Apocalypse Tomorrow

The world is going to end, and it is going to be in seventy-two years. The signs are all around us, if you know how to look at it.

I scribbled furiously in my notebook. The professor from Rice University was quite articulate about it. He did not use the Christian calendar. He used the Islamic date for the rapture, or the end, or whatever it is going to be.

Islam counts the years based on a lunar calendar of twelve equal months. That makes a year 354.36 days long. They are counted since the Hijra, or the Prophet’s emigration to Medina in AD 622. Time began On 16 July of that year, ceasing to be Anno Dominae, and becoming Anno Hegirae. The apocalypse is scheduled for AH 1497 .

That equates to 2076 AD, the American tri-centennial.

I won’t be there, I think, though one could easily imagine the kids rising that morning, a little querulous with age, and it would really be the problem of the grandchildren. But it is certainly within the span of a life, if one were born this afternoon. So that is part of the mystery that we do not see, though we are participating.

It had not appeared to be a day filled with portents and signs. I was cranky, since didn’t get to write in the pre-dawn since I was busy writing…office stuff…crap…the monthly flak piece styled after a Kipplinger newsletter…and couldn’t stop inserting three dots after each significant thought…you know the feeling…

But I traded some sleep and creative time to attend the conference, because it was important. It had not been a propitious start. I turned into the wrong underground garage complex. It was a private one, and at the bottom of a long concrete chute was a magnetic card reader and an implacable barrier. Soon I had cars behind me. I was pinned in the narrow chute, trapped like a rat. If rats drove late-model convertibles and were on their way to important meetings, that is.

Finally freed with the intercession of a caustic attendant, I parked the car at a meter on the street. “All may park, All must pay,” read the label on the meter. It was Arlington County’s way of being even-handed with it’s differently-abled population.

The International Conference on Adversary Cultural Knowledge and National Security was perhaps the most important meeting in town this week, though goodness knows there are dozens of meetings. The multi-purpose room of the Crystal City Sheraton was packed, standing room only. I squeezed up against the wall, sipping coffee out of one of those frustrating little hotel coffee cups and trying not to splatter it down my suit. On the podium was retired Major General Robert Scales. He wore a dark suit and an air of command. He was skewering the military system that sent our troops in harm’s way without the preparation to know what they were up against. The General knows something about being up against things. He began his career with a Silver Star from a place called Dong Ap Bia. The convention is that the winner gets to name the battle. We called it Hamburger Hill. A tactical victory in a series in which our forces were never defeated in the field and the war was lost.

General Scales is one of the small class of military intellectuals. He advocates education and cultural context as requirements for advancement. He is a bit of a a curiosity, like retired Marine General Tony Zinni, a man who thinks about what we are doing and how we do it.

I leaned against a wall and nodded as he spoke. Looking around the packed house I surveyed the audience. There were a lot of women, some civilian and some military. A lot of special operations types, in uniform and out of it. And a lot of the people I worked with in the aftermath of 9/11. Spooks and State Department guys, intellectuals if you will, people with some overseas experience and context. They had been gathered together in a Pentagon basement to try to craft a national message addressing the legitimate concerns of our adversary while framing the context for victory for the West.

That was the Information Operations Task Force. It was a tactically-oriented organization. But there had been more, over time, as we saw the enormity of the problem. I saw a couple folks from the Pentagon office that got shut down by the poisonous stories of a New York Times journalist who sniffed a threat to democracy amid the stench of flesh from the Towers downtown.

I quit the information business after the idea of influencing people overseas crashed and burned. I did what was logical, taking a position in Public Emergency response, since I assumed that if the information campaign failed, we would have to deal with more disasters.

So it was an emotional moment to see all the earnest people in the audience, still trying to figure out the context of this war. It appeared we did not know the enemy or what he wanted.

The General finished, outlining a bold future but acknowledging that an idea without resources was a hallucination in the Pentagon. There was no support for his ideas of cultural and regional education for the officer corps. There was not support for it, none, even with army embracing the enemy with high explosives and car bombs slaughtering the innocent.

I stayed for the first break in the conference. The monthly newsletter was calling me at the office downtown…three dot highlights from capitalism…

I followed a small knot of people downstairs and smoked with the brilliant PhD who put this together. She was energized, pleased with the response. The idea that cultural anthropologists and sociology had something to do with this struggle was something quite new for the establishment, though it should have been evident before the start, from the very beginning.

I told her how impressed I was, and that though business called, I would try to return. She raced away to ensure the next seminar would start in a timely manner, and I turned to walk to my car. As I turned I gazed into a set of blue eyes blazing over a bushy orange beard tinged with gray. The owner of the eyes was a tall man, athletic. A man gone native, I thought, like Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.

I had heard that Special Forces and SEALS in Afghanistan were growing beards, wearing local clothing and learning to quote the Koran. The Major, and he was one, was fresh from the Triangle of Death, and he was eager to talk. He was just back, and he burned with a messianic fervor. Talk about tribal loyalty, codes of honor, ancient means of negotiation spilled from him. ”All we have to do is understand” he said. ”Then we can fight.” His eyes glowed.

I excused myself, saying that I hoped I would see him later. Then the day. I dealt with the newsletter, and a hundred e-mail, and a supplication to the Director of the Agency that was co-sponsoring the Adversary conference. I took a call warning me of about stirring up tribal resentment in the Company, a gentle warning that I was causing a stir. There might be danger.

Danger is entirely relative, I sighed. I shut down my computer, thinking that if I hustled I could hear the last session of the day at the conference. It was devoted to Culture and the Global War on Terror. I took the elevator to the lobby and switched to the garage lift in haste. I exited the garage, scraping my bumper on one of the concrete walls down below.

There is never enough room in the garage, and arriving late on the day that everyone was back at work had not made it any better.

I flew out of town and over the 14 th Street Bridge. Thank God, praise Jesus, a twelve-hour meter available right across from the Sheraton. I fed enough quarters into the meter to cover the rest of the afternoon.

The break was just over, and the session re-convened. The auditorium was not over-packed as it was in the morning, and I was able to sit, notebook poised.

I was not ready for lyrics of the hypnotic song that began from the podium. First up on the panel was a fleshy young PhD from Rice who could speak the tongue. ”It ends in 2076, 72 years from now,” he said. His bio read that he was a student of the Koran, and of the body of Jihadi literature. And of the Apocalypse, from the eyes of the enemy.

”You must understand…not for some it ends…for millions …and every sign and portent of each day is a marker on the road to apocalypse. It is an article of faith to the Believer, and it all fits. Look around you.”

I listened to him with growing fascination, and when he left the podium to catch a plane, to the acerbic psychiatrist who had been the CIA Liaison to the Mujahadeen in their fight in Afghanistan. He was filled with contempt for those who said the Muj had ever won anything except for one battle in 1987. Everything else, every victory was done with what we had given them. The notion that they had defeated the Soviet Union was absurd.

He said we had killed most of al Qaida, almost all the cadre Bad Guys who had come from Egypt in the beginning. There were just more of them, because of the way we had done what we did. But it was true that the link to ancient days was alive now, the link to the conquest of Persia and Byzantium. The Soviet Union was Persia, and the United States was Byzantium. That is why they thought as they did.

The Doctor was followed by my British friend Andrew, a former associate, who described his study of the Big War. He had gone back in time to find what we had done to influence the Germans, make them not want to fight anymore. He intended to apply those lessons to the current conflict, and he described nearly being shut down in the reaction to the New York Times articles. I agreed with him, I agreed with his dry Oxford diction. I nodded over my notebook, thinking about the missed chances.

Then came the epiphany. A rumpled man, a poet-warrior from Johns Hopkins, took the rostrum. He had no slides on the big screen, but his voice was lyrical. He made the dance between our cultures understandable, made me feel the rhythm. From the time of Constantine moved his empire East, through the Hijra. Two great powers falling.

Osama thinks his time has come, Russia and the US falling to holy war, renewing his faith in time for the Apocolypse. The past is living through him. Al Zarkawi the Jordanian thinks he is a 7 th Centry warrior and every sign and portent is pointing toward a moment of destiny.

All the people of the book entwined. Muslim and Christian, Jew and Zoroastrian. All together in this dance, dreamlike. Murders and lovers…family. In our messianic quest to spread Democracy we are providing the false messiah to the Faithful. It fits, it all fits. Jerusalem is part of it, and the Temple Mount and the sons of Abraham. Where is the real Messiah, and who will wear the mantle of the true God? The days are numbered, and each moment has its sign.

America is playing to something that resonates deeply in Islam and we do not know it. There are people in Texas who want apocalypse just as much, want to bring on the end of days. They burn with a fiery yearning for God’s revelation on the dusty plain of Armageddon.

It is a Sufi concept, really, holy mystic stuff. I hadn’t thought about it being abroad in the streets of Texas.

I did not wake that morning intending to see the dancers all entwined. A moment of revelation, Ins’ Hallah. Viewed from the right angle, this is all God’s will, whoever he is. Waiting for the Madhi’s return. Waiting for the end of time, of which the days are numbered in the Book.

Baptist and Sunni dancing together.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra

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