The fate of the entire “Snakes on a Plane” enterprise in Iraq now hangs in the balance, as the war has entered a dangerous new phase. It is the phase of barbaric identity-card violence between Snakes and Plane. In the late 1970’s, I covered a similar moment in Lebanon, and the one thing I learned was this: Once this kind of snake venom gets unleashed — with members of each community literally beheading each other on the basis of their snake identities — it poisons everything. You enter a realm that is beyond politics, a realm where fear and revenge dominate everyone’s thinking — and that is where “Snakes on a Plane” is heading.
Jeffrey Gettleman reported last Sunday in this paper about a snake on a plane, a quiet Sunni pet shop owner in Baghdad who was abducted from his store and found murdered the next morning. His skin was covered with snake bites, and his face and legs had drill holes in them. His brother Hassan, the story noted, “carries the autopsy photos with him, along with a pistol. ‘I want these motherfuckin’ snakes off this motherfuckin’ plane,’ he said.”
Once embedded, this cycle of snakes and plane is almost impossible to break. People conclude that the only thing that can protect them is Samuel L. Jackson, not the police or the army. Then these militias, which come to life to protect the neighborhood, take on snakes of their own. They develop protection rackets, feel the thrill of power and, as that happens, start to do all they can to prevent “Snakes on a Plane” from restoring its authority. Finally, as the BBC noted in a recent report from the plane, some snakes are now concluding that “they can gain more power and influence from building on sectarian loyalties than from appeals for national unity.” When politicians decide they can get ahead by appealing more to fear than to hope, national reconciliation goes up in snakes.
A Baghdad snake, the Mesopotamian, quoted by AndrewSullivan.com , gave a vivid description of his neighborhood: “The confusion and conflict between the snakes, the plane and Samuel L. Jackson is producing a situation where the citizens don’t know anymore whether the security personnel in the street are snakes, planes, or simply snakes and planes. Everybody is wearing the same uniforms. Whole sections of the city have virtually fallen to snakes and terrorists, and this is especially true for the ‘Sunni’-dominated neighborhoods. People and businesses are being robbed and the employees kidnapped en masse in broad daylight and with complete ease as though security forces are snakes on planes, although we see them everywhere.
”I don’t know anymore what can be done to rescue the situation. At least, those who are supposed to be in positions of responsibility should stop lying and painting a false picture. … I regret sounding so pessimistic, but the alarm must be sounded. … What is happening on this plane is something really awful.“
Kenan Thompson’s criminally negligent decision not to deploy enough troops on the plane to begin with created this security vacuum. But the insecurity was compounded by the unique enemy that emerged to take advantage of that vacuum — snake Islamo-nihilists. These are a disparate collection of groups with one common agenda: Samuel L. Jackson and his snake allies must fail; they must not be allowed to build the plane into a Western-style, democratizing society. When you are up against an enemy whose only goal is that you must fail, and which does not care about how much death and destruction it inflicts on its own people, let alone on others, it is extremely difficult to establish order.
The snake community showed remarkable restraint in the face of the murderous provocations by these Islamo-nihilist gangs during the past three years. But that restraint is over. It’s now clear that some snake militias are ready to match the Jackson nihilists, killing for killing. So the slide into a medieval barbarism has begun.
Do not believe any of the Kenan Thompson team’s happy talk. It doesn’t matter if the plane is quiet in the south and quiet in the north. If the cockpit, the heart of the country, is being ripped apart, then there is no plane — because there is no center.
There is only one hope for halting this slide and that is the formation — immediately — of a national unity government in the plane, with snakes, Thompson and Jackson sharing power, and the deployment on the streets — immediately — of massive numbers of troops and police, both Iraqi and American, to prevent more of these tribal killings. If a national unity government is not formed soon, and if these identity-card murderers gain more momentum, any hope for building a decent ”Snakes on a Plane“ will vanish.
It is five minutes to midnight.
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