Amr Amr Mohammed Al-Faisal

Last week I had lunch with a French journalist friend of mine in Paris. The food, as you may want to know, was excellent. We discussed many things including the situation in the Arab world.

During the conversation my friend said he was appalled at the Iraqi resistance’s attacks on their own country’s infrastructure including electricity stations, water pipelines and oil installations. At one point he burst out: “They are nihilists”.

I pointed out to him that the Iraqi resistance were anything but nihilists. They were merely applying a military tactic as old as war itself, which is the tactic of scorched earth.

The tactic has been used many times in history and by many different people — an example is the scorched earth tactic used by the Russians when Napoleon invaded their country in 1812. The Russians burned everything in the French Army’s path up to and including setting Moscow itself on fire. The Russians did this to deny the French any sustenance or succor while they were on the sacred (to them) soil of their motherland. Napoleon was forced to retreat and his power was broken forever.

This is precisely what the Iraqi resistance is doing, in the hope of achieving a similar result.

The true nihilists are the neoconservatives in Washington DC. They are the ones who wish to engulf the entire region from Indonesia to Morocco in a flame of war, civil war and revolution, with regimes collapsing and nations being dismembered and the whole world spinning into anarchy.

And all that for what?

It is on the green banks of the Potomac that savage dreams of blood and iron are dreamt. The dreamers on the Tigris, on the other hand, dream of peace, unity and freedom.

On a lighter note, I am embarrassed to admit that I derive considerable amusement watching various members of the current US administration eating humble pie. I watched Colin Powell’s performance in Geneva with interest and was reminded of a story widely known in the Arab world.

A long time ago, a Turkish pasha (general) after retiring from the army fell upon hard times. His friends advised him to sell radishes in the market in order to earn a living. So he put some radishes on a tray and went down to the market to sell them. As he approached the market he remembered his days in the army where he commanded hundreds of men and was feared by all, and suddenly he felt humiliated. So he began to shout: “Radishes, you dogs! Fresh radishes, you donkeys!”

Need I say more?

(The second part of “Armies as a Mirror of Civilization” will be published next week.)