IRAQ: Truth Takes A Holiday
By Terence
Pearce
It is a sad day when soldiers
such as General Petraeus are used to distort the truth on the ground in an
attempt to shore up a patently failed strategy.
The truth (Oh! I’m sorry; did I use a
bad word?) about the whole situation in Iraq, independent of the effect of the
so-called ‘surge,’ is that children, women & men on all sides
are dying and being maimed for life every hour of every day as a result of the
American occupation.
We are told in
the most patronizing terms that if we pull out there will be chaos, as if
somehow the anarchy there is unconnected to American policy and actions there.
Of course there will be chaos! We have unbalanced the whole situation in Iraq by
our illegal invasion in the first place and it is not improving.
However, by pulling out immediately,
there may be a shorter-lived chaos with a concomitant lower death toll than if
we continue with the folly of this grinding carnage.
But hey! Let us be fair, the war has
succeeded in some ways. It has provided al Qaeda with their largest free
promotion and enrollment campaign ever & a place where they can get direct
easy access to attack, kill and maim American and British soldiers. It has
provided Halliburton & Friends with endless profit from the misery of troops
and civilians. After all, with an endless cycle of infrastructure destruction/
rebuilding who would want to kill ‘the goose that laid the golden
egg’ by hastening the advent of peace to the region.
It has added greatly to the crippling
of an American economy already bled dry by the greatest raid on the treasury in
history.
Last but not least America,
once the lamp of freedom held up to the whole world, has been magically
transformed. Transmogrified to a pariah, a rogue state, universally hated, thus
compromising our security at home and inviting more terrorist attacks
here.
Apart from my horror at the
results both on the ground in Iraq and in diplomatic terms worldwide it is our
government’s manifest and absolute contempt for the American people that
horrifies me the most. The fixing of ‘intelligence around the facts’
both in our entry to the war and it’s continuation is simply put an
appalling affront to the generous and freedom-loving hearts of Americans. Most
thinking people during the preparations for war did not need the transparently
trumped up intelligence to know that we were being lied to and led into
disaster.
Today we know, just as
clearly, that we are being lied to again in an attempt to extend the war and
squeeze more corporate profits from this blot on American history.
Do not dare to speak to us of
patriotism in this cynical and benighted expedition! What we as a people cry out
for here is real patriotism, and from those who have the means to effect a real
change, our leaders!
Real patriotism
often entails the ability to admit our mistakes and the understanding that we
are not dealing with some abstract exercise in policy here but a life or death
struggle for the well-being of real human beings with real lives and for the
future of the world we hope to see our children live to enjoy.
The American people are pleading with
their leaders. They are sick of subterfuge, weakness and contempt for their
hard-working lives. They are asking “For God’s sake stand up and be
counted!”
Posted: Mon - October 1, 2007 at 08:11 PM