or taking subways to get to them.

As I stirred this morning, I could have placed the morning report in any week since the Iraq crisis began. Maybe it is because of the enforced seclusion of the snowfall. I was pouring my first cup of coffee when the BBC featured the grandson of Mohandes K. Ghandi on the morning world report. He talked about nonviolence and the tradition of peaceful protest. He had the same reedy voice I remember his Grandfather had on the newsreels, the singsong diction and erudite vocabulary. His contends that America's policy against terrorism is an evil manifestation of post 9-11 hysteria, the Colossus crashing about in mindless rage. I love the Indian perspective on the news. I loved to listen to All-India Radio on the short-wave. It was like listening to the news beamed from Mars.

I thought about his Grandfather. Last fall, in Delhi, my guide just called him Ghandi-ji. He was proud to show us the site of his funeral pyre on the riverbank near the Red Fort. It is a park now, celebrating a life of peace and triumph cut down by a terrorist. Just down from that pyre is the park commemorating the life of Indira Ghandi, cut down by a terrorist, and then the park commemorating the life of her son, Rajiv, cut down by a terrorist.

I thought at the time that perhaps we should cut down the terrorists for a change. This morning it seems the Colossus is attempting to do exactly that. American troops are leaving not for the Gulf but for the Philippines to fight the Islamic Abu Sayef group.

In the Sirach Mountains, crack Persian troops are building roads to try to get to the remains of the Russian-made Ilyushin IL-76 transport that failed to clear the top of a peak by about 330 feet.

Everybody on the flight was a member of the Revolutionary Guards, an elite group established to guard the new regime and provide a politically reliable alternative force to the Shah's armed forces. Think of them as the Brownshirts of the Islamic State. Several of the victims are said to have been senior officers. Revolutionary Guards are barring all approaches to the mountain site. The weather is supposed to be awful, strong winds and rain and fog. Like Washington, there was heavy snow in many parts of Iran this week, including the crash site, which hadn't seen snow in three years.

Believe it or not, the Iranian government has blamed the crash on the US and the sanctions which have been in place since the Hostage Crisis of 1979. Bear with me, they have a case. I'll explain why in a minute.

1979 is where I came into the Islamic revolution, when my ship arrived in the North Arabian Sea to start the build up that lead to the failed military intervention at Desert One. Which directly lead to the election of Ronald Reagan, which lead to Star Wars and missile defense, and our training of the Mujahadeen to fight the Russians in Afghanistan, which lead to the collapse of the Russian Empire and the un-bottling of the genie of Islamic radicalism throughout the region.

And then, triumphant after the DESERT STORM that marked the high-water of the Cold War force, we slashed our budgets for foreign aid and human intelligence. And then we abandoned Afghanistan to the Taliban, which created a safe-state for al Qaida, who in turn went to war with the Russians in Chechnya and then with the West all over the world. It started here in America with the first attack on the World Trade Center, and continued a two-year increments with massive bomb detonations at American embassies in East Africa, attacks on warships and nightclubs and finally the shining airliners plunging into the glittering spires.

The Iranian contention is that US sanctions forced them to buy Russian, and it was a Russian airplane that crashed. In 1979, when the sanctions began, Iran began to augment its fleet of Boeing and European-made Airbus airliners with planes bought or leased from Russia. They could not buy American replacements, and they could not buy European-made Airbuses because about 40 percent of their parts are made in the US I did not know that the airline industry is just like cars. I have always tried to "buy American" where I could. I was, after all, briefly a member of United Autoworkers Local 215. But I don't see much point in that any more, any more than I listen to the short-wave radio.

It is a truly global world. Parts of everything are made everywhere. VW Beetles in Mexico, full-size sedans in Canada, Ford owns Jaguar, BMW builds Coopers and Mercedes owns Chrysler. You know the drill. Satellite dishes, too. The means of global communication untrammeled by the state. No need for a gigantic transmitter and antenna field to propagate the signals to the short-wave end of the electromagnetic spectrum.

We were talking about that at the office yesterday. Somebody said that the Islamic Revolution is a thin membrane stretching over an increasingly restive population. Particularly the kids. In my generation they were the ones who listened to Ayatollah Kohmeini on fuzzy cassette tapes or crackling short-wave radio from France. They were the ones who crashed into the US Embassy in Tehran. I came into the conversation late. I assumed they were talking about another generation of radicals, but I had it wrong.

This generation has been watching MTV. The girls have been watching women who are free to wear what they want. The next revolution in Iran might well be an outburst of individual freedom and the shattering of the myth of Islamic unity.

Or it might not. So although the news is stale this morning, the crisis being allowed to sit and for a few weeks until the arms inspectors report again to the Security Council on the first of March. But we are facing a world that could lurch in directions we do not understand. How can we? We may not understand the full consequences of what we do, but I am convinced that the determination to act is real. And all the moral posturing of the effete French or the placid Germans will not affect it one whit.

And whatever happens, we won't need to listen to it on the short-wave.