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Operation Humbug By Charley Reese One of the attractive ladies of the TV talk channels heard a report from Kabul, Afghanistan, recently. The story was simple: A peacekeeping patrol heard two or three shots in the distance. They determined the shots came from a camp housing one of the warlord's soldiers. The shots were not fired at them. They went on about their business. "Nevertheless," said the lady anchor, her brows tightly knitted in her professional anxiety look, "It was a scary moment." After I got up off the floor where my laughter had put me (it would take a lot more than the sound of distant gunshots to scare a British marine), I wished so hard that I had the creative imagination to write a novel about how today's journalists would have covered World War II. I wonder if they would have thought that the Normandy invasion was a "scary moment." I can just hear them at a press conference with Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower in May 1944. "General, there are rumors that you are planning an invasion of Europe. Could you tell us if that's true, and if so, when do you plan to do it?" It would be just as interesting to imagine how today's generals would have acted during the last Big One. "Ladies and gentleman, I can now say that we have just completed a successful bombing raid against Hiroshima, and our targets have been completely destroyed." "Uh, general, what were the targets?" "Oh, a Japanese military camp and a gear factory." "Was there any collateral damage?" "Yes, about 80,000 civilians. We think, however, that this raid, which we call Operation Why Can't We All Get Along, will go a long way toward ensuring the success of Operation Peace on Earth." Forgive my odd sense of humor. I suppose that having grown up during a war that took 55 million lives, I'm a bit more calloused than these younger folks. They seem unable to just stick to the facts. They can never say just a suicide bombing. It's always a "horrifying" or a "terrifying" suicide bombing. A bomb, like a rose, is a bomb is a bomb, and the dead are the dead. The place to be when bombs are exploding is wherever you can say, "What was that noise?" By the way, these suicide bombers are carrying explosives that are roughly equal to one high-explosive tank round or one missile from a helicopter gunship. So, you can say that the Palestinians, during the Passover week, fired six rounds at the Israelis. How many rockets and tank rounds do you suppose the Israelis have fired at Palestinians? How did the casualties get so lopsided for the Palestinians? And how can a people with no army be said to be "besieging" the Israelis, who have a very large army? I suppose it's no crazier than demanding Yasser Arafat, locked up in three rooms surrounded by tanks and soldiers, "do more" to stop terrorism. Sure, in the middle of an Israeli invasion, Arafat should say to anyone he can reach on a cell phone, "Please ignore the Israeli invasion, the tank and machine-gun fire, the arbitrary arrests, the killings and brutalizations, and let's all welcome our Israeli friends, who, after all, just want to restore order and live in peace on our land." I wonder what kind of silly names the Israelis use. Is this Operation Bagel? Or Operation Here Comes Samson? Perhaps it's Operation Chutzpah. That's pronounced "hootspa," said fast up North, and "Hoots Paw," said slowly in the South. It means outrageous audacity. In the meantime, President Bush has put another wrinkle on his forehead trying to figure out how to OK Ariel Sharon's destruction of the Palestinian Authority and at the same time convince other Arab countries that he's so evenhanded they ought to help him destroy still another Arab government. That could be called Operation Ain't No Way. |
