The recent fighting in Gaza between Israel and Hamas is the latest conflagration in the Middle East to grab worldwide headlines.
That’s the way it always works in the West…a big fight or catastrophe over there makes the news for a while, capturing the imagination.
And then suddenly the media moves on to something else closer to home, and the big fight in the sandbox is quickly forgotten.
Unless your life has been personally touched by it, the Wars of the Middle East seem to be mere passing fads to the average person of the West, seemingly unworthy of deeper scrutiny or analysis.
But I’m not the average person of the West, now am I?
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
I wrote and published my second book on the Middle East in May 2015, All Men Follow the Strongman: The Forgotten History of the Iraq War.
A 425 page, 8×11 inch behemoth, I wrote it in 2 ½ months, and published it immediately during my Freshman year of college at the University of Mary Washington.
The book was inspired by a number of firsthand influences.
The first was my work with Middle Eastern Refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, Somalia, and Egypt from 2011-2012 in Tucson Arizona with Tucson Refugee Ministries.
In 2012, I moved to Stafford, Virginia, 10 minutes from the Marine Base at Quantico.
My Father was made the head of the DEA’s SIU Training Program at the DEA Academy on the base there. His job was to train Allied Foreign Police Officers from all over Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.
During this time, all of my friends and neighbors were Marines stationed at Quantico, or Soldiers based out of the Pentagon and its many appendages.
They were almost all Mustangs, men who had enlisted as buck privates and worked their way up through the ranks to become commissioned officers. Nobody was above Lieutenant Colonel, because as everyone there knew, anything above Lieutenant Colonel starts to become a political appointment.
Almost all of them with the exception of one (who was universally disliked) had been downrange to Iraq and/or Afghanistan.
During this time, I was also volunteering as a tour guide docent at the National Museum of the Marine Corps, and all the other docents there were old Vietnam Veterans, with vivid tales to tell of the original post-WWII COIN adventure.
In those days, the Arab Spring was in full swing, Bashar al-Assad was barrel-bombing the kids in Syria, and ISIS was rocking and rolling again under Saddam’s former generals.
This was all much to the consternation of the Obama Era State Department, who had previously convinced themselves they had “kept a lid on things.” Things were beginning to look bad for the 2014 Midterms and the 2016 Presidential Primaries. God forbid we have that!
In response, many of my friends were gearing up to go back to Iraq yet again. Deployments to Afghanistan were also happening on the regular, and my Father would ultimately go to Afghanistan in September 2013.
The attitude of those days was best summed up by a phrase I would often hear my Father repeat along with his DEA friends:
“Mission First!”
And what a Mission it was.
BEST AND WORST
It was in this milieu that I wrote my book. The project reflected a life-long calling toward the Middle East, her people, and her Wars that began for me at age 5 when 9/11 struck the heartland of the United States.
In it, I synthesized my historical research with the observations of my friends fresh back from the battlegrounds, both American and Indigenous.
To every American Marine, Soldier, and LEO who read it, it made perfect sense. To every Indigenous person from the region who read it, Ally and Average Joe alike, it made perfect sense.
My greatest hope was to take this knowledge, and use it to help the War Effort, supporting our Warfighters to win the Global War on Terror and bring peace to a region that had never known it.
I figured that fact-based analysis from centuries past, coupled with the testimonies of first-hand participants, would be enough to reach across the aisle and allow Americans of all stripes to set aside their differences to pursue Victory.
Just like we did in WWII!
But when I began introducing my work to the rest of mainstream society in the United States, all the knowledge seemed to fall on deaf ears at best…and hostile ears at worst!
THE HUNT AND THE WHY
After Trump won the election in November 2016 and was sworn in in January 2017, a distinct shift began to take place within the American Electorate.
Things were becoming so bad at home, that nobody seemed to care about what was happening abroad anymore.
Everybody on the Left was on the hunt for Neo-Nazi White Supremacists. Everybody on the Right was on the hunt for Deep State Swamp Creatures.
And anybody who didn’t fit the mainstream BLM or GOP narrative was a persona non-grata…and my book definitely didn’t fit either!
You see, if you support the War on Terror, you’re a Racist Islamophic SOB who just wants to murder innocent Brown Muslims, according to the Left.
Contrarily, if you support the War on Terror, you’re war-mongering money-grubbing shrill for the Military Industrial Complex who just wants Americans to come home in body bags, according to the Right.
And of course, after Coronavirus 2020, no one really even cared at all.
“Why did God give me this passion?” I asked my Mom in December 2021, a few weeks before she died. I was confused, heartbroken, and bitter.
“Why did God bring these people into my life to tell me their stories? Why did He give this to me if I can’t do anything with it?”
“Maybe God gave it to you just so you know the Truth.”
I ponder those words every day.
THE TREE AND THE FOREST
They ask:
“If a tree falls in the forest, but there’s nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound?”
I say:
Who cares if it makes a sound or not!
The tree fell, and altered the forest forever! That should be enough reason to care and to go and investigate it! See what it can teach us about all the other trees falling in the forest around us!
But no…to many people, if they didn’t hear it, it didn’t make a sound, and so they don’t care.
And all the while, trees keep falling down like dominoes until there is no forest left…
A tree has fallen in the forest loud enough to make a sound…for now.
People are listening and paying attention…for now.
You dear reader, have a choice that you and you alone can make:
You can ignore the falling of this tree that you’ve heard and go back to your daily business.
Or you can investigate and open your mind to an entirely new world of wonder and terror alike.
If you choose the first path, nothing much will change for you.
And if you choose the second…well, I can’t promise you that you can change the world with it.
But at least, like me, you will know the Truth.
And maybe that’s all we can do.
Get the book, and decide for yourself.
Sincerely,
Richard Barrett
10-11-2023
Written at 3:39 PM, somewhere in the United States…
PULP FICTION RENAISSANCE 