On deadlines, ultimatums and the moment of truth

A deadline is the final date or time when a task or decision must be completed or decided. The term originated from the strict demarcation line around a notorious Confederate prison camp during the American Civil War. A certain distance from the prison fence was marked out and any prisoner who trespassed the line was shot dead.

The word ultimatum comes from the word ultimate and means the time when rejection will end peaceful negotiations and cause a resort to force or other drastic actions.

The Iraqi crisis is now past deadlines and ultimatums. What is important now is what Spaniards call "the moment of truth". That is a term that comes from bullfighting and is the moment when the bullfighter lunges at the bull for the kill. The matador’s timing must be perfect, otherwise, he – and not the bull – gets killed. Now the war in Iraq is a fact. But the moment of truth will come when we know its world-wide aftermath. For the war in Iraq will have global consequences and affect even future generations. So the ultimate effects will be a matter of truth and consequences. While the war itself may be limited to Iraq, the consequences will be world-wide. If Iraq, as claimed, indeed has prohibited weapons of war, one can reasonably assume that they will use it in defense of their country. The United States will, of course, be the main target of an Iraqi offensive. And we don‚t mean the American soldiers invading Iraq. We mean the United States mainland. If it is biological and gas weapons that will be used, the September 11 attack will suffer by comparison.

There is another danger that can erupt from the Iraq war and that danger should be our biggest concern. Muslim terrorists may launch attacks on countries that they associate with the United States. In our part of the world, we are the country with the most historical relations with the United States and we already had a big problem with terrorists long before the Iraqi crisis.

Truth is the acknowledgement of what is right and lawful. It is always the first casualty in time of war. We hope against hope that the Iraq war will be short, humane and limited to the armed forces of the two protagonists. At first, it was said that it would last only a few days. Now its time scope has been extended. We dream to see the day when all nations, big or small, can follow its own course in peace with the rest of the world.

Since boyhood, we always associated Iraq with The Thousand and One Nights, the tales of Scheherazade, the woman who married a sultan who got a new wife every night and strangled her at daybreak. Scheherazade amused him with a fresh tale every evening to the extent that the sultan became a monogamist and called her "the liberator of her sex." During this time of the Greeks, Iraq was known as Mesopotamia or "land between two rivers" and two great civilizations, Babylonia and Assyria, flourished there millenniums ago. Some Biblical scholars maintained that Garden of Eden was in Southern Mesopotamia. Now that Garden of Eden is a war inferno.