-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: September 14, 2007 6:36:20 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: A Nation's Mind and Soul, Flushed Down the Toilet
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, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, September 14, 2007
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2007/09/14/
notes091407.DTL
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.
It never mattered how many little American flags appeared on how
many bloated Chevy Avalanches, how many right-wing radio shows
found a new reason to pule, how many furiously blindered uber-
patriots happily ignored all the harsh words from all those
naysaying generals or even all the "turncoat" anti-war Republicans
and insisted we're really over there to fight some sort of great
Islamic demon no one can actually see or locate or define but that
we must, somehow, attempt to destroy -- even though doing so only
seems to make the situation far, far worse.
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.
It's the great unspoken subtext. Iraq has always been a war between
our dueling national identities, a battle over how we are to move
and breathe and behave in the new millennium. Are we really this
violently paranoid bully, this rogue pre-emptive screw-em-all
ideological war machine defined by the dystopian Bush/Cheney/
Rumsfeld vision of permanent, ongoing global conflict?
Or do we try, instead, to move forward and reinvent ourselves over
and over again as the world's most commited, forceful peacekeeper,
ever striving for balance and cooperation and tact, even in the
face of hardship and fundamentalist rage, refusing to be taunted
and dragged down lest we take the bait and lose our minds and
engage in torture and misprision and ultraviolence and become
little better, ideologically speaking, than our taunters? Have we
already made our choice?
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.
A waste of money. A waste of time. A stunning, almost unspeakable
waste of life. A waste of resources and intellectual capital and a
massive waste of national spirit. A waste of energy and hope and a
giant squandering of any goodwill or empathy our former allies
might've had for America in its post-9/11 state. Heard it all
before? Sure you have.
Some scenes remain almost comical in their absurdity. Perhaps you
saw that money, those enormous, ridiculous piles of American cash,
the photos floating around of American soldiers guarding giant,
shrink-wrapped pallets of U.S. currency known as "cashpaks," each
reportedly containing about $1.6 million in stacks of $100 bills,
all airlifted by the ton straight from the Federal Reserve and set
down in the Iraqi sun like rotting fruit, small mountains of your
tax dollars earmarked to buy off various warlords and pay for
covert, unauthorized operations all over the Middle East in an
attempt to buy our way into some sort of impossible, forced
stability. Right.
Or maybe it's the bodies, the sheer waste of American flesh, not
merely the thousands of U.S. dead or even the countless tens of
thousands of dead Iraqi citizens but also the lesser-known horrors,
like the epidemic of brain-damaged U.S. soldiers, thousands of
them, so many that they're becoming their own category of study in
medical textbooks given how they're beginning to exhibit
combinations of trauma doctors have never seen before.
What a recruitment poster this is. Come fight in the American
military. We're exhausted, overstretched, bewildered, have lowered
our entrance barrier to accept D-grade students and former inmates,
have almost zero idea what we're actually fighting for, and serve
under a Commander in Chief who cares more about trying to shore up
his wretched legacy than for the loss of American life. Oh and by
the way, odds are extremely high you will return home permanently
wounded, traumatized, or brain damaged. How very proud we are.
We all know the current reality: We are not safer. We are not
better off in any measurable way. We are not stronger or more
unified or prouder or more respected or healthier or wealthier or
wiser and we have done exactly zero to stem the flood of radical
Islam or the general outpouring of global disgust at what America
has become under this president. This is our scar. This is our
great American shame.
So, what do you do with it? Or with the prospect of still more
weeks, months, even years of this dull slog of war? Because the
fact is, as Petreaus' testimony essentially confirmed, we will be
in Iraq at least through the (blessed) end of Bush's nightmare
term, and likely well beyond, given how entrenched and ensnared our
forces have become.
Perhaps we can take the long view, the wide view, the spiritual or
karmic view, even, insofar as the short and linear view has become
so stifling and deadly and useless. Perhaps this is the only way.
Because truly, many in the alternative set, the lightworkers and
the gurus and the healers and the deep teachers, those who think
outside the war room and beyond the bland academic platitudes,
these people tend see Iraq, BushCo, the American right and all the
sanctimonious bleakness surrounding them as merely the inky
remnants of a passing disease, the last, vicious gasp of a dying
ideology, the violent struggle of resistance that always erupts
before any great cosmic shift.
Which is to say: The screeching of the Christian right, the shrill
alarmism from cultural conservatives about everything from sex and
drugs and music to gays and nipples and creationism, the rejection
of science, the attacks on women's rights, the abuse of the
environment, all the way up to the bleakest and ugliest
manisfestation of all, a brutal and unwinnable war -- taken as a
whole, these can, if you so choose, be seen as merely the embers of
a hugely failed -- and yes, nearly extinct -- worldview.
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.
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www.ctrl.org
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