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Damascus resident Ibrahim Fayyad announced that he was looking forward to the opportunity to be murdered not by sarin gas or white phosphorous, but by an ordinary, deadly American airstrike.
“Every day for two years I’ve lived in fear of being gassed by my government with chemical weapons, or brutally tortured by the rebels,” said Fayyad, noting that his neighborhood is just begging to be flattened by a Patriot missile filled with standard explosives. “But thanks to the Americans, that will all be over soon.”
“Things are looking up for Ibrahim Fayyad,” he added, glancing around hopefully as a military jet roared by.
In a speech yesterday, President Obama urged Congress to approve Syrian airstrikes. “This is exactly the kind of decisive leadership the world has come to expect from the American military,” he said. “Syrians, Libyans, Afghans, Iraqis, Yemenis, Somalis or anyone else who needs our aid: when America is through with you, you’ll never need worry about chemical weapons ever again.”
Secretary of State John Kerry described the scope of the proposed U.S. bombing campaign. “First, we’ll launch several Hellfire missiles here, rendering the entire neighborhood immune to chemical attack,” he said, indicating a densely populated area. “We will then seed this residential belt with mines, to catch government agents who might be thinking about dropping any deadly chemicals in the area. And as for the city of Homs, well, let’s just say chemical weapons will be the least of Homs’s worries.”
When the news broke last week that the Syrian regime may be employing chemical weapons, explained Fayyad, he feared the worst. “To have one’s life brutally ripped away, a pawn in some pointless civil war, well, it really depends how exactly they kill you,” he said. “Being shot is fine. Nothing wrong with a nice stabbing. Airstrikes are as good as it gets. At the end of the day, as long as it’s not chemical weapons it’s all the same to us. Thank you, America.”
Concluded Fayyad, “Do you hear that?”
As of press time, Fayyad was finally, once and for all, safe from the incomparable horror of chemical weapons.
