If you go and look back in my archives, you'll find my thoughts about what happened.
Meanwhile, in Amerika, what has happened since then?
Our civil rights are being trampled, our natural resources are in danger of being raped, the innocence and brilliance which comprise our children -- our future -- have been left to fall through the cracks, and the wisdom and experience of our elders -- our past -- have been left to rot.
Not, all in all, a very good track record, by any reckoning.
So what now? What do we do? How do we manage this?
"Sorry, I got nothin'." I have NO ideas. It is all I can do to slog through the day-to-day bull manure that comprises the bottom layer of my current existence. I find myself quite glad to be at work, because it helps take my mind off that layer.
It may seem very cold, very self-serving, just to think of where I'm going, but if I can't take care of even myself, I can't help anyone else. So I have to fix me first.
And this, too, may seem cold, but here it is:
Five years ago, we got off EASY.
We lost somewhere in the vicinity of 3,000 to 5,000 people that day.
Since then, we have lost probably very close to 3,000 military and paramilitary personnel, reporters and missionaries.
We have probably taken ten times that number in foreign casualties, mostly civilian.
We have committed at least 1,000 reported hate crimes toward people, citizens of this country who looked like our aggressors.
We probably have committed a great number of unreported hate crimes towards more of these citizens.
Are you feeling proud to be a 'Murkin, yet?
We chose our battles unwisely. We changed our focus from Afghanistan/Pakistan, where our instigator is STILL purportedly in hiding (I think he's dead, and our clueless leadership is thinking they're going to show us his body and say, "See? We got 'im!".).
And in doing what we did in Iraq, we won the initial battle.
But we lost the war.
We need to bow out and let whatever will happen happen. "What happens in the Middle East stays in the Middle East," as the saying goes. Or is that Las Vegas? Either way.
Taking out Saddam Hussein was a mistake. Sure, he was a dictator, and his regime was oppressive, but was it more oppressive than anything else going on over there? Come on, what are we going to do, take out every country that doesn't foster democracy?
Something occurred to me a while ago. We're not out to spread democracy, or our politics. We're out to spread our brand of capitalism, to spread our poisonous economy of artifice to the rest of the undeveloped world, even if that means undeveloping other parts of the world.
We were complicit with what happened five years ago. If you don't believe that, you haven't been paying attention.
So we deserved everything we've reaped since then.
Pay Attention. Your future depends on it.
1 comment:
If "only" ten times that many Iraqi casualties had been taken, that would be a blessing if sorts. Sadly, we are looking at something in the range of 655,000. Add to that about two million refugees leaving, and you see the reality is much much more stark. (I got the 655,000 from the Johns Hopkins study. Bush, of course, denies this, as he does most reality, but there you go.)
Consider also the lowering of enlistment standards to grant "moral waivers", the lack of followup on these people, and the recent lowering of psychological standards for admission and you have a real problem. When these people, with added PTSD and other trauma are "lucky" enough to make it back and recieve no care or substandard care, what will we have on the streets of our own land? Trained and experienced unbalanced people.
Many peole like to compare Bush to Hitler. Obviously, these are people who have not studied history. Hitler had people working on ways to preserve the sanity of his soldiers. There were many preludes to the Final Solution- he wanted to psychologically insulate the men in the field from the horror of killing thousands and thousands (and ultimately millions) of people. First there was the dehumanising of the victims, of course, but they still scream when gassed in the back of trucks driven by soldiers (a first attempt, later abandoned), which was too disturbing (aww, poor nazi's, eh?). Bush has no such consideration for the soldiers he uselessly sends into these situations.
Though we have seen a dehumanisation of the Iraqi's (and the mis-naming of the insurgents as somehow not Iraqis in many cases, which might be partly true, but ask yourself- if an invading army came to your town, what would you do? Gather help against them from wherever possible? Likely.).
Where does hope lie for America now? Not with the options on the table. The Democrats offer war-ish candidates Kerry and Edwards in '04, and Hillary and Obama both subscribe to a continuation of funding. The party's "benchmarks" include an opening of Iraqi oil fields to American companies, thus draining away the resource we went in there for in the first place, and simultaneously usurping the thing which would (maybe) economically revive the Iraqi economy if anyone is left alive at the end of this. Profits Exported Accomplished.
So, anyway...
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