From: "Dianne G. Brause" <diannebr@lostvalley.org>
From Coleman Barks, the translator of Rumi, to the US President:
Just This Once President Bush, before you order air strikes,
imagine the
first cruise missile as a direct hit on your closest friend. That
might be
Laura. Then twenty-five other family and friends. There are no
survivors.
Now imagine some other way to do it. Quadruple the inspectors,
or put a
thousand and one U.N. people in. Then call for peace activists
to volunteer
to go to Iraq for two weeks each. Flood that country with well-meaning
tourists, people curious about the land that produced the great
saints,
Gilani, Hallaj, and Rabia. Set up hostels near those tombs. Encourage
peace
people to spend a bunch of money in shops, to bring rugs home
and samovars
by the bushel. Send an Arabic translator with every four peace
activists.
The U.S. government will pay for the translators and for building
and
staffing the hostels, one hostel for every twenty activists and
five
translators. The hostels are state of the art, and they belong
to the
Iraqis at the end of this experiment.
Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandela, and my friend, Jonathan Granoff
at the U.N.,
will be the core organization team. No one knows what might come
of this.
Maybe nothing, or maybe it would convince some Iraqis and some
of the world
that we really do not wish to kill anybody, and that we truly
are not out to
appropriate oil reserves. We're working on building a hydrogen
vehicle as
fast as we can, aren't we? Put no limit on the number of activists
from all
over who might want to hang out and explore Iraq for two weeks.
Is anything
left of Babylon? There could be informal courses for college credit
and
pickup soccer games every evening at five. Long leisurely suppers.
The
U.S. government furnishes air transportation, that is, hires airliners
from
the country of origin and back for each peace tourist, who must
carry and
spend the equivalent of $1001 US inside Iraq. Keep part of the
invasion
force nearby as police, but let those who claim to deeply detest
war try
something else just this once, for one year. Call our bluff. If
this madman
Saddam's WMD threat is not, somehow, eliminated by next February,
you can go
in with special ops, and do it that way.
Medical services, transportation inside Iraq, lots of big colorful
buses--let the pilgrims paint them!--along with many other ideas
that
will be thought of later during the course of this innocently,
blatantly,
foolish project will all also be funded by the U.S. government.
There's a practice known as sama, a deep listening to poetry
and music,
with sometimes movement involved. We could experiment with whole
nights of
that, staying up until dawn, sleeping in tents during the day.
So instead of
war there's a peace period from March 2003 through February 2004.
It could
be as though war had already happened, as it has, and the healing
and
rebuilding. Now we're in the celebration afterward. I'll be the
first to
volunteer for two weeks of wandering winter desert and reading
Hallaj, Abdul
Qadir, Gilani, dear Rabia, and the life-saving 1001 Arabian Nights.
I am Coleman Barks, a retired English professor living in Athens,
Georgia,
and I don't really consider this proposal foolish.
Coleman Barks