GUN FOR A MOUTH / David Poe

LESSONS OF HAR-MEGIDDO

This summer, visit sunny Armageddon—and see what it offers the world.

By David Poe

You may know Armageddon as the name of a Swedish heavy metal band, a Bruce Willis movie, or a euphemism for the apocalypse.

But Armageddon is also a little town between Jerusalem and Galilee, a place I visited two summers ago. Known as Har-Megiddo to the locals, the hill of Armageddon has been a theater for so many violent conflicts over the centuries that its name became a synonym for war. Its blood-soaked history may be why it appears in the Bible as a sort of staging area for the end of the world as we know it.

Think of Armageddon like Waterloo, the town whose namesake developed after Napoleon suffered his final defeat there: he met his waterloo in Waterloo. But unlike Waterloo, Gettysburg, the beaches of Normandy or the death camps of Dachau, Armageddon is essentially a pile of rubble.

This is not to say it's not an interesting historic site. Like rings on a tree stump, its excavation sites expose cross-sections of trash and treasure. Roman, Babylonian and Egyptian empires held sway there, but many other civilizations sent troops into the region for treasure, land, retribution, God. Standing on that lonely hill, I realized how many different cultures fought for it—and that I had never even heard of most of them.

They all lost.

Today, like Armageddon, George W. Bush's name has become a synonym for war. His idea to win the hearts and minds of Middle Easterners by killing them has not worked out.

Bush may have succeeded in persuading moderate America to associate the religion of Islam with terrorism and mainstream Muslims to perceive American troops as Christian crusaders, but wars of choice are not sanctioned in either group's sacred texts. And on the secular side, even Gen. Petraeus testified before Congress that there is no "light at the end of the tunnel" in Iraq.

What Petraeus and the majority of both Americans and Iraqis understand is that there is no violent military solution there. The president may have won Western oil interests a chance to claim the spoils of his mini-Armageddon in Babylon, but Bush is losing his war for peace.

John McCain has promised to continue Bush's war. Barack Obama has vowed to end the war, although some question his plan to do so.

Both presidential contenders would do well to visit Armageddon. They might reflect there on the futility of other battles waged and lost over the millennia by foreign powers in the Middle East.

Because no matter how the Bush administration and its supporters characterize it, the war in Iraq is not a crusade, a magnetic bumper sticker, a debate for the situation room. Nor is it World War II, in which enemies were defined by borders and Allied fighting was a response to a nationalized attack. Like Armageddon, the Bush war is made of a lot of dead people, and it looks like the end of the world.

David Poe is a singer-songwriter and composer. Visit him at www.myspace.com/davidpoe.