I like to read fiction. A habit I picked up during my working years when there were lots of periods of forced confinement...in airplanes. Fiction, especially "thrillers," helped pass the time. Two or three books on a trip. Somketimes, the fiction proved to be truer than the non-.
For example, here is a quote from a memo which appeared in a book I read:
"...The ideal outcome [of a successful assassination of Saddam Hussein] would, of course, be for any successor regime...to take the form of a humane and democratic government.
"We believe such a hope to be illusory.
"In the first place, Iraq is not nor ever was a united country. It is barely a generation away from being a patchwork quilt of rival, often warring tribes. It contains in almost equal parts two potentially hostile sects of Islam...plus three Christian minorities. To these...add the Kurdish nation...
"In the second place, there has never been a shred of democratic experience in Iraq...
"In the event, therefore, of the sudden end of the present dictatorship by assassination, there are only two realistic scenarios.
"The first would be an attempt to impose from outside a consensus government embracing all the principal factions along the lines of a broadly based coalition.
"In the view of this group, such a structure would survive in power for an extremely limited period. Traditional and age-old rivalries would need little time literally to pull it apart.
"The Kurds would certainly use the opportunity...to opt for secession and the establishment of their own republic...
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
"To the southeast, The Shi'a majority around Basra and the Shatt-al-Arab would certainly find good reason to make overtures to Tehran. Iran would be sorely temped to avenge the slaughter of its young people in the ...Iraq-Iran war by entertaining those overtures in the hope of annexing southeastern Iraq in the face of the helpless Baghdad.
"The pro-Western Gulf States and Saudi Arabia would be precipitated into something approaching panic at the thought of an Iran reaching to the very border of Kuwait.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
"In the rump of Iraq we would almost certainly see an outbreak of intertribal fighting to settle old scores and establish supremacy over what was left.
"We have all observed with distress the civil war ... in the former Yugoslavia...
"Nonetheless, this group believes that the misery of Yugoslavia will pale into insignificance compared with the scenario now painted for an Iraq in full disintegration..."
How come Frederick Forsyth knew what our political leaders did not when he wrote "The Fist of God' IN 1994? (The memo from which I quoted appeared on pages 429-432 of the paperback I read.)
Here's another passage I love:
"'All Americans like to think they are different,' the man said sourly. "One of the many, many ways in which they are all the same.
"That's a very Hungarian observation," Janson said. [He was at a bar in Hungary.]
* * * * *
"'...You Americans complain about drug traffickers in Asia, and meanwhile you flood the world with the elctronic equivalent. Our children know the names of your rappers and movie stars, and nothing about the heroes of their own people. Maybe they know who Stephen King
is, but they don't know who our King Stephen was -- the founder of our nation!' A petulant head shake: 'It's an invisible conquest with satellites and broadcast transmitters instead of artillery.'"
Think about it. Perhaps, this is what drives those who violently oppose the U.S.. And, does it motivate our own fundamentalists at home. How do they insulate their children from the worst of what is on the net or tv or in music videos. They can't, unless they destroy those who send these materials out for consumption.
The quote was taken from Robert Ludlum's, "The Janson Diretive," which was published in 2002 (page 445)
Here's another thought, taken from Michael Crichton's "State of 'Fear" (p500): "...social control...the equirement of every sovereign state to exert control over the behavior of its citizens, to keep them orderly and reasonably docile. To keep them driving on the rigtht side of the road --or the left, as the case may be. To keep them paying taxes. And of course we know that social control is best managed through fear."
