Pretext

I wish I could say I had noble motives, causes, moral righteousness. But I would be lying. The bottom line was always the bottom line. I did it for the money.

It’s not too hard to get a hold of me. People who know how tell people that need to know how. A mark on a mailbox, an ad in the Auto Shopper. I see the right words, I show up at a specific pay phone or reach behind a specific toilet tank, I become an employee.

I don’t know what’s going on in Washington, and I don’t care. Politics, religion, ideology—my life is not complicated by any of these. I am good at what I do. I have the best reputation for getting things done. No one knows who I am, but everyone knows when they need someone like me.

The President, for whatever reason, wants a war. I don’t think the foul bastard has enough sense to have decided it for himself. I think it was the Vice President. I know for sure it was the Vice President who hired me for my most recent little job.

See, the Iraqis bought a bunch of heavy-duty aluminum tubes that can supposedly be used to make weapons of mass destruction or some such shit. I guess the Iraqis have no need for really good softball bats, so nukes it is. At least that’s the Bush administration line. The trouble is, the weapons inspectors aren’t finding any of these tubes. The Iraqis ordered them (supposedly, though there are guys out there that can be hired to say anything and produce documents to prove it), and then the tubes disappeared off the face of the earth.

So I get a message to contact someone who wants me to make sure some of these tubes get found.

And they get found. Just a few, because all the Bush administration needs is a pretext. The saber-rattling and rhetoric heats up for a few days, then fizzles. My aluminum tubes, so carefully half-concealed for easy discovery by weapons inspectors, weren’t the smoking gun George Jr. or Trickier Dick were looking for.

Half a million dollars later, I have a new assignment. I run myself ragged traipsing all over Iraq, dropping off missile molds and scrap missile parts lovingly slathered with chemical residue. Meanwhile, my comrades in the merc business are setting up suicide bombings, ruining the cruise business with norovirus, and faking pictures of world leaders and their wives in situations that would get Michael Jackson off the hook for life. By the time it’s all over, and it’s never all over, nobody knows what’s real and what’s fake anymore.

Think about it. If the crack-head and the cue ball really wanted rid of Saddam Hussein, a guy like me could make him dead. No problem. But if it was done that way, the boys over at Halliburton wouldn’t have all that Texas tea to divvy up. So we need us a war.

In the end, the world will be so fucked up and everyone will be so paranoid that Georgie boy will be a shoe-in for four more years. The little functional illiterate that could.

This morning I opened the Weekly Walker and found an ad for the New World Chinese buffet. Eat In, Order Out. If you read it just right, put the emphasis on the right syllables, you get the message. New World Order Out. Not too subtle, but it doesn’t really matter. Most people are too stupid to suss out the codes, and those who suss them out are usually so paranoid that nobody would believe them if they raised a stink anyhow. And, of course, there is no New World Chinese buffet. A similar ad appears in at least 50 regional tabloids anytime there’s work for me.

So, I give the number a buzz. The man at the other end doesn’t even say hello. He just barks out an address. No negotiation needed. They have the number of my Swiss account. Half up front, half when the job is done.

At the address, a condemned apartment building, I look around for my instructions. I finally find a moldy copy of “The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.” My instructions are bound deep inside.

I am to stage a small nuclear incident in South Korea with North Korean ordinance.

Sometimes all we need is a pretext.

© 2003 Brian G Parker