The other day I ran a video that showed how American convoys drive around Iraq. One of my blogging buddies said he had hoped it ended with an IED explosion. Kaboom.
I told him I would never show an IED explosion killing or injuring American soldiers. And there are a lot of them. Because while I hate the Bush and Cheney war criminals with every bone in my body. I hate to see our neighbour's kids die.
Or be horribly injured.....
Like this young soldier who lost half his head.
Or this one who will never be the same again...
Just ask his mum how much that hurts....
In fact I was going to write something about the new dangers American troops face from weapons like this one. That can go through a humvee like a knife through butter.
Or why a new generation of IEDs is so deadly, thanks to something called a shaped charge.That can take out a tank.
Just so everyone knows what they face every day. So you can understand some of the things they do.
But then I changed my mind....I still don't want most American soldiers in Iraq to be killed or wounded.
Just these guys.....
Sometimes horror stories like this one....... or this one.tell you all you need to know about the war in Iraq.
But sometimes how you treat a poor miserable crippled Iraqi street dog.... that has probably had to scrounge for scraps all its pitiful life without even a pat on the head from a human... tells you a lot too.
These soldiers aren't liberators. They never were liberators. They were just pawns in a monstrous war that never should have happened. Many of them are just victims like so many Iraqis. Some of them will be victims long after the war is over.
But some of them are monsters. And the longer this war goes on the more monsters there will be.
If I was an American I wouldn't worry about the war in Iraq. For them it will soon be over. I'd worry about their poor wounded kids for whom that war will never end.
And I'd worry about what's going to happen to their own country.
When those monsters come marching home....
3 comments:
"And I'd worry about what's going to happen to their own country.
When those monsters come marching home.... "
I was discussing this with a classmate last week, in context of the financial cost of this little excercise. The classmate was insisting that the current funding would be sufficient. I pointed out that current funding doesn't take into account costs like post-deployment health care. I have a feeling more people are going to become aware of the fact that "trillion" is a real numercal concept, just like billion.
and I don't want to see anyone's children being killed, like yerself. it was just a knee-jerk reaction to that video, and so many other home-made videos from Iraq I've seen.
Hi Jay! I know you didn't really want to see anybody killed either. Besides I had the same knee jerk reaction when I saw the dog video. But I figured that as a straight boy you could be a good buddy and go to Gitmo instead of me. I mean as a gay atheist being locked up with a bunch of homophobic religious extremists who pray all day would be....bad for my health. Sorry. :)
Seriously though the Americans have a real problem on their hands. They've got more than 20,000 wounded and many of them seriously.Because the war in Iraq is such a crazy and frightening one (once you've been in a convoy that's been hit by an IED everything looks like one from then on) there is going to be a lot of the post traumatic stress disorder. And then you've got all the loved ones of the dead and wounded wondering why they died or suffered for nothing. What a mess. What a tragedy. And it was all so predictable...
I don't know which feelings I have when I see postings like this on the net are the strongest; shame, anger, or guilt. I'm just one of the disenfranchised Americans that have been opposing this stupid war since the Bush/Cheney cabal used it as a prop to solidify the corporate, fascist hegemony that passes itself off as democracy in the lower 48 these days. I think you are dead on about the monsters coming home....I was one of the folks who marched and protested the Vietnam war in my youth, but for all our self-congradulations about stopping the war, in truth it was the realization by the business and economic elites that the economic burden of the war was going to have to be shouldered by them; because the ability to tap the human and economic resources of the working people in the US was about used up.
The right-wing business syncophants and the Christan jihadi in this country think they have common cause with the corporate overlords that have masterminded this fiasco, and with a populace that prides itself on its cultural ignorance, it's very difficult to generate the kind of unstoppable groundswell of popular opinion that could actually stop this madness. These folks will have to be hurt bad enough by this personally, to wake up and actually realize they've been screwed, before they are willing to admit the entire premise they've been operating under could even have been a mistake, let alone a most cynical lie. The other thing I see that worries me is the seeming export of the big multinational corporate lie, -that the neo-fascist, anti human rights, pro business perogative, property rights over human welfare and quality of life, white, Christian, homophobic zealotry exemplified by the Bush/Cheney regime has been exported to Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Italy, and to a lesser degree France and Germany. When I first heard that Canadians were buying the lie that so-called competition would give them 'better and cheaper' medical care, and that this was a wedge issue for some right-wing politicians from the Western provinces to beat up their supposed 'liberal' Eastern competitors with; I had to ask myself 'Did anybody ask somebody from the U.S. who didn't have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, what their experience with the supposed advantages of private, free market medical care was?'. I bet they didn't. This kind of gets off the main topic of the Crippled Dog video, but none of these items exist in a vacuum, and they are all intertwined in a Gordian Knot of visible and hidden relationships. This war is more complex then just a few greedy American executives making a grab for Iraqui oil, Islam is a target, at least to the extent that it is the socially and culturally most powerful unifying anti-corporate force in the world today. The political power of fundamentalist religious bigots, white racism, homophobic zealots in denial of their own covert personal sexual identies all play a part in the rise of support that passes for legitimacy of these authoritarian, fascist, hierarchical movements. History has shown that the only way to effectively oppose them is to share information, alliances, and support with each other; and to expose the misrepresentations and outright lies every time we see them.
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