In college, I played judo to win, and so during a pre-match warm-up, I paid attention when my coach pointed out my tournament opponent’s taped ankle and her wrists wrapped in ace bandages.
“She tapes those places because they hurt,” said my coach. “Remember that when you fight her.”
It seemed unsporting. But the ankle sweep is a traditional judo move, so when our match began, I brought the side of my foot against hers with all my might, several times, as I pulled her uniform sleeves tight against her taped wrists.
I could feel her flinch in pain. So I smacked just below her ankle again. And again. And I won. Because I hit the places that hurt.
This is why the Americans and their allies are targeted in the Middle East. The American people, militarily untouchable, have let the terrorists know what really bothers them.
We have taped our hurting places for the enemy to see. Kidnapping, decapitation, and its memorialization on video cassette, hurts Americans.
So expect to see more of it. Americans are used to being in control. They are used to tough-talking leadership, used to their military marching abroad at the slightest and greatest provocations.
And they are used to living in a world made uniquely safe for them by wealth and accidents of geography.
But kidnapping, hostage-taking, quasi-court hearings with masked killers pronouncing irreligious judgments and jump suited “prisoner” quaking and screaming in terror, begging for mercy these are things that one cannot control.
Not with traditional warfare, anyway. Not with arms. Not with coalitions and tutelage governments.
Kidnappers do not kill “cleanly,” or at a distance, as one does with a gun — something Americans are very accustomed to, or from the eagle eye’s view of an Apache gunship helicopter.
No. Kidnappers get in close. They actually touch their targets, grapple with them, wrestle them down get dirty, get bloody, and are “blooded.”
That is why the O.J. Simpson trial mesmerized the world several years ago, and the dramatic Scott Peterson trial transfixes today. Both men were accused of killing their wives and others up close and very personal.
DNA under the nails-close, blood in the nose and hair-close.
Americans are used to cleaner kills. Shooting, strafing, or dropping their airship’s load, and moving on. Tossing the gun away, or getting out of the chopper, going home and becoming a normal person again.
Thus, the killing of civilians and others in combat becomes a very clinical, “clean” experience. Odd that the military calls it an “operation,” a medical term. “Surgical strike.” “Clinical precision.” The West equates its own killing methods with cleanliness, even with healing.
Those who beheaded Nicholas Berg, allegedly Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi and his followers, referenced the famous Battle of Badr in justification.
Badr was where “the two armies met in combat. One was fighting in the Cause of God, the other resisting God.” The Muslim forces faced heavily armed and armored pagan-worshipping forces, over twice their numbers, and against insurmountable odds, defeated the pagans by striking with swords the one place not covered by impenetrable armor — the neck. The place that hurts.
Al-Qaeda and Zarqawi and company continue to develop and change along lines that remain purposefully entrenched in idealized Qur’anic justification, and at the same time hold significant clues as to how they seek to thwart American’s latest exercise in “manifest destiny.”
The Madrid train station attack, which initiated Spain’s withdrawal from Iraq by popular mandate, has profound security implications for NATO. And the beheadings of American Jews with Israeli ties sent specific messages that insurgents viewed the Iraqi struggle partly in political anti-Zionist terms.
It is indeed odd that the West continues to deny the significant role its unquestioning alliance with Israel plays in the conflict.
Zionism is the Middle East’s hurting place. America denies this. And so Zarqawi and other “movers” expanded geopolitical tactics.
The killing of the South Korean “businessman,” a fundamentalist Christian missionary, could potentially polarize South Korea popular opinion from its government, and destabilize one of the world’s most important geopolitical military alliances — that between South Korea and its military protector, the United States, which staved off a potential World War III in the 1950s by pushing communist North Korean forces back to the infamous 38th parallel.
Even with the Soviet Union’s recent demise, its former patron state, North Korea, unabashedly “going nuclear,” remains a key strategic player in world affairs.
To move the South Koreans away from the United States at this particular time, even slightly, as Al-Zarqawi and company clearly aspires to do, could eventually destabilize the entire Asian region. The prospect of an economically-prosperous South Korean reunification with a nuclear-armed North is an alarming thought and is the West ready for this?
Not if it is orchestrated by terrorists who provoke Korean anti-Americanism. Influencing Spanish elections, altering the NATO alliance, creating Asian hegemonies.
Pretty heady stuff for a couple of masked men armed with nothing but homemade bombs and knives. But then, wasn’t it just a gang armed with box cutters who started this whole mess? Al Qaeda, Al-Zarqawi and kidnappers. “Barbarians,” as US President Bush says? Or foreign policy geniuses? Either way, they’re at the gate. Ready to strike at the places where it hurts.
(Sarah Whalen is an expert in Islamic law and taught law at Loyola University School of Law in New Orleans, Louisiana.)
