Here's an article I wrote about the subject which basically sums up everything I have to say on the subject:
Happy Birthday to the War
Three years old with no end in sight, three years have passed and only now the people start to see, three years gone with oil prices and usage sky high. Over two thousand Americans killed, several hundred thousand Iraqi deaths ignored, bombs shattering silence by night and bombs burning flesh by day, bullets whizzing by schools and hospitals with an entire generation singed with war and despair. Oh, we’ve fought for freedom. We’ve fought for the freedom to starve, the freedom to surrender our freedoms to the barrel of the gun, to surrender to the misery and contagion of OPEC, Haliburton, and greed.
Anger fades to vengeance as we seek those to blame; visions of bodies piling up in mounds, the rotting flesh of arms, legs, and dignity of those labeled “collateral damage,” the young men seeking freedom in Abu Gharib after being rode like a jackass, having his race and religion laughed at, the poor farm boy recruited to die just so that he can go to college, the thousands of boys on both sides killed for the honour and benefit of Osama and Bush; this degradation of our basic humanity. Is Bush to blame? No, the blame shouldn’t be isolated to him alone. The blame is on all of us. For their greed is fed by our own; every time we choose to poison the earth and continue our addiction to oil for the sake of convenience, every time we fall for the lie of a foreign bogeyman, every time we choose to pay less on the backs of others, every time we bloody our hands for material desire. How many more mass graves for 90 cent oil?
Yet pick a point of the globe, the picture is the same: there’s the right to obey, the right to be killed or incarcerated for not obeying, the freedom to give yourself up to a crypto-fascist corporation, or the freedom to starve, the tap, the phone, and the silence of stone, the same children being buried hungry, the same rebel to tame, the masses to distract with female cliche and Hollywood Aristocracy.
And a fourteen year old boy will walk past the smouldering ruins he used to call home, his parents killed by bombings and his brother taken in the middle of the night to a detention camp. The neighbours have fled and his stomach growls as he seeks money and food anyway he can, the familiar faces replaced by armoured white men with guns and brown men draped in dogmatic ceremony promising salvation. They call him brother as they seduce him with tales of after-lives and seventy virgins, he didn’t know what America was before but he knows them now. As they fill his head with tales of evil, corruption, and greed, they hand him a vest of explosives and tell him how and where to fight evil. To make it all stop anyway he can.
Mr. Anchor assure me, that Baghdad is burning, your voice is so soothing, that cunning marching of killing, I need you my witness, to dress this up as bloodless, to numb me and purge me now, of thoughts of blaming you. Yes the car is our wheelchair, my witness you’re coughing, oily silence mocks the legless, boys who now travel in coffins. RATM, 2000.
Let us pause now and reflect on the rationale for this war and the ultimate lessons we have learnt from it. It was originally herald as an example of America’s awesome military might, a move which would completely upset the paradigm of contemporary foreign affairs, and of course be a swift bold move towards winning the War on Terror. Of course, it was not without precedent, in fact everything about the invasion was eerily familiar. The false pretense, the inciting a peaceful populace into a fever of jingoistic hatred and lust for war, the tangled web of interests stretching from imperialism to business, and the continuing excuse of cutting money for social programs to fund useless wars abroad. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, the military industrial complex and their inexplicable million dollar gifts to Lyndon B Johnson, the populace ready and willing to kill anyone in the name of freedom and democracy, the beginning of vast cutbacks of social programs of all sorts from Medicare to education to a bloated “defense” budget now spanning over two-thirds of an American budget of over four trillion dollars. Persian Gulf War the sequel? More like the end of the Vietnam trilogy.
The lessons of Iraq have also been painfully obvious; American military might is quite fallible if not laughable, the willingness of those select business interest to declare war on third world countries and fool the populace is a breathtakingly easy decision (the CEO’s and Presidents feast at night with swollen stomachs while the charred remains of young boys lie smouldering on the side of roads), and of course the unceasing hostilities in today’s world. For those nations who dare to defy American greed, labeled terrorists or rogue regimes, the lessons of Iraq have been glaringly simple and obvious. Quite simply, to successfully defy American imperialism you must: 1) have weapons of mass destruction, 2) be willing to use weapons to mass destruction if attacked, 3) in no way cooperate with UN inspectors, 4) there can be no peaceful resolution without nuclear blackmail or surrendering to American will. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, thus they had absolutely nothing to stop an American invasion. Without the threat of force (which of course for all the ballyhoo about creating peace and freedom is the biggest lie ever perpetrated in human history,) you will in no way be able to be taken serious in the world stage. Cooperating with the United Nations is a dead end; America will use it as a tool for spying, if nothing is found then they will accuse the enemy of not cooperating, the inspections will be nothing more than a facade to push away the news of a massive military build-up, and allowing the United Nations to strip a nation’s only possible defense against the world’s largest holder of weapons of mass destruction is a suicidal policy. Nations who choose not to surrender to American business interests will be left to continue an arms build-up on the backs of citizens and society’s worst off (North Korea and Iran) or left to surrender and be incorporated into Pax Americana’s hypocrisy (Pakistan and Libya.)
I do not write this in anger but in quiet resignation, this is the way it is and the way it’s been for hundreds of years and will possibly be the way for hundreds of more years. All culminating to that one nuclear strike which will blink humanity out of existence, and we will inevitably support such actions as heroic, as an example of democratic leadership: the type where one man spouts democratic ideals while defying democratic will for the benefit of the masses, the masses being the idiot child who needs to be lead by the hand of our “leaders.” Despite the only example of wars of defense in North America since the twentieth century being Pearl Habour, we will continue to invade and kill in the name of some abstract lie of “defense.” We will export our wars, just like our torture, and give them catchy cold names like Rendition or National Interests or even more pathetically, “taking the fight to the enemy.” So that while we sleep soundly in our warm beds tonight; bombs rain down on homes, bullets fly through nursery rooms, family members will be rounded up in the middle of their slumber, and we will continue to provide more reasons for people to strap themselves to bombs and kill us in return. An eye for an eye is obsolete, a bomb for a bomb and inflicting the heaviest death tolls possible is the new truth. Ok, I wrote that last part in searing anger.
Try again.
@ Fedele