Sunday, July 25, 2010

Afghanistan: The Horror, the Sorrow, the Madness
















War is always like that eh? They tell you you're dying to make others safer. They tell you  it's a noble mission and that God is on your side. But sooner or later out of the bloody mist the ugly truth emerges.

The horror.

Bloody errors at civilians' expense, as recorded in the logs, include the day French troops strafed a bus full of children in 2008, wounding eight. A US patrol similarly machine-gunned a bus, wounding or killing 15 of its passengers, and in 2007 Polish troops mortared a village, killing a wedding party including a pregnant woman, in an apparent revenge attack.

The sorrow.

The madness.

The former director general of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency said Tuesday that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had greatly increased the terrorist threat to Britain and that intelligence available before the Iraq war had not been sufficient to justify the invasion of that country.

And I feel about that like Steve Bell does...
















Why did it take so long to figure it all out when it was so OBVIOUS?

I wonder what historians will say about the war most Canadians preferred not to think about.

I'm sorry we didn't make a movie like this one...



Because that way we might have figured it out for ourselves.

But then how could we when the Harper Cons turned the conflict into cheap politics?

“Is it next going to be tea with Osama Bin Laden?” asked Peter MacKay. A Globe and Mail columnist indignantly wrote “Would he pull out the chairs for their representatives? Would he pour tea for those who have killed 23 Canadian soldiers this year?”

Independent bloggers –rarely known for putting the “B” in subtle — went even further one insisting that Layton “loves dead Canadian soldiers”.

And tried to hide the truth about torture.

And most Canadians didn't care one way or the other.

Yup. The Great War on Terror.

I can't wait to see this movie...



Because I might actually learn something I didn't know.

Everything else I did.

The horror, the sorrow, the MADNESS...

4 comments:

ck said...

Don't count on anything.

Especially after G20 fiasco. I mean, if most Canadians are ok with the police torturing fellow Canadians: brutalizing their own, stripping them of their civil rights and the ripping off prosthetic legs off the bodies of amputees and dragging them savagely; can we really expect them to care about foreigners being tortured a world away?

Oemissions said...

Yes, the Madness!

Simon said...

hi ck...I have no illusions that most Canadians are going to take an interest in what's going on in Afghanistan. We welcome our poor dead soldiers home, but we'd rather not know how they died, we've spent about
twenty minutes debating it in Parliament, and when it comes to torture we clearly don't give a damn.
I read every Canadian opinion on the war, on the left and on the right, but nothing can make me believe that this doomed mission was anything but a tragic mistake...

Simon said...

hi Oemissions...One of my favourite movie scenes is the end of the Bridge on the River Kwai. When the doctor comes upon the scene of total destruction ads and mumbles "Madness. Madness."
I wouldn't be surprised if this war ends something like that. With the last helicopter lifting off from Kandahar, and the soldier in the door shouting "Afghanistan. Afghanistan..."
Yup. The road to hell is is paved with good intentions. And madness is MADNESS...