Here in just a second I'm going to connect some dots for you. Now, it will be Iraq dots so you probably should just stop reading now, and go stick your head back in that comfortable sand of "I've got a depression to worry about—don't tell me any more war stories!"
But then many of you didn't want to hear the war stories in the first place. You wanted to hear about how in 2003 the brave American troops had swept into Iraq, and some SEALs or something had fired off some sniper shots and the whole thing was mission accomplished, just like the idiot-in-chief claimed.
When the news started, and it started pretty quickly, to turn against thinking the US invasion of Iraq had been a success, or ever would be that, you wanted the bad people who told you these upsetting things to shut up and go away. You didn't want to hear about tortures and murders committed by US troops (and other collaborating occupiers) against innocent Iraqi civilians.
So, you decided, much as the US military decided, that there weren't any innocent Iraqi civilians. If some Iraqi got rousted out of his house late at night by US military, and got tortured or dead as a result of being interrogated, well hey that's because that Iraqi was a "bad guy". Right?
I mean after all, so many of you were, and still are, so fucking stupid, you thought Saddam Hussein and Iraq attacked the United States on 9/11. You thought, because the war criminals in charge of your country kept telling you these lies, that Saddam Hussein was a partner of Osama bin Laden, and was about to dip into his stockpile of WMD to nuke-up Qaeda and blow you and your dog to kingdom come.
Yep, that's how stupid and how wrong you really were.
And now of course you think somebody else should care about the fact you don't have a job or you're scared of losing it. After years of your support for horrific war crimes, you want sympathy?
Anyway—so I promised some dots—right.
Here they are:
1. Most Iraqi civilian deaths were caused by executions (bullets or drills in the head, or more gruesome tortures), not Sunni insurgent bombs. While the majority of these deaths are alleged to have happened through the sectarian warfare that occurred between Shiites and Sunnis—in fact "death squads largely run by Shiite militias [in retaliation against Sunni bombers] were believed to be behind many of the bullet-riddled bodies that turned up by the dozens on the streets of Baghdad and other cities"—some portion of them were the result of US troops committing war crimes.
And so, dot 2:
2. US military finally convicts a US soldier of executing Iraqi civilians. Yep, even though the US military executed thousands of Iraqi civilians in (literally) countless war crimes, and even though they indicted some US soldiers for torture and murder, only a few (mostly guards responsible for the Abu Ghraib prison tortures) were convicted. Generally, Iraqis understood there was no point in accusing American soldiers of war crimes. Nothing would be done about it. Here's a really great line from US military prosecutors, attempting to demonize the convicted soldier: "On two separate occasions, the accused became the judge, jury and executioner". In other words, he became and behaved as a US soldier, following the orders of his savage masters.
Which brings us to dot 3:
3. Gutless Spanish turn tail and run from war crimes indictments of of Bush's henchmen. "If one is dealing with a crime of mistreatment of prisoners of war, the complaint should go against those who physically carried it out"—really, that's what the idiot Spanish prosecutors said. In that way of equivocating, Hitler was just a victim of a lot of overly zealous generals and death-camp guards. Of course, "those who physically carried it out" are never going to be identified or charged with anything, because after all they were just torturing and killing "bad guys". See also this discussion.
A brief note about the Somali pirate situation and in particular the resolution—of death—arrived at by the US Navy, as ordered by the warlord Barack Obama. First off, the United States has been conducting a clandestine war in Somalia for a long time, once again murdering and torturing bunches of poor people who are called "bad guys" if they are adult males and of course "collateral casualties" if they are women and children. In fact, the hatred the United States feels for Somalia, where a bunch of poor Somalis defeated the US Army Rangers back in 1993, probably exceeds that which Americans feel for Iraq, where of course thousands of Americans went to die for nothing—AKA George Bush—this past decade.
Given the disastrous mess the United States has helped to make of Somalia, is it any wonder that some Somalis have thought it honorable and certainly profitable to turn to piracy (which is of course a proud European and American tradition)? As one of the men aboard the Maersk Alabama said about the Somali pirates: "They're just hungry."
I'll just leave you with a thought, one written a long time ago by a fellow who had much to say about life, war and the difference between a warrior ethic and that of an ostrich:
After Victory you must not parade your success,
You must not boast of your ability,
You must not feel proud,
You must rather regret that you had not been able to
prevent the war.
—Lao Tzu
Or to put it and look at it another way: The more of "them" you kill, the more of "them" there will be.
(jk)
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