The Big Blue Sky: Seventy-one

The clock was ticking steadily down to war, which with each passing moment seemed more and more inevitable. It grew beyond its human creators, fed by the cruelty, impatience and ignorance of their hearts. It grew out of all proportion, until nothing more could be seen, and peace was a naïve and cowardly alternative. And like rogue militias looting a captured village, each nation angled for the greatest benefit.

The Syrians were only too eager to give the Americans fly over permission. Closer to the West, they stood to benefit greatly throughout the region following a predictable Iranian defeat. They would emerge as the regions superpower, an opportunity they had waited for decades to achieve. My contrast, America’s Israeli allies declined permission, not wishing to provoke any sort of Arab backlash, despite that they were eager so see Iran crushed.

From Moscow to Beijing to Washington diplomats worked desperately at ever changing tasks and goals. What had been an effort to find a resolution was now an endeavor to shore up alliances, to win concessions from countries sympathetic to Iran and to keep the conflict from becoming a wider issue. Indonesia, a moderate Islamic nation would receive economic considerations for not having an official view of the war. A pending arms deal would be sped up for Egypt, which, in a quid pro quo, undertook a crackdown on radical groups. Turkey, straining socially from the economic downturn used the crisis to strengthen its European Union ties, while the US convinced Iraq to crackdown on Kurdish separatists using Northern Iraq as staging areas for incursions into Turkey.

That ticking clock was apparent nowhere as great as in the Gulf. On the Allied side, soldiers, airmen and sailors consoled themselves with death and exhorted one another to victory. Every moment became its own philosophy, alte3rnating with hope, preeminence and fatalism. They said goodbye to one another, to themselves and to the world. With that they surrendered their fate to god and the universe. It was no different on the Iranian side, for the militiamen digging trenches and building bunkers, for the airmen and seamen who faced almost certain death in the coming hours, and the thousands fleeing cities and coastal areas. But fate hinges upon the small perhaps as much as the large, and the fate of millions depended upon a desperate fight taking place thousands of miles away.