My Personal Gsus

I found myself somewhere in the center of Amsterdam. It was Friday at noon, and I was sober. I presumed the afternoon would be like other fashion outings with my girlfriend: we would go to a fashion show; meet a lot of loud, excited, beautiful people; see some nice threads; and interact with businessmen trying to get my girlfriend to buy their lines.

 

Naturally, I decided to stop for a drink at Warmoesstraat and let her go ahead. I wanted to at least be a bit relaxed for the whole ordeal. I wanted to show up mostly for the freebies. I needed a new t-shirt and wasn't in the mood for shelling out two euros and ninety nine cents. Don't judge, I'm weird when it comes to spending money on certain things.

 

So, the fashion show was not too far from Haarlemmerdijk -- Amsterdam's answer to SOHO -- meaning that I had to walk about half an hour from Warmoesstraat to the end of Haarlemmerdijk. I was to meet my girlfriend at some tent in a park by Haarlemmerdijk, but the beer got me better than I expected. I got lost, stumbled in the middle of a snowfield, and, after finding the tent for Amsterdam Fashion Week, tried entering through the back. After making it to the front entrance, I learned that the Gsus fashion show, for which my girlfriend had been invited, had already started.

 

My girlfriend waited for me until the very last minute, and it was my delaying her that changed her fate and mine. She was the last one to enter the fashion show stage, and her third-row seat was already occupied. A guy in an orange suit approached her and was not only kind enough to give her front-row seating, but also the goodie bag that came with that privilege.

 

The fashion show was merely 20 minutes, and afterwards I joined for the after-party. My girlfriend handed me two kickass t-shirts, exceeding my expectation. They were sophisticated, but inside held cutting lines in case you ever wanted to customize them with a pair of scissors. When the t-shirt fades, you turn it inside out, and customize it.

 

Gsus had my attention; they had prepared a product with consideration for its afterlife, for the potential of a t-shirtical revival. Bang! Cheapskate Jose now not only had 2 t-shirts with an afterlife as fancy wifebeaters, but also some wine tokens. Gsus had delivered wine, and the wine was good. I raised my glass -- my girlfriend did the same -- and I made a toast, ""to long life and good health," right as a 172 centimeter man approached from the shadows behind a mannequin.

 

He knew my girlfriend and introduced himself. Noticing that my wine glass was near-empty just after one toast, he said, "let one among you who is without wine, ask for more tokens." He handed me a handful of tokens, and I knew that my Friday afternoon wouldn't be as sober as I had predicted.

 

"You're a criminal," I said; "Wine is my enemy!"

I don't remember much of what happened after that, but I do remember he said, "love thy enemy."

America Declares Drone War Against North Africa

Now America can follow its former arch-foe -- the freedom fries-hating French -- into the fray created by NATO bombardment of Lybia. As soon as NATO started bombing Lybia, his mercenaries saw the writing on the wall and started fleeing south, to Mali, where they established the Azawad state.

 

The United States has recently announced that it is looking to build a base in Niger, and was also possibly looking at sites in Burkina Faso. One of these two poor African countries -- or likely both -- will soon find themselves in the same situation as Djibouti, which is used to launch drone attacks against Yemen and Somalia. Make no mistake about it, the construction of these bases means that the United States will soon start targeting Boko Haram in Nigeria, as well as the Islamist rebels in North Mali (Azawad.)

 

How long this new two drone wars will last, no one can tell. However, everyone is certain that there will be collateral damage, and we will have disgruntled civilians in both countries seeing us as enemies. Fortunately we have a black president who was selected by fate to drone the world.

The Iranian Empowerment

I knew who Osama Bin Laden was on 9/11. I was in Ms. Gross' 9th grade history class, and had just turned 14 three days earlier. We started discussing what was going on, and I said, "This is the work of Osama Bin Laden," much to the confusion of everyone else in class. I knew him because on a daily basis I saw a poster of the victims of the USS Cole -- attributed to Bin Laden -- in the first floor of my middle school. The poster read: "They died for your freedoms," and contained a portrait of the victims of the attack. 

What I did not know, however, was where exactly Afghanistan was located on the map. The next day, in Ms. Hammer's art class, we were asked to draw something describing how we felt about the whole situation involving the Twin Towers. I drew a crude map of the Old World and, not knowing exactly where Afghanistan was, I simply drew an American flag dripping blood and stretching all the way from Morocco to India. "Disturbing," Ms. Hammer concluded.

I felt like a lot of Americans that day; I wanted blood and revenge. But it was not lost on Ms. Gross that no one in class knew where our advanced bombs would soon be targeted, and she gave us a lot of maps to color on a daily basis. I spent more time coloring maps that year than I did studying for my weekend calculus class at City College.

I found the work of drawing rather tedious and more suitable for elementary school, not high school. Nonetheless, coloring maps on a daily basis is something that every American should be forced to do. Maps put the world in perspective. Maps help us understand the world in a similar way to how a military general looks at the world. If we were to look at a map of Iran, we would notice that the country is already surrounded by the follies of American military adventurism.

View American military bases near Iran in a larger map

Iran is completely surrounded by US bases, and it only serves to empower and legitimize the Iranian Islamic regime. People forget that Iran was a progressive country with a democratically-elected leader who wanted to nationalize the oil companies and distribute the wealth to his people. However, what Mossadeq failed to realize was that it is a serious crime to take food out of starving oil stockholders. 

The CIA waged a campaign against Mossadeq and installed the Shah of Iran, a vicious tyrant who terrorized and stole from his people. The Shah will serve as perpetual proof in the Iranian consciousness of how greed leads American subversive diplomacy. The Shah of Iran was overthrown, the Ayatollahs who led to his downfall thereafter established an Islamic Shiite state, and the fear of America is enough to give the Ayatollahs a massive base of support.

American support of Israel is also another element in the Iranian equation that serves to legitimize the Ayatollahs. The constant threat of sabotage, assassinations, and bombardment at the hands of Netanyahu, coupled with a map of Israel's expansionism, is more than enough to frighten the average Iranian.

As it stands, the Iranian Islamic regime is far more powerful today than it was on 9/11. The Shias and the Sunnis already had a tense history until the US decided to divide and conquer. In so doing, they encouraged Shiites everywhere, and particularly in Iraq and Syria, to swear allegiance to Iran instead of their own countrymen. 

Saddam Hussein was a Sunni, and likewise his government was Sunni-led. Today, the Sunnis in Iraq feel marginalized, and want to possibly break away from the Shiite-led government. Were Iraq to break along Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish sectarian lines, it would basically allow the Ayatollahs in Iran to gain a new, Shiite state right near their border. Even as it stands, Iran, simply by being Shiite-led, has today more influence in Iraq than it ever did under its archfoe: Saddam Hussein. Hussein had a bloody war with Iran in the 1980s, so in a way the US invasion of Iraq eliminated an enemy and gained them allies.

Iran will soon get a nuclear weapon; it is only a matter of time. They are unlikely to use it, but it is a sad state of affairs that being a nuclear power is the only thing that makes people around the world feel safe from America and its "coalition of the willing."

Fortunately, the Persians don't have a tribal culture where vengeance runs deep like their Yemeni counterparts. The truth is, we should worry more about Yemen. When they finally do rise, and their time is coming -- as it always does -- there will be no mercy for Americans. When they finally do rise, they will not only acknowledge collateral damage, they will celebrate it.