The “Genie War” In Iraq
Sure, liberals still insist we are losing the war in Iraq and shouldn’t have waged it. But it would have been worse if we had lost the “Genie War,” which started in the 1980’s and has lasted up to the present day. Its origins can be traced back to the period when Islam was still battling tribalism in Mesopotamia, but some claim that beings we know as genies and jinns arrived in the region when Babylon was a powerful city as well as a mighty empire.
Genies are actually Reactive Spiritoids. They are alien beings able to use nuclear catalytic devices, which are often contained in objects that look like lamps or bottles and can transmute elements and produce objects as if by magic.
The tradition of granting three wishes is for practicality. The catalyst is powerful enough to be used countless times, but there is the possibility that radiation deadly to humans will be produced as a byproduct of the formation of large or massive objects. For example, a person could wish for a mountain to be turned into solid gold, but the vacuum created as materials are being changed and condensed into gold could suck in the person making the wish. Or the gold might become a radioactive isotope.
That’s why it was better for people to make only three wishes and wish for only relatively simple things like a ton of gold, a banquet of the finest foods and drink, or harems of beautiful women. The women wouldn’t be real, but they would be a great simulation of living beings. There are reports that some have even given birth, but the offspring are sterile.
If it weren’t for genies, Iraq would be a worthless desert region. Genies produced deposits of oil, but only so much. If the region were swimming in oil, powerful nations would have invaded decades ago and would have never allowed it to slip from their grasp.
Aladdin could have been the wealthiest man in the world had he known how powerful his genie was. Other possessors of genies were wise: they used their reactive spiritoids only occasionally and tried not to attract attention to themselves.
The flying carpets that were produced were actually alien technology. Simple field displacement and circulation allowed them to fly in about the same way a UFO flies. The rope trick which allowed climbers to disappear at the top of the twine was actually a form of interdimensional shifting. The end of the rope in the air connects this dimension with another; when the shift is completed, the rope usually drops to the ground.
When Saddam Hussein came to power, he had heard stories about genies, and he supported an effort to discover them and exploit their abilities. But the same stories had been told to children who grew up to be Islamic clerics and terrorists. Saddam was “wise” enough to be a brutal dictator and an almost observant Muslim. If he had turned against Islam and hadn’t supported those who wanted to destroy the West, he might have been killed by his opponents or possibly by genies controlled by Islamic fundamentalists.
In the 1970’s, someone in the CIA who had grown up in Iraq before escaping with his family and who had listened with fascination to the stories about the Arabian Nights and the other tales interested some other agents in secretly trying to discover genies in Iraq. The CIA initiated a clandestine operation called OPERATION ALADDIN’S LAMP. The agents figured that people wouldn’t think they seriously believed the thing existed. Surely the operation had to be involved with something else like discovering more oil deposits, or maybe a secret nuclear weapons program.
Baghdad became a busy area with Saddam’s agents, Iranian agents, Soviets, Chinese, Saudis, Europeans, and Americans all hunting for magic lamps and bottles. Whoever controlled the genies might eventually control the Middle East and, in the long run, the world. People followed leads. Many disappeared or died mysteriously. But the dreams of unimaginable wealth and power drove men and even women to search for genies wherever they might be.
Genies were discovered by a handful of people. A CIA agent using an advanced detector that located nuclear material found a lamp in a bazaar in Mosul. The owner didn’t know what he had when he sold it to Hassam ben Ali for $40 and a fake Rolex. But when the agent returned to his hotel room and tested the device out, the reactive spiritoid left the lamp when it was rubbed. To avoid attracting attention, the agent opened his suitcase to provide material for the being to transform and had a “magic” sheet produced. It had the ability to make people invisible, shift to other dimensions, protect people from most weapons, and fly.
There was one glaring problem. The material was too thin to prevent radioactive fibers woven into the sheet from spreading mild levels of radioactivity. The radiation wasn’t too high to be considered deadly, but if it were used constantly, there was the chance the person might develop cancer. Hassam was able to fold it small enough to slip it into his lead-lined photographic film pouch. By the time the mission was over, the Iraqi-American would use the sheet to make his escape from the country.
The first salvos fired in the “Genie War” involved a Soviet agent and an Islamic fundamentalist. Both had acquired genies and were using them to form weapons and protection from weapons. One night, the Soviet’s car mysteriously exploded and the next day, an insect bit the warrior for Allah and nearly killed him with a strange virus. A cobra appeared in the bed of the Soviet while poisoned fruit was served by a “synthetic” room attendant to the Muslim. Both men left Iraq, because the next attacks might have proved to be deadly.
As so many feared, Saddam finally obtained a genie and discreetly began using the being and its catalyst to form chemical weapons and conventional weapons which he stockpiled all over the country. To prevent suspicion from being aroused, many stockpiles were hidden in the desert or made invisible so that hardly anyone would know exactly what he had and how much. But there were enough genies and catalysts discovered by different people to keep Saddam fairly in check.
Hassam returned to Iraq often and was able to discover that Saddam was indeed working on weapons of mass destruction. Most were hidden and couldn’t be seen unless the genie that Saddam controlled allowed them to appear. That was why the inspectors that arrived in Iraq after the first Gulf War and later before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 were unable to find WMDs the CIA claimed were there. Many were moved out of the country before the start of the war in March. But there are caches of WMDs that are either invisible or shifted into other dimensions that we may eventually find. But it will require genies to make them visible.
Iraq could have exploded into total brutality and terrorist destruction during the 1980’s and in the 21st century if it hadn’t been for the balance of power achieved by the many factions that possessed reactive spiritoids and catalysts. There were attacks and counterattacks in Iraq. But thanks to something called dimensional displacement, in which battles were shifted to other dimensions, the millions of victims were never recognized as victims because, to most observers, nothing dramatic happened. Real people were replaced by synthetics and the destruction happened unseen by most people and even satellites.
Hassam and his fellow agents managed to remove three reactive spiritoids and catalysts from Iraq before the first Gulf War and helped us defeat the Iraqi military in record speed. Those genies were used during the latest Gulf War to help us once again win rapidly.
But the genies used by terrorists and Saddam loyalists are as potent as the ones we use. No one is about to wage a full-scale genie war that could keep the death and destruction in this dimension. Having access to weapons and explosives is not as important as having access to genies, because genies can produce the weapons and explosives needed and not cost the terrorists anything but a long life.
Our people know the power and danger of unlimited genie usage. Once Saddam’s genie turned on him after a fellow genie convinced him to rebel against the dictator, the war was basically over. The problem is that the genies now belong to Iranians, who may use them to produce nuclear weapons.
Unrestricted genie war could kill by radiation poisoning as many people who use the spiritoids and catalysts as are killed intentionally by the beings and their technology. We could have pacified all of Iraq on March 21, 2003 by having our opponents shifted into other dimensions. But instead of around 15,000 dead from fighting, ten times that many soldiers could be dead from radiation. The civilian death toll might be in the millions. Genies are just too dangerous to use at full strength.
As so many people involved in the genie war know, the genie is literally out of the bottle and no one is willing to put him back in. At least most people have the sense to use the reactive spiritoids sparingly; but until we can all use genies for peaceful and productive purposes, Iraq will be on the edge of a full-scale genie war which may ultimately destroy the world.
Copyright © 2005 by Bewildering Stories on behalf of the author