{"id":46500,"date":"2014-08-25T12:00:09","date_gmt":"2014-08-25T11:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=46500"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:30:42","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:30:42","slug":"all-this-talk-of-an-apocalyptic-threat-is-simply-childish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/08\/all-this-talk-of-an-apocalyptic-threat-is-simply-childish\/","title":{"rendered":"All This Talk of an \u2018Apocalyptic\u2019 Threat Is Simply Childish"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chuck Hagel and Martin Dempsey were pure Hollywood. They only needed Tom Cruise.<\/em><\/p>\n

“Apocalyptic.” “End-of-days strategic vision.” “Beyond anything we have ever seen.” “An imminent threat to every interest we have.” “Beyond just a terrorist group.” “We must prepare for everything.”<\/p>\n

So are they Martians? Alien invaders from Planet X? Destroyer spacecraft from the movie Independence Day<\/em>?<\/p>\n

The word movie is the clue. Chuck Hagel and Martin Dempsey were pure Hollywood. It only needed Tom Cruise at their press conference to utter the words \u201cMission impossible\u201d. Who writes this God-awful script? Can\u2019t the US Defence Secretary and his joint chiefs chairman do better than this?<\/p>\n

Even the titans of World War Two \u2013 Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin \u2013 never used this kind of rhetoric when they confronted real-life evil empires.<\/p>\n

Churchill talked of Hitler threatening \u201ca new dark age\u201d and Stalin urged the Soviets to destroy the \u201crobber hordes\u201d of Germany. Roosevelt described the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour as \u201ca day which will live in infamy\u201d. Did the victors of the 1939-45 conflict ever use such trashy semantics to define their mortal enemies?<\/p>\n

Never. They said what they meant. They would not dream of insulting our common sense by referring to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi\u2019s crackpot \u201ccaliphate\u201d as apocalyptic. Even at his most insane, General Gordon (of Khartoum fame) wanted only to \u201csmash up\u201d the Mahdi \u2013 the latter being the 19th century equivalent of Baghdadi \u2013 and look what the Mahdi did to Gordon!<\/p>\n

The followers of Mohamed Ahmed ibn Abdullah, against orders, chopped off Gordon\u2019s head. Revenge took many forms, including the Battle of Omdurman where the British destroyed the Dervish army of the now-dead Mahdi\u2019s successor.<\/p>\n

One of those Britons was Churchill himself, who commented eloquently that \u201cthe weapons \u2026 and the fanaticism of the Middle Ages were brought by an extraordinary anachronism into dire collision\u201d with modern organisation, adding generously that his opponents were men \u201cof the most desperate valour\u201d.<\/p>\n

Those were the days. You could slaughter your cruellest enemies without exaggerating their power or ignoring their courage.<\/p>\n

But the art of rhetoric \u2013 of exaggerated and artificial language \u2013 is intended to deflect reality. At one point, almost unnoticed, a White House official, Ben Rhodes, said that the US would not now be limited by \u201cgeographic boundaries\u201d \u2013 after Dempsey had told the world that the Iraqi-Syrian border was \u201cnon-existent\u201d.<\/p>\n

Odd that. It wasn\u2019t non-existent a few months ago when the Assad regime was about to be given the Isis treatment. But now Assad\u2019s lads are chatting \u2013 so I hear \u2013 to Dempsey\u2019s lads about their mutual apocalyptic-visioned enemy, which has just beheaded an American journalist who (so American officials claimed not long ago) was in an Assad jail.<\/p>\n

Long forgotten now is that one of the journalists viciously murdered in Gordon\u2019s 19th-century war against the Mahdi was Frank Power, Khartoum correspondent of The Times<\/em> who tried to make it through enemy lines down the Nile. He was tricked with his companions into eating with the rebels \u2013 who then murdered the lot. They say Power was beheaded. Certainly his severed head is produced in that old Hollywood clunker Khartoum<\/em> when Gordon (Charlton Heston) meets the Mahdi (Laurence Olivier).<\/p>\n

But Obama can relax. He called Isis a \u201ccancer\u201d, but Gordon never met his adversary \u2013 that bit of the movie was a hoax \u2013 until the Mahdi saw Gordon\u2019s own chopped-off head in a leather bag. Someone should tip off Chuck and Martin on the difference between Hollywood and reality.<\/p>\n

Oh yes, and I noticed that Chuck said of the \u201cIslamic State\u201d that it was \u201cas sophisticated and well-funded as any group we have seen.\u201d Sophisticated? Really? And funded by whom, I wonder? If our new enemies have an end-of-days vision, where does the cash come from, Chuck?<\/p>\n

____________________________<\/p>\n

Robert Fisk, based in Beirut, is a multiple award-winning journalist on the Middle East and a <\/em>correspondent for <\/em>The Independent, a UK newspaper.\u00a0 He is the author of many books on the region, including <\/em>The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 independent.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The word movie is the clue. Chuck Hagel and Martin Dempsey were pure Hollywood. It only needed Tom Cruise at their press conference to utter the words \u201cMission impossible\u201d. Who writes this God-awful script? Can\u2019t the US Defence Secretary and his joint chiefs chairman do better than this?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-focus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46500\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}