Iraq Reflections

I’m a loyal American. I support and applaud our troops.

But it’s criminal to waste men and material on a job they’re not designed to handle. And it’s criminal to let it continue without speaking out.

Occupation is not what we’re about. It’s a job no country is really capable of. The only folks who seem to handle it are autocrats engaged in genocide or (at minimum) mass murder. Even there, the occupiers are worn down and dehumanized by the process.

Our military can do two things well. We can go in with overwhelming force and liberate an objective. We can save people if they wish to be saved. But that’s all our military can do.

We can’t occupy other nations. No military can.

Watching our brave men and women trying to do the impossible, I am
reminded of Star Wars troopers trying to control Tatooine streets. So
are most people in the world. The fact that Americans aren’t reminded
of this is due to the fact that these are our brothers and
sisters, mothers and fathers, lovers and friends over there — we see
under the helmets and flak jackets to the people suffering underneath
them. And we sympathize.

As of today, 3 1/2 years in, we’ve lost nearly one-half as many people,
killed and wounded, as were killed during the 16 years of Vietnam.
Modern medicine has saved lives, and kept our losses from being larger,
but more of our wounded than ever before are permanently wounded, their
lives and futures destroyed by the impact.

And what of those we’re occupying? 600,000?
That’s nearly double the civilian toll Saddam Hussein levelled in his
entire tyrannical age. It does not count the military he sent through
the shredder against Iran, or into Kuwait. But any American who denies
that George W. Bush is now in Saddam’s league is fooling himself.

Two nations are being destroyed in the sands :

1. Iraq was the
   cradle of civilization. It’s where mankind first built homes and cities
   and empires. Iraq is destroyed. 
2. America, the dream
   of something better, the hope of mankind, the liberator, that America
   is dead.

We killed both these great nations because we used the same tactics in this so-called War on
Terror we used in the Cold War. We treated it as a war between equals,
a war over territory, rather than what it is, which is the residue of
all that, along with an ignorant medievalism that claims to have answers but,
when it does achieve power, quickly proves it does not. By turning
failures into martyrs, and turning evil men into heroes, we’ve done
their work for them.

Yet still it goes on. No matter what happens on November 7 it will go
on. It will go on because George W. Bush wills it to go on. And there
is no chance that a two-thirds majority of both Houses will have the
guts to call him out on it.

All we can hope for is investigation. All we can hope is for subpoenas
to lay it all bare, the lies, the murder, the war crimes, the banality,
and create a record that a future government might send to the
International Criminal Court, a record which will indict us all. Even
me. Even you.

And then, maybe, we can set upon what should be our real task, saving the life of this world.