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Crying Wolf & Becoming the Too Fat Frog

Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus

When I was in grade school, we thought we were pretty advanced because we had libraries of reading books in each schoolroom. The stories were mostly of the ‘feelgood’ sort — Dick-and-Jane or the Centerville postman or Cinderella. But we had moral stories also, especially Aesop. Since I got in my father’s cows from our woodland pasture almost every evening, Aesop’s ‘cry wolf’ story struck me powerfully. I had pretended to be dead once and fooled my parents into believing I was. They’d cried and cried. Later, I’d delayed bringing in the cows to scare my parents even more. This time though they were angry. Aesop’s fable really hit me with my own wrongs:

A shepherd-boy, who watched a flock of sheep near a village, brought out the villagers three or four times by crying out, “Wolf! Wolf!” and when his neighbors came to help him, laughed at them for their pains. The Wolf, however, did truly come at last. The Shepherd-boy, now really alarmed, shouted in an agony of terror: “Pray, do come and help me; the Wolf is killing the sheep”; but no one paid any heed to his cries, nor rendered any assistance. The Wolf, having no cause of fear, at his leisure lacerated and destroyed the whole flock. Moral: There is no believing a liar, even when he speaks the truth.

A hopeless Lutheran liar, I lived in fear that someday I too would need help and not get it.

Now that fable has become not only my story, but our national story as hopeless hegemonic liars. In editorials and blogs and TV commentary, the crying wolf story illustrates what has happened with George W. Bush. The first ‘wolf cry’ came when he misled the nation about Iraq’s nuclear weapons. The nation came running. The second was misleading the nation about the immediacy of Iran’s nuclear threat. The Republicans and the Clinton Democrats came running with their votes to condemn the Iranian Republican Guard as a terrorist organization. That vote essentially authorized a presidential order to attack Iran.

The third ‘wolf cry’ has come with Pakistan and its nuclear threat. This wolf, though, is real.

The ‘real wolf’ exists as a radically unstable Pakistan possessing 30-50 nuclear weapons, many of which it has had since 1986. It has always been a bit unstable because of its troubled history, dating to the period of the Iran-related Mughal empires. The modern state was begun in a compromise between the Hindu, Gandhi, and the Muslim, Jinnah, and forged out of the bloody forced emigration of millions of Muslims from Hindu parts of India into predominantly Muslim territory. It encompasses many peoples, tribes, cultures, and it quite early lost almost half of its landmass when the Bangladesh portion of the country rebelled and formed a separate state.

Now the remaining unstable amalgam has nuclear weapons. The claim is that the bombs are safe because they are not fully assembled and the parts are scattered about the country, but someone surely knows where the parts are, else the bombs would be worthless.

The United States has periodically raised the threat of sanctions against Pakistan for its nuclear bomb-making (ostensibly to answer India), only to back down when it appeared that Pakistan would be important to us geopolitically against the Soviets, Iran or the Taliban.

The moral of our present posture seems to be, “We don’t oppose nuclear weapons; we just only want ‘our guys’ to have them.” (We, of course, are the only ones to have used nuclear weapons in a war. After World War II, when the Soviets proposed the destruction of all nuclear weapons, we opposed them.) According to journalist and disarmament expert Jonathan Schell, we are now trying to define a nuclear club made up only of our friends and asserting the right to preemptive American attack (it would come from StratCom) on any hostile or neutral country that seeks like arms. Instead of negotiating and helping, we have threatened and threatened, and the result has been polarization throughout much of the Islamic world.

Polarization has created the real wolf. Pakistan’s nuclear weapons may well fall into the hands of a radical Islamist government in that land. It is very unstable now. Pervez Musharraf’s American-supported dictatorship and the confusion and corruption of Pakistani politics have led to widespread sympathy for the Taliban and their allies. According to Pakistani polls cited by Jonathan Schell, “Osama bin Laden, at 46 percent approval, was more popular than Musharraf, at 38 percent, who in turn was far better liked than President Bush, at a bottom-scraping 7 percent.” The polls also show that 60-75 percent of the Pakistani public want Islamist law — such as the Taliban would impose in ruling the country.

Other ominous signs: the Taliban have grown by leaps and bounds in the northwest Pakistani areas of North and South Waziristan, where the Pakistani government has reached an accord to allow the Talibanrelated tribes more or less free rein in the area. The Taliban have also grown rapidly in Pakstani cities. Some speculation says that Taliban sympathizers may take over parts of the army, and the well-armed Northern provinces may convert new provinces to the south. To resist the coming chaos, Musharraf has made himself into a full ironman dictator by dismissing judges that stand for independent law and against his continued personalist rule. Though necessity may force him to come to a compromise with Benazir Bhutto and her secularist forces by the time this column appears, it seems unlikely that the compromise will, in the long term, stabilize a nuclear Pakistan or create anything like a democracy there.

Further destabilizing the country is its economic and educational situation. According to World Council of Churches data, two-thirds of Pakistan’s adults can’t read, half have no access to basic health care, 35 percent are poor, 6 million more per year become poor, the real unemployment rate is estimated to be about 10 percent and the economy is generating few jobs. So the wolf fable is apropos. Pakistan could become the first Islamist nuclear power. Then what do we do?

Our proclivity will probably be to do what we have done in Iraq and what we are trying to do in Iran — threaten, threaten… threaten again, then bomb. But that may not scare a nuclear Pakistan much. Our ‘all or nothing’ policy requires that nations such as Pakistan succumb. In the words of State Department official Richard Armitage, directed to Musharraf, “You are either one hundred percent with us or one hundred percent against us.” General Musharraf has been pretty much with us since then, but the Pakistani people have not. Too many of them remain bad off. Perhaps we ought to talk with a few of them, the illiterate, the unemployed, the undereducated, the impoverished, to find our whether they are one hundred percent with us or against us or whether they would just like a new pair of shoes. Perhaps this is not an ‘all or nothing’ world.

One of Aesop’s other relevant fables is the story of the frog that got too big for its britches:

As a huge over-grown ox was grazing in a meadow, an old envious frog that stood gaping at him hard by, call’d out to her little ones, to take notice of the bulk of that monstrous beast; and see, says she, if I don’t make myself now the bigger of the two. So she strain’d once, and twice, and went still swelling on and on, till in the conclusion she forc’d herself, and burst. The Moral: Betwixt pride, envy, and ambition, men fancy themselves to be bigger than they are, and other people to be less: and this tumour swells itself at last till it makes all fly.

The frog, in this version of the fable, is the United States under the neo-cons in the Bush/Cheney Administration. The ox is the world, and we pretend, to our peril, that we are more important than everyone else.

A little talk with the ox might be in order, and perhaps the President, who was reading The Pet Goat to grade school kids on 9/ 11, should read more children’s stuff, starting with Aesop. He might also attend to Aesop’s implications.