TWENTY-FIVE

I’m getting a little hungry. Would you mind if we stop?” Harry looked over to discover that Sarah had dozed off in the passenger seat next to him.

“What? What did you say?” She blinked, rubbed her eyes, and stretched her arms. “You want to stop?” She yawned. “Sure. Where are we, do you know?”

“Somewhere west of Gallup. I’m not sure how many miles. We crossed the Arizona-New Mexico line a ways back,” said Harry. “Just passed a sign. There’s a restaurant and truck stop just up ahead.”

“How far to the next town?” she asked.

“What, you don’t like truck stops?”

“If you want to stop, it’s fine with me,” said Sarah.

“We’re going to need gas anyway. How are you doing?” Harry looked over at her and smiled.

“I’m fine. Rather be home.”

“Wouldn’t we all,” said Harry.

“After we gas up and eat, I’ll drive if you want. You can rest up.”

“Sounds good.”

“You must be tired,” she said.

“Actually, I am a little.” Harry had been up half the night, keeping one eye out the window of the motel room toward the car. He had parked it almost a block away, under a streetlight in front of another motel across the road. He had told Sarah it was too dark in front of the motel where they were staying and they had a lot of stuff in the car.

She called him Uncle Harry, told him he was weird, and asked him if anybody had ever told him that before.

“No. Just you. Oh, and maybe a half dozen judges in town.”

Harry had known Sarah since she was three. Until she was six, Sarah thought he was her uncle. When she was finally told they were not related, it was like finding out that the tooth fairy was a fraud. Harry hung around the house more than most of her relatives. He was often there for dinner. And when her mom, Nikki, died, it was Harry who sat with Sarah for long hours and played games with her, cards and anything that came in a box out of her closet. While Paul arranged the funeral, Harry tried to keep Sarah’s mind from grasping the permanence of death.

The images of him in that effort were forever engraved on her memory. She could still see his hulking form scrunched up sitting on a ridiculous little chair at her play table, looking like the giant who’d lost his beanstalk. He would move the Parcheesi pieces around the board with his thick fingers and he would cheat just to keep her mind on the game whenever she asked an uncomfortable question, like what they were doing to her mom at that place where they’d taken her, or where Dad was going with one of Mom’s pretty dresses on a hanger.

There were times when Sarah still called him Uncle Harry, but usually now it was only to get his goat, to remind him of how old he was getting. But Harry didn’t care. Harry was timeless, like a comfortable old pair of jeans. The fraying and the holes only added character. He would be there forever, at least in her memory.

“Explain something to me,” she said.

“If I can.”

“How did we get in this mess?”

“You mean Liquida?”

“No, I mean the stuff with terrorism. The attack on the base in Coronado, 9/11 and the World Trade Center. All the hostility from the Islamic world. How did it happen?”

“Why don’t you just cut to the chase and ask me what happened before the big bang?” said Harry.

“No, really,” she said. “I was just a little kid when most of it happened. Now we’re caught up in it. Dad, you, me, Herman. I’d like to have a better understanding.”

“Fair enough. Where should I start?”

“The Middle East. I didn’t take any world history,” said Sarah.

“Oil and money, what can I tell you? From the history I’ve read, it began before the First World War with the Western powers when their warships went from coal to oil. When the war ended, the winners carved up the Middle East and installed friendly leaders to get oil. The national boundaries didn’t make much sense. They didn’t take into account many of the ethnic groups, clans that had been warring with each other for centuries. Some of the poorer countries got none of the oil but had most of the population. Add to that the creation of Israel in the late forties, the loss of Palestinian lands, and you get a region that’s a boiling cauldron. We shared in the division of spoils from the oil. Saudi Arabia and the shah of Iran fell into our sphere.”

“Iran?” said Sarah.

“Yeah. Strange as it seems now, we were thick as thieves with the shah before he fell. It started in the fifties when a CIA-inspired coup brought him to power, but got real ugly in the late seventies. Yeah, I’d say that’s when the real trouble started. The origins of jihad and the terrorist movement.

“Then once in a while you get a leader who decides to do what he thinks is right, by that I mean morally correct. Jimmy Carter was one such soul. He had his share of failings, but most agree that his heart was in the right place. Unfortunately, in the twisted world of foreign affairs that’s probably a disability. Carter’s big thing was human rights.

“But you see, it’s not that easy. After a couple of thousand years using avarice, malice, greed, and tyranny as the steady diet of the body politic, a sudden dose of human rights can make the patient upchuck. The shah had all the jails in Iran bulging, some of them with political prisoners who wanted to replace him. Every once in a while he’d stick ’em with cattle prods and do other nasty stuff. Needless to say, this didn’t go over big with Carter.

“He turned his back on the shah. The message to the world was that unless the shah cleaned up his act, we wouldn’t support him. It was a new day. Human rights were suddenly in vogue. But the regime was already sitting on a powder keg.

“The shah saw the fuse being lit and left town. The army threw down its guns, students overran the palace and the American embassy, and suddenly the Islamic revolution was in full swing.

“You would think the students in the streets would be grateful to Carter for his stand on human rights. But they weren’t. Everyone in the U.S. embassy became a hostage. Carter became a victim of the law of unintended consequences.

“After that it was like a house of cards. It led to the Iran-Iraq War. We backed our good pal Saddam Hussein, the tyrant in charge of Iraq. A few million people got killed. Saddam lost a lot of face when we got tired and the war ended up in a draw. In Middle Eastern politics, loss of face is a terminal condition. Generals seeing their dictator walking around with half a face figure they could do a better job and they start measuring the other half to see where a bullet might look good.

“A few years after this, Al Qaeda declared war on us, but given everything that was going on, we didn’t notice. They set off a bomb in the World Trade Center. We treated it as a criminal matter, made a few arrests, and shook it off. A few years later they blew up two U.S. embassies in East Africa. We lobbed a few missiles at Al Qaeda training bases and then went about our business. They attacked a U.S. warship in port in the Middle East, killed a bunch of sailors, and we started another round of investigations. Then came 9/11.

“We went after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, ousted their allies, the Taliban, only to have them come back later.

“Which leaves us with Iran, their quest for nukes, and their continuing threats to use them on Israel the moment they get them. And of course Al Qaeda, who would like to borrow a couple of these for use in gift baskets to New York and Washington.”

“So what are we doing to stop them from getting the bomb?”

“Oh, the State Department’s on top of it. They’re talking to the Iranians through third parties. Trying to convince the international pariah that they wouldn’t want to be viewed as an international pariah. Threatening to isolate them with economic sanctions. And trying to make sure that if Israel incinerates them, they do it on a day when the rest of the world is upwind.”