The False Beginning

March 19, 2003. In the beginning, we believed that all roads led to Baghdad. The quiet weeping of the survivors’ mourning echoed from the ashes of the twin towers across the Atlantic through the vast expanse of the Kuwaiti desert. The time for retribution had come. It seemed so right, so just. Finally, we would dismantle Saddam and the Baath Party and show the world what happens when the gentle giant is disturbed. It was time to demonstrate the full might of American Power on those that would seek us harm. We conducted the final inspections of our seventy-ton war machines, wrote our final goodbyes to our families, prayed to the God of Abraham for protection, and stormed through the breach.

Hundreds of miles to the east, the sun’s rays pierced through the darkness in yet another display of its endless cycle, and a young boy was awakened by his father. Today would be different for him. He would not work in the fields. Instead he would attend the madrassa for schooling, one of thousands built by Osama with Saudi Arabian oil money funneled under the guise of charity while the rest of the world slept. Unbeknownst to him, his indoctrination into an ideology of hate, a sick, twisted interpretation of Mohammed’s works, would begin. Today this cancer would continue to spread across the Muslim world.

Two thousand miles away, locked deep inside of his basement, a burly American forced himself to sort through the countless pile of correspondences that had accumulated; however, his thoughts drifted on how to tell his story, raise the money, and educate the children. He is not one of us. He is a different breed.

In the beginning, Pandora’s Box was cracked, civilizations clashed, innocence was lost, and everything unraveled.
In the beginning, we were wrong.