The Eyes of the Enemy

            The man slipped in next to me and softly shut the car door. He said nothing as I pulled away from the curb into a sultry Persian Gulf night. We headed west into the desert, the occasional car passing close on the narrow two lane road. What the Arab agent would offer to tell us we didn’t know, though we knew he was well connected.

            Actually, I remember only a few details of that night, details that stuck with me, visions that sometimes appear without warning in my dreams. Seated next to me in the car, and later directly across from me in the safehouse, was an Arab terrorist from one of the most ruthless organizations in the Middle East, personally protected and given safe haven by Saddam Hussein in Iraq. He offered no excuses. He was not concerned about protecting America. He was there to betray his fellow thugs and murderers for money, for lots of cash.

            My prime recollection from that night was not the concern that I might be set up, that maybe he was a “double.” What haunts me today was the empty stare as he looked my way. The Arabs say “the eyes are the windows to the soul.” As I searched his that night I found a wasteland. The man revealed neither sadness nor anger, just…nothing. He was a moving, talking manikin, though a manikin that might kill if threatened. He had trained the group’s fedayiin (“ones who sacrifice themselves”), their professional assassins, and had sent off many to kill and maim, and be killed. Perhaps in the beginning he had been motivated by radical Islamist ideology…perhaps, but not anymore. He was spent. He said he wanted to quit the profession, yet personally I doubted he cared one way or the other.

This was the terror-boss, the general-manager Americans never see, consumed by the incredible inhumanity around him, and jaded by corruption and greed at the top. Terror creates diseased hearts and deformed minds. But it is more than a sickness. It is a prison. Radical Islam feeds on endless hatred, an inhuman condition from which it is nearly impossible to escape. While this terrorist was trying, I hoped, I also doubted he would find rest in his new life. Perhaps his willingness to help America against his former colleagues was his stab at penitence, though I quickly dismissed that possibility, too.

In my mind, more than a decade later, I still see those eyes. The Arabs are right—windows to the soul. His eyes were the polar-opposite of the eyes of U.S. troops I’ve met in Iraq since. Tyranny (and its weapon of choice, terror) does more than terrorize and shackle. The tyrant creates two kinds of puppet-slaves: First, by destroying the heart and soul, he turns some into indiscriminant, unfeeling murderers of the innocent. More often, however, the tyrant reigns by neutering the masses through bloody terror, creating human-sheep who will never dare challenge the Maximum Leader. The terror-boss seated across from me that night was the former, his vacant orbs mirror images of the untold corpses he had fashioned from living, breathing human beings.  

 “The banner of Islam will necessarily be raised when the land is watered with the blood of martyrs.”- al-Qaeda Terrorist Organization (1998).

“It is not a field of a few acres of ground, but a cause, that we are defending….” - Thomas Paine (1776).