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Wars and conflicts International USA
By BOB HERBERT
For the smug, comfortable, well-off Americans, it doesn’t seem to matter how long the war in Iraq goes on ? as long as the agony is endured by others. If the network coverage gets too grim, viewers can always switch to the E! channel (one hand on the remote, the other burrowing into a bag of chips) to follow the hilarious antics of Paris, Britney, Brangelina et al.
The war is depressing and denial is the antidote. Why should ordinary citizens (good people, religious people, patriots) consider their role in ? and responsibility for ? the thunderous, unending carnage? Enough with this introspection. Let’s go to the ballpark, get drunk and boo Barry Bonds.
The nation is in deep denial about Iraq. For years the president and his supporting cast of arrogant, bullying characters have tried to put the best face on this war. They had no idea what they were doing when they ordered the invasion of Iraq, and they still don’t. Many of the troops who were assured that the Iraqis would welcome them with open arms are now dead. And there’s still no plan.
Paul Wolfowitz, who fashioned the phony intellectual underpinnings of this catastrophe, told us that Iraqi oil revenues would cover the cost of reconstruction. He was as wrong about that as the president was about the weapons of mass destruction. (And as wrong as Dick Cheney was last June when he said the insurgency was in its last throes.)
Here are the facts: The war so recklessly launched by the amateurs in the Bush White House has already taken scores of thousands of lives, and will ultimately cost the United States $1 trillion to $2 trillion.
No one has been held accountable for this. While Mr. Bush’s approval ratings are low, the public has been largely indifferent to the profound suffering in Iraq. This is primarily for two reasons: Because most Americans have no immediate personal stake in the war, and because the administration and the news media keep the worst of the suffering at a safe distance from the U.S. population.
The killing of American troops is usually kissed off with a paragraph or two in the major papers, and a sentence or two, at best, on national newscasts. (Imagine if someone in your office, sitting at a desk across from you, were suddenly blown to bits, splattering you with his or her blood. You wouldn’t get over it for the rest of your life. This is what happens daily in Iraq.)
The many thousands of Iraqis who are killed ? including babies and children who are shot tto death, blown up, or incinerated ? remain completely unknown to the Americann public. So not only is there very little empathy for the suffering of Iraqis, there is virtually no sense among ordinary Americans of a shared responsibility for that suffering.
Despite the frequently expressed fantasies expressed by President Bush and some of the leading politicians of both parties, the idea of a U.S. victory in Iraq is an illusion. The nightmarish violence is rising, not receding. Iraq is not being pacified. A suicide bomber blew himself up in a bustling market in Basra over the weekend, killing 27 and wounding scores. On Sunday, 20 people were stopped and pulled from their vehicles on a highway near Baquba and shot to death.
John Burns, writing in yesterday’s New York Times, told us: "The death toll in one of the most grisly recent attacks, in the village of Hadid, near the Diyala provincial capital of Baquba, rose to 17 on Tuesday when the police delivered nine severed heads to the Baquba morgue in the fruit boxes in which they were found in the village."
Eight other heads had previously been found.
Instead of beginning to pull our troops out of Iraq, we are sending more in. The permanent Iraqi government, which was supposed to be the answer to everybody’s prayers, is a study in haplessness. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda’s man in Iraq, remains at large. (As does Osama bin Laden, somewhere in Pakistan.)
As was the case with Vietnam, the war in Iraq is a fool’s errand. There is no clear mission for American troops in Iraq. No one can really say what the dead have died for. And yet the dying continues.
When it all finally comes to an end (according to President Bush, on somebody else’s watch) we’ll look around at the hideous costs in human treasure and cold hard cash and ask ourselves: What in the world were we thinking?
Forum posts
11 June 2006, 09:56
Thanks Bob. Good post. It is important to remember the suffering. Well so much for zaqarwi, eh? But it won’t change anything. What has been changing it people’s attitude toward the war and Bush. The unfavorables keep going up, so despite the efforts of the administration and the press, somehow it’s getting through. Although we can’t wait that long, it would be interesting if a name candidate for prez said they would bring the troops home if elected. It worked in Spain, it worked in Italy, and it would work here except for that sticky issue of paperless electronic voting machines. Part of the effort of the press is to make us believe that the vast majority of the public doesn’t give a shit. Why believe the press anymore, so you have to do your own polling. Do the vast majority of your associates not give a shit about the war? That is a better indicator of what is going on in the minds of the american public, not what you "learn" on tv or in the newspapers.
19 June 2006, 21:19
To answer your question: NO. The majority of the people I work with couldn’t care less about this fake ’War on Terror’ which is nothing but a slowly eroding high-tech disguise for the naked US annexation of what once was a sovereign nation. But, & there is a huge but, I would not call it a vast majority, just a majority of perhaps 51 or 52%. The vast majority who have expressed their opinions publicly on this godforsaken war are VEHEMENTLY opposed to it, and do desire to have the entire White House leadership, not just the President, removed from office, which is a 180 degree reversal in opinion three years ago, when the invasion started.
I do believe that the majority of the people who don’t care about the war, the usual apathetic majority that this country has always had, are also not strong supporters of the status quo what so ever, despite what the Fascist mouth pieces say in the US mass media.
The apathetic majority don’t believe in the President, the Congress, the entire political class for that matter, nor the US mass media, simply because the reasons all of these ’supporters of democracy’ give for this war of occupation to continue do not make any sense at all, not economically and not politically.
The only reason that makes any sense for this occupation to continue is the blatant annexation of Iraq as a puppet regime, and through this conquest, the unilateral control of all the vast Middle Eastern oil reserves by the US military. The President continues to say that he will ’stay the course’ with this annexation, despite the objections of most voting Americans and his own allies. He intends to do this with a minimum of 50,000 American GIs posted to six of the permanent military bases Halliburton and the Bechtel group are currently building in Iraq. And he is doing this with the complete support of the Democratic Party, our fake loyal opposition.Just like the Democratic Party, he too couldn’t care less for the opinion of the American people, let alone the Iraqi people, who are sick and tired of living in an occupied land manned by callous, often murderous American youths who have contributed enormously to the agonizing civil strife that they have been forced to suffer, and in their desperation are either leaving their homeland en masse or joining the insurgency in droves.
With 37 states still using the most hackable, most vulnerable of voting machines, those horribly corrupt Diebold machines, each without a single simple paper trail to corroborate the ’vote’ they have supposedly tabulated, one can argue very persuasively that the US is a
controlled democracy, not a real one.
It is because of the Diebold machines that the spineless Democrats can now shamelessly display their true colors and reveal to all sane and intelligent Americans, [a tiny percentage ,I must add, of the US Population] that the ’two’ party system that has governed the American people for decades is a nothing but a huge crock of shit, a high-tech Punch and Judy show for the masses. The Democrats will continue to have Lieberman and Hillary Clinton, two of the biggest warhawks in existence [as pro-war and with the same Imperial ambitions as the President or McCain for that matter] to lead them, despite lacking the support of their rank and file. With the Diebold machines on their side, the Democrats can easily manipulate the vote as their supposed opponents, the Republicans have done, and both parties’ leadership staffs would also like to see more of these Diabolical Diebold machines in all 50 states.
Both parties are ardent students of Stalin, who believed that the people who counted the vote were far more important than the people who voted. In America it is Stalin who has triumphed, and not our Founding Fathers. A country that cannot even understand this shame, this blasphemy of the sacred right to vote does not deserve to have a Republic in the first place.
The Democrats, their leadership staff anyway, in refusing to do the right thing, ACTING LIKE A LOYAL OPPOSITION and demanding impeachment proceedings against the entire White House and cabinet, obviously couldn’t care less about how the American people feel. In this they too are as hypocritical and as arrogant and as power hungry as the President and his personal Gang of Four, which includes Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice. They are no different than their false opponents the Republicans who have always pursued the same foreign policy and the same trade agreements as they have in the past 50 years. To the "Democratic" and "Republican" leadership the word ’democracy’ is just their favorite, pretty lie, a meaningless, empty word that they love to spout out to news anchors and Tim Russert, believing that by merely spraying this word enough times it will somehow maintain this illusion, this circus they call ’American freedom’ for the apathetic majority . For if any of these ’statesmen’ were truly worthy of the name, they would make it their full time job to rid our nation of these diabolical Diebold machines and ensure that nothing but paper voting is allowed throughout the land.
This is what the neofascists are actually defending in Iraq, a false democracy where the people are continually duped and psychologically terrified to the point that they don’t care any more who controls their destiny. Except that in decimated Iraq, the terror is not merely psychological, or subliminal, no, the terror over there is very real and carries with it anguish and death. A terror made more hellish with the constant, daily barrage of words like ’liberty’ , ’freedom’ and ’peace’, heaped on their weary heads, words that have become curse words instead of the hopeful blessings they used to mean. How different is this godforsaken ’War of Terror’ created by US policy makers from the ’Reign of Terror’ of Revolutionary France? How different are the explanations of Bush and Cheney for this ’War on Terror’ than Robespierre’s defense of his ’Terror’ so long ago. The only difference that I see is that of a span, of let’s say, 210 years.
The solution: VOTE INDEPENDENT. A vote for either party is a vote for this madness, this manufactured War on Terror to continue. To vote for either party is to vote for the future enslavement of the American people.