Iraq: A Domestic Call

On every cop show you see, it is stated that the calls that police most hate to answer are for domestic disturbances, mainly fights between husbands and wives.

In college I met a man and a woman who, after graduation, married each other. For a while I kept in contact with them, mainly because of the interest we shared in writing. But it wasn't long before those two were at each other's throats, and with that visiting them lost any point that it may once have had. As a staunch believer in avoiding personal confrontations at almost any cost, I was amazed and baffled at how they had lost all interest in talking about anything or doing anything except taking verbal and sometimes physical chops at each other.

In that way I got a good glimpse into the virulence and the all-consuming nature of domestic differences.

The situation in Iraq is just such a disturbance. There the battling pair consists of the Shi'ites and the Sunnis, with cousins -- the Iranians, the Kurds, the Turks, the Israelis, the Bin Laden bunch, and others -- standing by to lend a hand or looking for some advantage for themselves to be gained from all the turmoil and bloodshed.

In the days when Democrats ran the U.S. Government, Republicans were quick to condemn U.S. involvement overseas of various kinds as attempts to be the "world's policemen," but now the Republicans themselves are neck deep in an exceptionally violent domestic call made worse by a large number of factors, such as that they have too much of a superiority complex to even pretend to be good police, and they don't speak the language or share the culture of the quarrelers, and they weren't called.

Now, those who were in control in Iraq, the minority Sunnis, have had their hand weakened, but, like formerly controllers everywhere, they aren't about to concede quickly to their former underlings, anymore than the Shi'ites, better able now to contest the situation, are about to bow down again to the Sunnis.

The laughable but also very sad thing about all this is that the "cops" not only think that they have something useful to say but also that there is a chance that things will quiet down enough to allow them to get back into their cars and drive back to the doughnut shop with the satisfaction of a job well done. They don't realize that this is a fight that has been going on for several times longer than their country, the U.S., has even existed, and that means that, because it is a quasi-religious matter and therefore not rooted in any kind of reality, it is fated to continue for an eon or two longer. These sorts of matters have enormous half-lives in the Middle East. The Israelis should be able to attest to that.