Sunday, March 24, 2013

Blood on Their Hands

The warmongers and profiteers of the Iraqi invasion caused the deaths of over a million Iraqis, coutless injuries, infants born with malformations never seen before in that country (see previous blog), scores of displaced persons, ruin of infrastructures and more. More than 4,400 American soldiers lost their lives. This was a war based on imperial conquest, oil resources, and corporate profits.
According to the warmongers' thinking, if the Iraqi people had to pay the price, so be it. Acutally I don't even think that these war criminals gave a second thought to the pain and suffering they were about to inflict on a nation, in the runup to that war. An understanding of their way of thinking can only be found if one realizes that to them the Iraqis were expendable, a means to an end. They were considered pawns in the buildup of empire. There was no legitimate reason to invade Iraq, and so Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and the majority of the congress people who supported them,  invented reasons, and the war drums began. The drum beating  ended in the invasion of Baghdad, with the cartoonish and insulting  name  Operation Shock and Awe. Talk about supremacho titles. The only problem was that it wasn't macho at all but cowardly, because the U.S. is vastly superior militarily to Iraq.
All of those against that war did everything we could to stop it. We marched, we signed peititions, we wrote articles, we appealed to the UN, but we all knew that somehow we were fighting a losing battle. The monster of war was out of the bottle, and most Americans supported it.
 A few days before the invasion I felt despondent, knowing that Baghdad would certainly be attacked, and that people would be killed and many would be children. I went out and bought a set of prayer flags and hung them outdoors, as a symbol of compassionate thoughts to those people who were about to be bombed, about to lose children, about to have their homes destroyed, about to lose their lives. It was all I could do. The war criminals had their way. Today they sit pretty, hold their heads up , are interviewed on TV, and live comfortably. They are still arrogant and remorseless. None has been held accountable.

2 comments:

  1. Yeah, Anna, that seems to me also to be pretty much what happened. It is sad to say that the U.S. is the most militaristic power in the world today. And "we" are not afraid to use that power. It is very sad, and it seems that most Americans are still asleep at the wheel.

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  2. A side comment: Getting good information is of course very important in the forming of attitudes about issues. In the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, I was reading The Tribune, which as you must know was the competing paper to the Albuquerque Journal. It is ironic, it seems to me, but the Tribune was publishing much better information than was the locally owned Journal. The Tribune was owned by Scripps-Howard, and I read an article analyzing news coverage during that period, and Scripps-Howard was far better than there competitors at presenting dissenting opinions and CIA news releases that did not support the various reasons given for going to war. Unfortunately, we no longer have the Tribune.

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