The Letter

I’m glad I am not heading for Newark today. The monsoon that passed through here over the weekend has stalled over the Northeast, and the water is rising. There are endless delays at the airport, and I cannot think of anything more depressing than being trapped on an airplane, waiting to disembark in …. Newark .

That would be a topic of conversation, were the news from the devastated area of Pakistan not so morbidly compelling. Everyone is talking about it, not seeking intimacy, but perhaps the reassurance that something so horrible could not happen to us. Even with the graphic evidence of the storms that points to the fact that it can.

The driving thing about humans is their need to talk to one another. It is about ego, I suppose, the need to assert a sense of self. Then it is the need to inveigle ourselves into intimacy, or out of it, or to confirm that it continues.

Men and women are said to have different approaches to talking, and hence the sharing of information. Scientists attribute it to a difference in the connections between the sides of the brain, but I know that both the sexes have a compulsion to talk, whether it is about the state of the relationship or the collapse of the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.

The powerful and the weak both need to talk. Aftab Ahmed Sherpao is the Pakistani Minister of the Interior. His English is fabulous, and he was talking up a storm about how hard they were working on the relief effort. People needed to understand that all the helicopters and tents were being used, everything was fully committed. He sounded a little hysterical at the end of his sound byte, but I certainly understand why.

Ghazi Kanaan gave an interview two days ago in Damascus . He needed to talk, perhaps to get something off his chest. He was most lately Syria ‘s Interior Minister, but he had been the Big Dog in Lebanon for twenty years before that. The chickens were coming home to roost on the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri, the former prime minister of Lebanon . He reformed the local economy and was a prosperous capitalist. He had a big estate here in Washington , where it is usually safer than Beirut . But the modifications he made to the historic property were the talk of the town for a while.

It is said that Kanaan was responsible for Hariri’s murder. He denied it in a press conference, and saying that the interview might be his last, departed for his office. He was found there a few hours later,  a single bullet wound through the roof of his mouth exiting the back of his head. There is a lot of talk about that. He was a tough cookie, and not prone to hysteria. Maybe the real story was closer to young President-for-life Assad, but if it was, he isn’t talking yet.

People need to talk, even when it is difficult to do so. Sailors are an innovative case in point. Being out on the ship in the old days was an exercise in solitude, since the only way to talk to the shore was through the ship’s radio, controlled by a scowling Chief Petty Officer, index fingers curled around the handles of well-seasoned coffee cups.

Sequestered on the USS Forrestal one month, I was amazed to find that some enterprising troops had rigged CB radio antennas in the overhead of the foc’sle. They could only have been of use in the local operating area, but talking to Momma, or the bookie, or whoever, was of critical importance to them.

The other way to communicate was through the lost art of semaphore hand-talking. The first time I saw it was when USS Midway was alongside another capital ship for the intricate ballet of underway replenishment. I forget which ship it was, and as I watched them rig the high-line between the gray hulls, I realized that men were signaling to each other across the narrow band of water. Not with the exaggerated waving of flags, arms outstretched, but with small compact motions of the hands held close to the belt, index fingers pointing rapidly in a compact shorthand version of the official procedure. There must have been dozens of covert conversations going on across the gap, hands and fingers flying.

I have no idea what they were saying- most people don’t, which is why they always had a communicator go down and review the decorations in the hangar bay before important ceremonies. The signal flags were colorful, and nautical, but there was more than one case in which the bright pennants signed out something colorful about the President, or his mother.

Even master terrorists huddled in dank caves need to talk. In fact, they may need to talk more, based on their isolation. The leadership of al Qaida are quick learners, and avid readers of the international press. When they realized their phones were tapped, they switched to cell phones. When the cell phone signals began to attract smart bombs, they threw them away.

They have great discipline, taping their communications, or entrusting letters to couriers sworn to die. One of them was intercepted recently, and the text of a letter from Osama’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri to Jordanian-born insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been posted on the Director of National Intelligence’s web page.

Ambassador Negroponte vouches for its authenticity, and you can read it in English or Arabic, if you can. I read it with interest, since I don’t get a chance to peruse other people’s mail much since I retired. It is a long rambling missive, filled with “In the name of God,” and “peace be unto him” and all that stuff.

The letter is a curious mix of things, but being private correspondence, it is quite honest and chatty. Al-Zawahiri says the war is just beginning, and will continue after the Crusader Americans and their lackeys leave Iraq . He laid out the vision for the future:

Sharia Law will be established in the next Iraq ;

Iraq will be the focal point for the destruction of the surrounding secular states;

The Caliphate will be re-established and it will be headquartered in Egypt ;

It will take generations for the Umma to be fully educated and conquer all

But conquer they will.

As to tactics, al-Zawahari comes across as an avuncular Machiavelli. He indicated he was a little short on cash, up there in his cave, and asked for $100,000 in petty cash to re-establish communications. He also gently chided the Iraqi leader for the severity of his methods, not that they are unjustified, of course, peace to be him, and may his posterity be great.

He suggested Zarkawai stop murdering the apostate Shias so publicly, refrain from beheading captives, and accept the minor doctrinal differences in the insurgent factions. All these things can be taken care of later, and he reminded Zarkawi that a bullet is just as effective as a beheading, and does not generate nearly so much revulsion when the results are shown on the media.

Even other believers have a hard time with that, and the battle is at least half being played out in the media, just like Vietnam .

Zawahiri has studied up on the last time the Americans were defeated. He has time in the cave. He thinks the Vietnamese leaders used the press masterfully. He says the Muslim people just are getting the wrong message out of the wholesale slaughter of Shia civilians, and while education would help, a change in tactics might be useful. Not that someone so far away from the action on the ground could comment authoritatively, as he hastens to add several times.

It is an interesting letter, and it would be useful if all the people arguing about the war would read it. I am still trying to wrap my brain around how this might have been done better; the Bad Guys are implacable, and committed to the Final Triumph of the Faith against the West, regardless of how we pussyfoot around their motivations. 

Of course we fear such talk would insult the silent Muslim majority, and even the Bad Guys know it. The reaction in the Arab street to the way war is being conducted by al Qaida in Iraq is being noted, even in remote caves in the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan.

People are talking.

They have to. They are only human.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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