Mark Morford: Iraq, Deep In Your Bones

A war that isn’t really a war, the great humiliation that’s ours forever. Is there any upside?

by Mark Morford

We are, of course, mostly fighting against ourselves.

It must be repeated every so often, just as a painful, necessary, ego-tweaking reminder: Iraq was never a war. Not really, not in any sense that mattered or that we could actually define and understand or to which we could truly submit ourselves or our national identity.

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There was never any coherent, justifiable heroic cause. Indeed, the truth about Iraq, as evidenced by Gen. David Petreaus’ muted, bleak testimony before Congress just this week, is much more simple, nefarious, pathetic. Iraq is, was, and forever will be our very own massive strategic blunder, a failed land grab for position and power in a tinderbox region defined by furious instability and corruption and death.

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Because the truth is, we are well past the point of salvaging anything noble or honest from Bush’s massive, historic debacle. We have only this brutal reality: Iraq is, and forever will be, one of the most extraordinary wastes in all of American history.

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Here is the hesitant optimism, the hint of the new, the tentative suggestion that all is not lost: By many measures, the worst of it is over. There really is light coming, a new awareness, a shift away from the bleakness and the rot and the wallowing in bland violence. Perhaps you can feel it. Or perhaps you need to be ready to feel it. Either way, it’s there. You have but to do the most easy/difficult thing of all: you must look behind the veil, see the two dueling Americas, and make your choice.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/14/3849/

Wonderful piece by Morford. Well worth the read.

Let's hope so.

In Iraq, twenty million shattered lives - a million of them dead, two million refugees, the majority of the rest far worse off, living among their losses among the wreckage of an endless war, remembering loved ones dead, worrying over the missing or crippled or hungry, and things just grind on and on...

Morford suggests America may collectively take a good long look at itself in the mirror and say "it was all about me". Yes, then we might stop the "extraordinary waste" - imagine all the stuff we could have bought with those billions! - admit it was never really the heroic cause we thought, and we can come home to a new day, a hesitant optimism, a new peace between the "dueling Americas", a smile toward a better future. What a load of self serving crap - how many other people's countries do you get to destroy, how many millions can you kill in the process of working out your problems, and still get a free pass to a fresh start? A clean suit and tie will never conceal the rot behind the eyes...

my birthright, and license to rant now and then.