What we're fighting for,
or, The Triumph of Faith over Works.
A day in the life of the average Iraqi has been reduced to identifying corpses, avoiding car bombs and attempting to keep track of which family members have been detained, which ones have been exiled and which ones have been abducted.
2006 has been, decidedly, the worst year yet. No—really. The magnitude of this war and occupation is only now hitting the country full force. It’s like having a big piece of hard, dry earth you are determined to break apart. You drive in the first stake in the form of an infrastructure damaged with missiles and the newest in arms technology, the first cracks begin to form. Several smaller stakes come in the form of politicians like Chalabi, Al Hakim, Talbani, Pachachi, Allawi and Maliki. The cracks slowly begin to multiply and stretch across the once solid piece of earth, reaching out towards its edges like so many skeletal hands. And you apply pressure. You surround it from all sides and push and pull. Slowly, but surely, it begins coming apart—a chip here, a chunk there.
That is Iraq right now. The Americans have done a fine job of working to break it apart. This last year has nearly everyone convinced that that was the plan right from the start. There were too many blunders for them to actually have been, simply, blunders. The “mistakes” were too catastrophic. The people the Bush administration chose to support and promote were openly and publicly terrible—from the conman and embezzler Chalabi, to the terrorist Jaffari, to the militia man Maliki. The decisions, like disbanding the Iraqi army, abolishing the original constitution, and allowing militias to take over Iraqi security were too damaging to be anything but intentional.
The question now is, but why? I really have been asking myself that these last few days. What does America possibly gain by damaging Iraq to this extent? I’m certain only raving idiots still believe this war and occupation were about WMD or an actual fear of Saddam.
—Riverbend, “End of Another Year”
So why did the president wait so long to rid himself of this meddlesome general? Well, politics is politics, remember. “Many of Mr. Bush’s advisers say their timetable for completing an Iraq review had been based in part on a judgment that for Mr. Bush to have voiced doubts about his strategy before the midterm elections in November would have been politically catastrophic.”
The saddest thing about the 3,000th American death in Iraq is that unlike the first batch of casualties, people getting killed or maimed in Iraq these days are really doing so in the course of a bad faith military option.
We’ve all lost some of the compassion and civility that I felt made us special four years ago. I take myself as an example. Nearly four years ago, I cringed every time I heard about the death of an American soldier. They were occupiers, but they were humans also and the knowledge that they were being killed in my country gave me sleepless nights. Never mind they crossed oceans to attack the country, I actually felt for them.
Had I not chronicled those feelings of agitation in this very blog, I wouldn’t believe them now. Today, they simply represent numbers. 3000 Americans dead over nearly four years? Really? That’s the number of dead Iraqis in less than a month. The Americans had families? Too bad. So do we. So do the corpses in the streets and the ones waiting for identification in the morgue.
re:The question now is, but why? ...What does America possibly gain by damaging Iraq to this extent?
Wrong question – America has nothing to gain. The neocons, on the other hand, have everything to gain by completely dismantling the UNITED STATES as a moral force in the world.
It would have been relatively easy to go in and take the oil, but that could be undone by the next president. The damage done to America’s ABILITY to help the Middle East will not be repaired any time in the next generation. They openly state that they believe in manifesting hell on earth, and that the natural condition of humanity is brutal struggle and oppression. They are working to implement their vision. What’s so complicated about it? The fact that lying words spew out of their mouths? No problem – just look at ACTIONS. Try the thought experiment of setting aside ALL public political TALK since GWB was elected and look at the ACTUAL CONTENT of the LAWS ENACTED. Nothing subtle, nothing obscure, nothing confusing. A clear, straightforward goal, and steady progress towards it.