Manpads and Wooden Carrots

By Jawad Ali

Bush was in Asia this week trying to get a ban on Manpads. If you are like me, you are thinking that the world is better without this type of sanitary napkin. It turns out that Manpad is military speak for Man-Portable Air Defense system. How can we forget the scrappy little Stinger missile that brought down the mighty Soviets in Afghanistan? Recent research has shown that they can be aimed at our airplanes too without any modifications. As always, there is also a great concern for civilian lives here. How can any right thinking person not get behind this noble cause?

I am all for banning weapons. Like the time we banned weapons from the Bosnia conflict till all the Muslims were cleansed from the desired areas. Then we brought in the big bombs to punish the bad guys. It was a very complicated war, and ordinary people should not try to understand it, any more than they should try firing missiles at aircraft.

And that is the problem with the nasty little Stinger. Ordinary people.

That is why we always talk about non-proliferation of weapons. Only the weak willed ever talk about global disarmament. Weapons are best left in the hands of the very very powerful, and the absolutely powerful. Look at how safe they have always kept the world.

So ban the sucker, I say. It will only bring down civilian aircraft. There was a time when the powerful ruled the world with their gunships. Now they do so with helicopter gunships. It is only a matter of time before some crazy person, drunk with liberation, aims a Manpad at an Apache helicopter carrying innocent civilians. Then what? Never mind the fact that helicopter gunships have killed more civilians each year since 1965 than all the Manpads combined. This is because there is a software glitch in the Apache that makes it attack wedding parties in Afghanistan and funeral processions in Gaza. This will be fixed soon. Why are they having wedding parties in Afghanistan anyhow?

I made up that number about Manpad casualties ratios. We were very careful to tell the Mujahedin not to down any Soviet civilians, evil empire or not. Those Mujahedin can be so silly sometimes. The first time I heard of a civilian airplane downed by a shoulder fired missile was by our guys. It was our man Jonas Savimbi of the UNITA front in Angola. Savimbi was busy making the rest of Africa safe for South African style (ahem) democracy. This caused President Ronald Reagan to invite him to the White House with the pomp of a head of state. Jeane Kirpatrick referred to Savimbi as "one of the greatest heroes of our time, a true freedom fighter," but that might have been for the civilian train that he derailed killing over a 100.

So ban the Stinger, and ban that train-derailing gadget from the ACME catalog. I was only hoping that those wimps in Asia would sneak in some of their own favorite civilian killing weapons into the deal. How come it never works that way? Sure Bush would never agree to it, but it might draw a little attention to cluster bombs and depleted uranium.

Why do they roll over so easily, and why to they ask for so little in return? Ayaz Amir of the Dawn newspaper in Pakistan has these questions on his mind also. Mr. Amir has made this argument before, this time he is quite funny. The question is not whether they, the folks that gathered in Kuala Lumpur, are a bunch of hookers and beggars. We should just accept that fact. Why can’t they be high-class hookers, rather than back alley crack whores, Mr. Amir wonders out loud. Our leaders should be selling our national interests for billions of dollars. Often times they just settle for a green card for their favorite son-in-law. Turkey should be our role model for the kind of Gucci whore we want to be.

It is not good to nit pick with someone’s comedy routine, but Mr. Amir neglects to point out a few obvious things. Sometimes there is no carrot in the carrot-and-stick routine. Particularly in this uni-polar world, our leaders are presented with two sticks. Sometimes the Godfather makes offers they cannot refuse. Often the leaders pick the orange stick because it looks the most like a carrot.

Turkey will be getting billions in loans, to help them go further in debt. The loans will pay interest on pervious loans, but since the new loans are not interest-free either, even bigger interest payments will be due soon. Sometimes there is a stick and a family sized bag of heroin to help the leaders get over their addictions.

In the 80’s, the mighty General Zia of Pakistan scraped together the last of the pennies behind the country’s cushions to buy a set of shiny new fighter jets. The US acted as an honest broker and helped him negotiate the best possible deal with itself. There are no free markets for F-16s, and no discount coupons. There were only two large orange sticks, and neither of them looked much like a carrot.

So the US took the money and then sent a form letter to Zia that said “Dear Dictator, thank you for the money. We will not be sending you the airplanes because a think tank in Israel has decided that you are a terrorist nation. We are keeping the money, and we are sending you our new catalog of full-priced Korean War equipment. Long live Jonas Savimbi.” “Sorry, a deal is a deal” he was told, when Zia asked for the money back. This is a true story. I only made up the part about Savimbi’s name on the form letter. Pakistan was still begging for the airplanes or the money back some twenty years later. This story should be required reading for all hookers that act surprised when they find no tip under their pillows. A date rape analogy might make a better analogy for this scenario that a hooker-john one, but it would not be very funny.