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To follow up on what Fred said yesterday ...
Fred made the following comments the other day and I just want to echo him on this one:One thing we have been missing, except here at Rantburg, is any kind of real assessment by the press of what makes up the Bad Guy organization. Even here, for fear of becoming too repetitive, I haven't been diligent in pushing my observation that the Bad Guyz are controlled by a cross between SPECTRE, the Council of Boskone, and The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. When we were kids -- those of us over a certain age, anyway -- you could tell the bad guys when you went to the movies or watched the teevee. They wore black hats and usually were the uglies. If you grew up reading Dick Tracy comix, you knew Pruneface and Flat-top weren't on the side of truth and goodness. Pirates, as everybody knows, had peg legs and eye patches and made people walk the plank. Even today, if you go to a Star Wars movie, you've got no real doubt as to who the bad guys are. Yet here we are, fighting a war to the death -- also a point not being pushed -- with an enemy largely consisting of Dick Tracy characters and (in some cases literally) pirates. We've got one-eyed Mullah Omar, peg-leg Basayev, and pruneface al-Libbi. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad looks like Vanessa del Rio's true love, fergawdsake. Nobody's walked the plank lately, but lots of people have had their heads cut off. We seem to have a lot more emotional reaction to the Katyn Forest massacre than the mass graves, still being filled, mind you, in Iraq. And we do have the Bad Guyz own words to dispell any lingering doubts that they're simply misunderstood or that they're somebody we could negotiate with, meet halfway. We've got one such article today, from Pakland. Yet this isn't a picture the media's painting. To me, that's where they're really falling down, and it's the weakest part of the entire war effort. We're fighting against characters who'd make good cartoons, complete with fanatical minions, and we're worried about their "civil rights." I'm with him on this one. Anybody who has examined the villain's gallery we've come to know and love over the last 4 years can't help but notice the more obvious similarity to some of the more colorful characters from popular fiction than any kind of historical parallel like the Soviet Bloc or the Nazis. I'm too young for Dick Tracy, so let me use Hydra or Cobra from my own youth. More to the point, not only do these guys look like comic book villains (all we need is for someone to show up in Darth Vader or Dr. Doom armor), they also kind of talk like them if you read over the Milan wiretaps that Alphabet City found or the various speeches, communiques, and rants that read like self-parodies if they didn't involve people's heads getting chopped off in the process. I've talked with people in law enforcement about this and they told me that mobsters used to talk like regular people, then they started trying to sound like The Godfather and today they want to sound like the cast of The Sopranos. So you figure people like Zarqawi grew up with the cartoon concept of what terrorists looked, acted, and sounded like, so that's what they became. Near as I can tell, the Bad Guys more or less consist a vast insidious conspiracy, which may be one of the reasons why they believe that there's an opposite number running our side. At the top of it all, we have a nefarious meglomaniac who even went to the point of pseudo-faking his own death and then staging his return at the height of the US presidential election. If that isn't something out of a bad Hollywood script, I don't know what is. But there's even more to it than that, and I'm just talking about Binny here. His mentor, Abdullah Azzam, died under mysterious circumstances, and he even opted talking with his minions Darth Sidious style, with a hood covering his head back when he was "dead" according to Ghailani and KSM. He's also got an evil sidekick in Ayman, who is also his stalwart But wait, it doesn't end there! We have criminal masterminds (Dawood Ibrahim) running the South Asian equivalent of Black Sun, a rogue intelligence agency with entirely too much power (the ISI), a state that looks like something dreamed up by Machiavelli on his darker days (Pakistan), the Council of Boskone in the Soddy elite, a religious conspiracy for world domination in the Supreme Council of Global Jihad that looks like something dreamed up out of the worst anti-Catholic or Masonic conspiracy theories (pick your poison), and a whole host of exotic henchmen every bit as evil as anybody who was ever dreamed up by George Lucas, Jack Kirby, or Stan Lee. We have our own Count Dooku working out of Chechnya at the behest of an evil master, fergawdsakes! What more do you want? Fred and I have discussed on occasion why the government seems to want to isolate the population from the war as much as possible. I think it's a bad idea and still do, even more with everything I've find out about the Bad Guys over the last year or so. All the same, one of the reasons why I can't help but wonder why the government doesn't explain the way stuff is to the general public is because of just how ridiculous an enemy we're up against. Based on everything we've learned over the last couple of years, you don't get the picture of a ruthless and determined adversary out to destroy our way of life so much as you do the plot of a really, really bad novel. Just my $0.02. Posted by: Dan Darling 2005-05-08 |
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