The job in front of you...
23 February 2006 | Ron Pickrell

Posted on 02/23/2006 9:20:19 PM PST by pickrell

In a recent post here on Freerepublic, the dean of the graduate school of business at the American University of Paris believes that an internally built rebellion, aimed at toppling the clerics in Iran, cannot succeed due to the ruthless efficiency of the Iranian security services. The argument runs that only the thought of a nuclear Iran commands any attention from the outside world. "No foreign power can ever care about us Iranians, more than we care about ourselves." His argument concludes that only those Iranian expatriots safely outside of Iran can intervene to topple the current barbaric clerical rule.

Iranian student activists are quoted as maintaining that, "So long as our people are oppressed, our children raised as barbarians and taught to live as cave dwellers, we are Iranians aspiring to love and freedom…. We look forward to the extended hands of our sisters and brothers, to those of the children of Adam and Eve, those of the noble peoples of the world, to come to our rescue in helping us regain our due place in the concert of the civilized nations."

They are mistaken.

The American intervention in Iraq occurred because of a variety of factors not present in Iran; and the hope of Iranians now living under the barbaric conditions within that sad country, that the Marines will also depose what the Iranians cheered on in 1979, is less than a hollow dream. It is a bitter illusion.

The Leninists spent the night dancing in Russia after the fall of the Czar. They never danced again in their lifetimes, once the consequences of their "victory" was brought home to them under the iron boots of the communists. It fell to their grandchildren to begin the process of redemption. Eight decades and arguably a hundred million deaths is the tune the piper demanded.

Such is the cost of tossing freedom into the dust. It is a sad and horrifying thing to realize how easy it is to disdainfully tread upon that which others paid for with their lives, in a legacy then rejected by their countrymen. How bitter and bloody the long quest to regain it.

It must prove almost unmerciful to the Iranians to watch the chance for freedom purchased for the Iraqis by so much Marine and G.I. blood. Hiding in their homes from the bitter whip of the Islamic enforcers, they must naturally entertain hopes that once the Iraqis stand up, that the Americans will also liberate Iran soon.

Again, they are mistaken. I say this not in the spirit of unkindness, but in the harsh demanding voice of the Drill Instructor who must firmly dispel any ideas that a platoon of Marines, cut off and surrounded by the enemy, can crouch deeper in their foxhole and just wait for rescue. "You wanna live- you wanna a beer- you damnsure fight like madmen to live ta' get one. There's only you, your team... and the job in front of you. Momma's busy at home, and Dad went fishin, girls.... "

No one, including those American fighting men who have liberated so many all over the world, in the course of our 230 years as a Republic, wants to die. Everyone wants someone else to "make it go away". And finding yourself locked into a situation where everyone and anyone could be an informant, and discovery or even suspicion invites a retribution where torture gives way only to the cooling embrace of death, doesn't make the brochure any more attractive.

Americans aren't small enough to wish further ill upon the populace who killed several of our military officers and held so many diplomats and others captive during the mad years of the mullah ascendency. The hell they brought upon themselves for nearly 3 decades now, has so outweighed the anger of America, that we would just as soon leave them to their own devices, whether of manufacture or of torture as they choose, and simply wish them well.

Control of any body of people, in the absence of consent of the governed, can only be accomplished by the application of efficient brutality. But terror is only effective when the means of the victims to communicate with each other and begin the organization of resistance can also be extinguished. For the ruling hunta, this has the added benefit of concealing from outside eyes all indications of the prevailing mood of the people.

Snippets will escape in the form of anecdotal testimony and the pleas of any exiled resistance movement; but as has been learned the hard way, those in the ex-patriot opposition often have their own axes to grind, and a loose interpretation of "fact". Testimony as to the readiness of the populace for liberation must be taken with a mosque full of salt.

Yet most of this is beside the point. It doesn't matter that it will involve suicidal risk on the part of those in Teheran who wish for a release from hell for their children. It doesn't matter that efficient mechanisms of betrayal will render so many deaths as fruitless. And it really doesn't matter that young Iranians should not have to throw their lives away to bring down a system despised by so many.

You see, a large number of American soldiers should not have had to offer their lives to stop the madmen of the last 20 wars or so. They, too, had plans for their lives. They, too, shouldn't have had to make the biggest payment.

But they did. And they did because of that abiding love that seizes the hearts of young men who will interpose their very bodies between their communities and the evil that other men callously allowed to incubate.

They did the job that was in front of them.

They took down the Iraqi regime by invasion because we knew that Iraqi generals forced to publicly kneel down and kiss the hand of Saddam in front of their troops, would not inspire any loyalty and self sacrifice on the part of those troops. Only the averted eyes and the despair of the conscripted. It is not that the Iraqis are worthless as fighting men- it is just that Iraq, unlike America, had not shown them a community and a culture worth dying for.

We are adjusting their thoughts at present, and offering the chance, but only the chance, for them to seize a future for themselves, which doesn't include blowing up children, and gang raping women to death for dress code infractions.

The job is in front of them.

U.S., British, Polish and Australian blood has forestalled the massive death that would have occurred in an uprising against Saddam. The marsh Arabs of southern Iraq can testify as to the cost of trying and failing. The Kurds can attest to the esteem in which they will forever hold those young foreigners who paid for the future.

But for those of you in Iran, no such happy occurrence will set aside your time of tears. I only say this because R. Lee Ermy isn't there closeup-in-your-face, to make you understand.

The job is in front of you, and whether you want to live or not- whether you are afraid or not-, doesn't figure into the present situation. The fact is that evil has been let into your house, and engulfs your children and grandchildren. Despair over the unfairness, or the hopelessness of it all, cuts about as much ice now as a couscous hacksaw.

With no communications on a national scale, groups of young Iranians must periodically stage their own Bunker Hills, so as to test the waters, at the cost of their own deaths, as to whether the people are with them. It's easy to say, and not so easy to do. We know that. It's why we revere our own forefathers.

Your lives, your fortunes and your sacred honor... has a whole new meaning when it's now... and it's you... If you're fated to have a bomb strapped on you anyway at some time in the future, your only real choice now is what you want to leave for your children. But you better make the choice while it's still yours to make.

Watch a few old newsreels of the devastation in Berlin, as the city finally fell to the Allies. Watch them again and again. These men who have seized your country will bring all of that and more to your homes and communities. The pleasant people in our "mainstream" media will not say these terrible things to you. They are too much the sophisticated citizens of the world. Instead, it falls to us oldsters, to make you youngsters in a different land understand, that the clock is ticking.

We invaded Germany 60 years ago, and lost many thousands of good men. We then took Okinawa, in the Pacific, preparatory to an invasion of the Japanese mainland, and found that the suicide bomber, the Kamikazi, was their preferred response to our attempts to end the war. They drove their civilians off cliffs to die gruesomely. They drilled women and children to die in defense of the homeland. "Seven American deaths for every Japanese". Not to win the war for the Japanese, you understand, but simply to kill as many Americans as possible until the Empire fell. A matter of honor, they explained, before we tripped the trapdoor, and hung them.

Your mullahs ordered waves of Iranian teenagers in the 1980's to clear minefields the hard way, and to exhaust the ammunition of Iraqi machine gunners. Standing on the piles of adolescent skulls of uncountable numbers, they now boast that a million more young Iranians stand ready to die heroically, so as to kill Americans. Are you eager for your sons to be conscripted? If so, then also watch the newsreels of the surrender of Japan.

We ended that war... with nuclear weapons. It couldn't have happened any other way, in spite of the prognostications of the meatheads in our Universities. We didn't make the decision... the Japanese military did. We will not spend cheaply the lives of our troops, as your enlightened religious leaders do.

Understand this... despite what your leaders promise you, we have more nuclear weapons than you will ever have; we have more conventional weapons than you will ever have; but more importantly, we have over two centuries of experience in never bowing to the scimitar of Islam, or any other totalitarian force, for that matter. You might say that we have made a habit of it. Our young men will not die as willingly as yours will, but they will facilitate yours in that purpose with a terrible efficiency if you leave us no choice. And we will equip them with anything which will ensure that outcome, at whatever the cost in Democratic politicians.

You can watch Berlin, and Hiroshima, re-animate to render your nation a scattered collection of hill and cave-dwellers, such as Bin Laden has become. You can die in those ashes, secure that the forfeiture of your children's future at least bought a few more months or weeks for you of safety from that numerically smaller group of the mullahs' enforcers with all the guns, or ...

... you can suck it up and do the job that is in front of you.

We don't wish you ill, but you need to clean your own house. We can't do it. We won't do it. Don't expect it or even dare wish for it. There's only you and your team.