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The longer you remain amid the country's violence, the more insistent, the more bullying it becomes. Over time, more people you know die, or are left maimed, or have scrapes with dea th that leave them psychologically scarred.
Luke Baker's evocative Reuters repo rt on living and reporting in Iraq. Baker's article is personal: it toss es away, for a moment, the reporter-subject convention, and portrays the reality of life in Iraq to those around him and the Reuters bureau ther e And that reality is death - death in many gruesome forms, death for t he sake of politics, for the sake of oil, for the sake of religion, deat h for the sake of the bloodlust of petty, murderous tyrants and killers. Oh, it is certain that is "is better to fight them in Iraq than in the streets of our cities," as the President and his lackeys insist. It is a lso certain that a doctrinaire, intellectually incurious, unblooded and stay-at-home gaggle of technocrats led by a faux cowboy from Connecticut unwittingly unleashed this waterfall of blood.
commented today (returned to form as she is, finally throu gh with her mid-life crisis and honed like a Schick Quattro Razor to str ike at the Bush chin stubble) we have returned to 1968: there is a mount ing anti-war movement in America. F or one, it is not led by student radicals: we do not have a draft, so th e college-bound upper middle class does not worry about the rigors of th e battlefield. No, this movement is in the center - not so much the poli tical center (it's heavy with liberals to be sure) as the center of regu lar American life: people with homes, jobs, cars, retirement plans, vaca tions, and high-speed Internet access. This is no "Michael Moore fringe" as the righties are keen to say (not that Moore is particularly fringe, given the sales of F-911: millions would have to be "radicals" to have made him as rich as he is). No this movement is very much like the one w ithin the modern Roman Catholic Church in America, the lay movement of V oice of the Faithful, sickened by bureaucracy and yet loyal to the core: its leadership populated by Rosary Society types with plenty of gray ha ir and mass card buyers among them. This is the movement of Cindy Sheehan, who has clearly survived the Swift ian smearing of the right to emerge into the broad sun-lit plains of the American mainstream, a brave and embattled Gold Star mother, the type o f real-world person (looming divorce, mourning for her son, stricken eld erly mother) that Americans can - and do - identify with easily. Camp Ca sey has become Camp Homeland, as the President's approval ratings slip b elow Nixon's, and a majority of Americans now oppose the disastrous Iraq adventure. Unwittingly perhaps, television preacher Pat Robertson - in his silly, addled call for assassinating Venezuela's socialist president - spoke for this movement; such an act was cheaper, cost less in lives and fortune. If we are honest, we can admit the Reverend Pat's words wer e thoughts that connect our Iraqi day-dreams; The symbols have never been more stark: no screenwriter (even those who w rite farces) could have sold such a script in 2000, before the national election was pickpocketed by James Baker. A blithe, pl ay-acting President on a bicycle on the ranch, under siege from a growin g camp of aggrieved Americans while the finest, middle class youth of th e nation is bled white thousands of miles away in the midst of a religio us civil war triggered by the United States - with no hope of victory, n o hope of Jeffersonian democracy, no hope for honor. Yes, this does soun d like 1968 - minus the bicycle, and with lower approval ratings and a m ore mainstream opposition. Yet, of course, the toothless, political cowardice of the Democrats must not slip away into the night of history. Particularly in this Congress, lockstep support for national security in the "time of war" has given th e Administration the social checkbook it needs to write the bills for th is war. Far too many Democrats went along for the ride, bought too easil y into the argument that everything is different after 9-11. They missed the fact that one thing didn't change, despite the panic of the Preside nt and his little yelping terriers: we still have some national characte r in this country, we can't be sold a bill of goods forever, we know whe n to hold 'em and to fold 'em. When the argument for continuing war is to merely to honor the dead that have gone before with more dead, with more wounded, with more destruction, you know the jig is up, that the mi litary maneuver is merely in the form of a forlorn hope, destined to die for nothing. Ther e never was an Iraq, except as the construct of an empire and a dictator ; we had no business in the squabbles of religious tribes. And we have n o business in helping to write a consitution that places the lives of wo men at the mercy of a medieval code of sexist, moralist, symbolist humil iation and punishment. Conspiring with the mullahs against women may be George W Bush's greatest act of treason against the world's people - an d it will live in infamy. There is nothing to this but to admit failure, and save American lives. Perhaps it leaves a vaccuum in the east, i nto which the hard-core religionists can step. In Luke Baker's story, honest as it is, you can read the hopelessness of the situation between the stark lines of reportage, because this is Geor ge Bush's Iraq: All along there have been stories about it -- those killed by aerial bom bardments, children blown apart by suicide bombs, families caught in cr ossfire, slain at the hands of insurgents or murdered by criminals. In March last year, I stood in the street in Kerbala as suicide bombers exploded among crowds of Shi'ite Muslim pilgrims, killing more than 100 people, including dozens standing around me -- strangers who became ne w victims of Iraq's conflict. But in recent months, the deaths have grown more personalised -- it's no t just random people who die anymore, but people you've met, people you 've interviewed, some you know quite well, colleagues you work with eve ry day, friends even. Almost every week, someone on the staff at Reuters, just one of a dozen or so news organisations still operating in the country, has a new tale to tell of a relative -- a brother, a mother, a cousin, or a son -- ki lled in terrible circumstances. Last month, one of the team of drivers, Yassin, said he needed some time off to look for his brother, who had been missing from his job as a bl acksmith for five days. Relatives searched fruitlessly until, desperate , they decided to look in Baghdad's morgue, a building on the banks of the Tigris that is literally overflowing with bodies. After trawling through the autopsy rooms, pulling out the cold trays on which the bodies are kept, Yassin found his brother, Ibrahim. He recogn ised him by the clothes he was wearing and by a tattoo on the inside of his arm. He couldn't recognise Ibrahim's face because his body had been left outs ide in the sun after he was killed and the intense summer heat had burn ed his skin beyond recognition. Or that rubber tur key the President was photographed with during his brief in-country phot o opp that first Thanksgiving? Or Cheney 's classic: "We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators." So now Camp Casey will move from Texas to W ashington DC, and indeed, will spread to cities and towns across the Uni ted States. And the moral relativist press will be finally shaken from i ts torpor. Even Ruppert Murdoch will turn Fox to oppose the war f rom the right. The war itself is over, the retreat will begin shortly, and Iraq will set tle in to its own bloody reinvention over the next decade.
from Ramblings from My Mind Want another real view of the war ... this one comes to me via Tom Watson go read it all and then follow the link on his page to the full story .
Hootsbuddy | Aug 28, 2005 9:48:25 PM "And America, my country, will reel." This is among the chief reasons, if not the chief rea...
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