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Edited on Wed May-31-06 09:48 PM by Plaid Adder
Two years ago, I would have been writing about Haditha as soon as the story broke. But instead, I have more or less been avoiding reading about it, never mind writing about it.
It isn't that I don't care any more; I just don't see the point of talking about it. If Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, Shock and Awe, and the daily mounting casualties on all sides of the war are not enough to teach my fellow-Americans and my Congressional leaders that we need to pull the plug on the American occupation now, if they can't figure out yet that all we are doing over there is making things worse, if they haven't grasped yet the fact that whether we stay or go we no longer control the outcome, and if they can't tell from the news that's come out during the past three years that this war is a crime, a sin, and a shame, then I don't see why it should bother them to contemplate the possiblity that in November of 2005 a group of American soldiers executed a dozen or so unarmed civilians because they had the misfortune to be near a bomb that had been planted by someone else. Bill O'Reilly has already explained to all of his viewers that, hey, shit happens in war, although Wes Clark tried to explain to him that he was full of shit. This is just going to become one more foul monstrosity that Bush and the media and the 29% swallow and smile about.
I've been listening to an audio course that my dad bought and passed on to me about the history of US policy in the middle east from 1914 to 2001. It's depressing. Basically the main problem is that US policy is always based on promoting America's interests, at the expense of human rights and democracy and everything else--and that their concept of "America's interests" is tragically short-sighted and limited. All that bullshit that went on with the US and the USSR jockeying for position during the Cold War as if everyone was playing a gigantic game of Risk, and then it just gets worse and worse. I'm now up to the part where Zbignew Brezinski, under Carter's administration, gets the bright idea of funneling covert aid to the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan because he's really excited about the opportunity to "sow shit in <the USSR's> backyard." Yeah. That was real farsighted of you, Zbignew. You indulge your puerile desire to piss on your enemy's doormat, and 20-odd years down the road, the Islamic dictatorship you helped give birth to winds up sheltering the guy who's going to take down the Twin Towers. I can't wait to hear all about how Reagan took your mistake and ran with it. Because that's the really depressing thing about all of this: fundamentally, the objectives of American middle eastern policy don't change with a change in party. The methods vary, but they're all about equally ill-conceived.
Except for Bush's invasion of Iraq. That brainstorm goes beyond "ill-conceived" to "just downright insane."
All these idiot men and they are so convinced they're the smartest guys in the world and they know exactly what to do with the globe and how to win the game and they are just wrong. (I should say that I do not expect that when the course gets closer to 2001 and some of the idiot men become women, it will help much.) And so eventually they create the conditions that make it possible for American soldiers to deliberately execute innocent civilians. Rumsfeld is just the last in a line of cocksure assholes who thinks the only reason the world isn't perfect is that he's never been in charge of it, and who fucks up and fucks us all over and then fucks off without a mark on him.
I guess I'm still a tad pissed off.
Well, anyway. So now the Vietnamization of the Iraq war is complete, and has this debacle has finally produced a My Lai. You'd like to think it would wake some people up. But I don't have much hope. The 29% has had a lot of damn wakeup calls. I think they're down for the count.
The Plaid Adder
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