Tick-tock, tick-tock…

The news today is dom­i­nated by the events in the Azores, where U.K. Prime Min­is­ter Tony Blair, U.S.told the world body that its mem­bers had “overnight” to think about sup­port­ing the U.S.’s efforts to march on Bagh­dad.
“There’s a sim­ple choice,” Blair told reporters after the coun­cil of war. “Peo­ple have got to decide whether they are going to allow any sec­ond res­o­lu­tion to have the teeth to make it clear that there is a real ulti­ma­tum, and that’s what we are going to have to find out overnight.”
As Bush declared tomor­row is the “moment of truth” for the world to demand that Iraq dis­arm com­pletely and uncon­di­tion­ally, Iraqi pres­i­dent Sad­dam Hus­sein responded by threat­en­ing to unleash war “wher­ever there is sky, land or water.”
This, obvi­ously, is either a warn­ing or call for ter­ror retal­i­a­tion, which many — OK, me — have feared for a while. (Hear­ing the first plane snarl over­head at 8:45 a.m. Sept. 11, 2001 and watch­ing both tow­ers fall from blocks away makes one leery of a mis­guided for­eign pol­icy that has a goal of war with­out end, amen, and a blow­back that invites and encour­ages ter­ror attacks like sui­cide bomb­ings on the sub­ways.) The New York Times reports that anger at the Iraqi cam­paign is boost­ing al Qa’ida recruit­ment on three con­ti­nents, some­thing I men­tioned two weeks ago (scroll down.) In the Pales­tin­ian ter­ri­to­ries, Islamic fac­tions are call­ing explic­itly for a jihad against the West, and the United States in par­tic­u­lar. In a com­mu­niqué dis­trib­uted to jour­nal­ists dur­ing a march in Gaza City, Hamas Leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin called on the Islamic nation “to strike at West­ern inter­ests every­where if Iraq is con­quered. … The hate-drenched West, headed by Amer­ica, declared today a cru­sade on the [Islamic] nation and on the Mus­lim belief when it gath­ered to strike Iraq.”
Yassin called on the Iraqi peo­ple to join ranks under the ban­ner of jihad, and demanded that Iraq “open its bor­ders to all Mus­lims across the world so that they can play their part in the defen­sive bat­tle of the [Islamic] nation.”
Oddly enough, this hap­pened once before when a super­power invaded a Mus­lim coun­try and set up a pup­pet gov­ern­ment. Thou­sands of rad­i­cal­ized young men poured into the coun­try and began a guerilla cam­paign that even­tu­ally led to the the hum­bling of the super­power and its retreat. The coun­try even­tu­ally fell into chaos, gang­ster­ism, rule by war­lords and ultra­harsh Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ism. The coun­try, of course, is Afghanistan and the super­power was the Soviet Union.
And, omi­nously, I received an email today from a Mus­lim man in France who promised to become an “explo­sive martyr” — with no specifics given — in the event of a U.S. inva­sion of Iraq.
“Irak after this war, where childs and par­ents will die, Irak will rec­og­nize this zion­ist project [Israel] as [a] state but the world will cry and scream.
“Yes, I will be an explo­sive mar­tyrs [sic] as you said.”
If all that’s not enough to scare the crap out of you, in upstate New York a 20-lb. carp, just prior to being killed, allegedly began to yell in Hebrew, shout­ing “Tzaruch shemi­rah” and “Hasof bah,” which in essence means account for your­self for the end is near. (Can some Hebrew speak­ers check that trans­la­tion?)
The fish was even­tu­ally butchered and sold, prompt­ing a gefilte fish com­pany to toy with the idea of adopt­ing the slo­gan, “Our Fish Speaks for Itself.”
Jokes aside, the world seems closer to mid­night than ever. “I am liv­ing at the Villa Borgh­ese,” wrote Henry Miller in the open­ing line to Tropic of Can­cer. “There is not a crumb of dirt any­where, nor a chair mis­placed. We are all alone here and we are dead.”
It’s a beau­ti­ful day today in New York.

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