Schoolyard Bullies and U.S. Foreign (War) Policy

If there was anything good about my father's military career it was that my family got to move around the world a lot. Every year or two the service would tell my father where it wanted him to be and the family could follow or find somewhere to stay until he got back from where ever the service had sent him. For most of my time I attended at least two, and sometimes three, different public schools for each of the school years between Kindergarten and the 12th grade. Needless to say I got to be the new kid in the class quite a few times and that always led to my being greeted by the local "Welcoming Committees" more commonly known as bullies.

After a few of these meetings I started to catch on to their usual bag of tricks. The first one was for the bully to stand in my path, sometimes with assistance from a few of his friends, inducing me to politely say, "Excuse me," in a normal conversational tone. The bully would respond in a voice that could be heard by anyone within a mile radius, "What did you say about my mother?!?"

Of course I hadn't said anything about his mother and I would point that out to him and his snickering band of miscreants. At this point the bully would turn to his entourage and ask them if they had heard me say something disparaging about his mother to which they would all bob their heads in unison and let out a few guffaws. What would really bug me about such situations were those innocent, uninvolved third parties who would later testify that they had heard me say something insulting to the bully when the most they could have ever done was see my lips move when I first spoke to him.

The U.S. Federal government uses this technique sometimes in its attempt to lead up to causing a war without it being obvious that it started the whole thing. It's even easier when the person accused of saying something derogatory said it in a foreign language that most Americans are not familiar with. Take the case of the leader of a certain Middle-Eastern country that is often quoted with an English translation that puts a genocidal tone to what he actually said that cannot be farther from the truth.

It is this mistranslation that is quoted again and again in the American media and sometimes embellished with remarks from other genocidal maniacs of history by certain political pundits who obviously have some kind of agenda. I am reminded of something about Nazi propaganda and telling Big Lies with a large amount of repetition as a way to sway public opinion in the direction certain parties would want it go.

Another tactic of the bully was for him and his friends to spend a great deal of time insulting me and making fun of some of my physical attributes that I had no control over, like my diminutive stature or my wearing of corrective lenses. When my agitation would become obvious on my face the bully would taunt me with suggestions that I was getting angry at him and might want to hit him. He would then offer his chin and challenge me to strike him there as hard as I could.

This was a sucker play on his part. Since he had proposed the target, he was ready to defend it and then counterstrike. He could then justify his actions to anyone interested in judging his behavior that I had thrown the first punch and he was simply defending himself against my aggression. If I was fortunate enough to land a hit with sufficient force to cause him injury then he could complain to whatever authorities existed that I had attacked him, which would get me in trouble and that would make him and his motley crew just as happy. I found the best course of action in such matters was to ball up my fist, coil my arm, and then kick the bully in the groin. I still would get in trouble but I had got my message across that with me, the bully should always expect the unexpected.

The U.S. Federal government has often used this tactic in the past to start wars and then accuse the other party of being the aggressor in the whole affair. Lincoln goaded the South in firing on Fort Sumter, which was a U.S. military base posted on what was foreign soil at the time, and FDR was able to nudge the war faction of the Japanese government into attacking U.S. bases located in the Philippines and the U.S. territory of Hawaii, most notably Pearl Harbor. The only real surprise for FDR about the attack was the efficiency of the Japanese Imperial Navy in crippling the U.S. Pacific Fleet stationed there.

The U.S. Federal government is now conducting the same campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran. With warnings and threats of sanctions, siege, and pre-emptive strikes against strategic targets, it is no wonder that both the government and the people of Iran are getting a little agitated and might want to do something to strike back at what they perceive to be unjust bullying.

And the U.S. is providing them with a target-rich environment at which to strike. U.S. combat forces are stationed in neighboring countries. U.S. spy drones are flying through Iranian airspace and mysteriously falling from the sky. The U.S. Navy is conducting joint exercises with Israel in the Persian Gulf (understand that what they are "exercising" is to practice at conducting a war) and neither of those two countries, at least the last time I checked a map, has a coast bordering that body of water. It is only a matter of time before someone, possibly a mentally imbalanced person, does something out of a sense of self-defense.

The last and possibly most desperate tactic of the bullies I have known is the intentional "accidental" shoulder bump. No matter how far I would walk to one side or the other of the school hallways, the bully would always maneuver in my direction so that our shoulders would collide with a high magnitude of momentum on his part. He would then announce loudly, if not proudly, to everyone within earshot that I had struck him and the fight, or more correctly, the mugging would be on. Since the bully attacked from a position of superior force, either through the number of accomplices he had helping him or the relative difference in our body sizes, the most I could do was to block anything that could cause me some form of serious bodily injury.

The pummeling would continue until some member of the school's faculty or staff would intervene to stop it. Then to add insult to any injury I had recently received, this adult would send me, along with the bully, to the principal's office for some form of disciplinary action for my "fighting" on school grounds. It has always astounded me of the general incompetence of public school employees to distinguish the difference between an assault-in-progress and a mutually agreed upon duel of unarmed, hand-to-hand combat.

On the world stage, at the same time that the U.S. Navy in engaged in the aforementioned exercises, the Iranian military is also conducting exercises of its own, along with the testing of new weapons. With all that ordnance flying around, any reasonable person can only wonder how long before one of those missiles, torpedoes, or bombs "accidentally" bumps into one of the several parties involved. And we know that some people are certainly not against turning an honest accident into an "Act of War" on the part of the group that caused it.

In a tussle with a bully in the schoolyard, one could expect, at least in my day, a bloody nose and/or a black eye. In international affairs, bullying of this type could lead the World War III. The good thing about the bullying that I was on the receiving end of over all those years was that it drove me to take up the study of the Japanese martial art, Shotokan Karate-Jutsu. Along with learning how to protect myself in physical confrontations, Karate also helped me to deal with my extreme shyness and the other social phobias I suffered from as a child and is the primary source of my philosophy on life and the world around me. The only people who could consider WWIII to be good are those who would like to see a serious reduction in the Earth's human population.

One of worse things about being an American citizen and having to deal with a Federal government that is transitioning from the World's Policeman (a role it should never had held) to the World's Schoolyard Bully is that it is a lot like having an Evil Twin. The Evil Twin runs to and fro causing all sorts of destruction and mayhem and when his victims come looking for him to take revenge for his evil deeds, they attack the Good Twin in a serious case of mistaken identity. So if you are out to punish the Evil Twin, please make sure you get the right one and leave the rest of us alone...