Dateline: ARLINGTON COUNTY—American military officials order surgical attachment of American soldiers’ heads to the bodies of Iraqi soldiers to improve Iraq’s military training.
Prior efforts to train democratic Iraq’s military have been stymied. Instead of fighting Islamic State insurgents, Iraq’s soldiers became infamous for fleeing the battlefield, allowing waves of IS fighters to control key sectors of Iraq.
“The problem,” says U.S. General Buttercup, “was the training that had already been done not just in Iraq but throughout the Middle East. Those folks had trained for decades to be tribal theocrats, to be Sunni, Shia, and so on. Their traditions go back many centuries.
“For example, IS fighters are Sunni and most of Northern and Northwestern Iraq is also Sunni. Iraq’s government is dominated now by Shias, so the Sunni soldiers and tribesmen don’t want to fight fellow Sunnis. Nor do they want to fight for their Shia leaders.”
“It’s a case of a clash of indoctrinations,” says an American military psychologist. “Muslim sectarianism is deep-seated, because the Middle Eastern countries are tribal, meaning that from a very early age Muslims are taught to identify with only a subset of Muslims, not to mention other humans. That’s the start of their extensive training.
“Now Americans want to retrain Iraq’s soldiers’ to be liberal humanists, to see past their tribal and religious allegiances. Alas, each soldier has only one brain. American training techniques are unparalleled, but no matter how hard you train a brain that’s already been thoroughly trained to adhere to a vastly different mindset, you’ll run out of room in that brain to store your memes and mores.”
General Buttercup concurs with that analysis. “I told President Obama from the start,” says Buttercup. “We’ve got to give those already-trained Iraqis a second brain. Their brains were full of Muslim nonsense before Bush had invaded Iraq. We spent a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars training Iraq’s military to fight for Western values and interests. But how could even all of that overcome centuries of Middle Eastern history and tradition?
“It’s like flapping your arms to see if they’ll fly. No, it took millions of years of evolution to get them to work like arms rather than wings. You’re not going to overcome that anytime soon. But what if you could add wings to the human form? That’s what planes are for.”
“Their minds are opposed to ours,” says General Buttercup. “They’re Muslims and we’re Christians. They’re used to theocracies and dictatorships. We love our political and economic liberties. What we need is a meeting of minds, so we’re attaching hundreds of American military heads to Iraqi bodies.”
Instead of undoing Muslim and tribal indoctrinations, which would require beheading the Iraqis, the hope is that the new heads will compensate for the un-American worldview.
“We don’t do beheading. It’s just not in our playbook,” says Buttercup. “If we could train the Iraqis to be American by beheading them, believe me I’d be all for it. But I can’t go against my training.”
“No one trains harder than us at the ,” says USMC Staff Sergeant Kyle Killsalot. “You just wouldn’t believe how hard I trained. If you asked my opinion of whether I approve of having my head surgically attached to an Iraqi soldier’s body, you wouldn’t get it. I have no independent opinions since I serve my military collective, my brothers in arms. Believe me, I’ll whip that Iraqi into shape and there will be no more running from insurgents. If he tries to run I’ll turn my head and spit in his eye.”
Ruth Riegler, I couldn’t decide between two different mockeries of your comment, so I’ve included both. See which one you think works best.
(1) You speak of “your” (i.e. my) US military, air force, and so on, and I’m so glad you do. I don’t know how you found me out, but you did. I’m the guy who’s secretly in charge of the new world order. And on Jerry Seinfeld’s advice, after I finish with my mischief in the Middle East I’m going to aim the free world’s military at the liberal PC police who can’t take a joke and just love to repeat their cherished memes and hot-button words, like “racist,” “sexist,” and “warmonger.” At the slightest opportunity, these postmodern relativists and crypto-nihilists will pounce and try to end discussion by pretending they’ve come across some taboo behaviour even if they plainly haven’t and they don’t know what they’re talking about. So when the black helicopters come for you, you’ll have me to thank since I control them too.
(2) I’m inspired by your heroic effort at reading between the lines, so I thought I’d return the favour. I see from between the lines of your comment that you’re actually a Bengal tiger with robotic arms who lives at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, who speaks twelve and a half languages, who once travelled back in time and tickled the feet of Jesus Christ and then wrote a long play about it, overseeing its performance in Elizabethan England but receiving only mediocre reviews; undaunted, you leapt forward centuries and discovered that despite all the evidence on my blog to the contrary, I’m secretly a gung-ho, redneck American, not a cosmicist Canadian who wrote “The Vileness of Guns and Just Wars” (and made a YouTube video of it); you decided to out me as such but only in the humblest, most inept fashion, presenting not the slightest evidence to back up your interpretation and so making it look for all the world that you’re a trigger-happy liberal who’s more interested in waging stale, idle internet wars of words than in understanding what’s really going on around you.
Oh that's satire? (of the Aryan Nation variety). The usual vivid fantasy, i.e. Americans are intelligent and brave and will defeat the IS, probably while bare-chested but for a bandoliers, while firing multiple machine guns and of course smoking stogies – because real life's just like Hollywood… Or not. Actually, last time around your 'brilliant' military, along with the UK's, relied on Iraqi Sunni tribes to defeat al Qaeda and now your 'brilliant' air force and those of half the world's nations can't defeat another bunch of medieval throwbacks despite their lacking an air force, navy, etc, and are relying on Shiite militias (more medieval throwbacks) who can't do it either.
Though your Playstation warriors, er, drone operators, are doing very, very well on killing civilians around the world, so I guess the US has progresssed since Vietnam – still engaged in pointless endless wars, but killing lots more people.
Still, you're heroes according to Hollywood, and that's all that counts.
1. "Saddam: What We Now Know" by Jim Lacey* draws from the Iraq Survey Group (re WMD) and Iraqi Perspectives Project (re terrorism):
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/277115/saddam-what-we-now-know-jim-lacey
* Dr. Lacey was a researcher and author for the Iraqi Perspectives Project:
http://fas.org/irp/eprint/iraqi/
2. Explanation of the law and policy, fact basis for Operation Iraqi Freedom:
http://learning-curve.blogspot.com/2014/05/operation-iraqi-freedom-faq.html
3. "UN Recognizes 'Major Changes' In Iraq" by VP Joe Biden on behalf of the UN Security Council:
http://www.un.org/press/en/2010/sc10118.doc.htm
4. "Withdrawal Symptoms: The Bungling of the Iraq Exit" by OIF senior advisor Rick Brennan:
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/withdrawal-symptoms
5. "How Obama Abandoned Democracy in Iraq" by OIF official and senior advisor Emma Sky:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/obama-iraq-116708_full.html#.VTb5WLt0x0s