"Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity."
---(Anonymous, Marine Corps saying)
It seems to me that America is being given a ringside seat at what can be termed a calamity for civilization through our "association" with Iraq and the Iraq War. We are being allowed to witness the inhumanity that lurks within each of us individually and all of us collectively. We have been allowed to see how little "coaching" it takes to turn a "people" from a definable human society into something so subhuman that no animal species could be accused of allowing this to exist in their "culture". For those Americans with an "eye to see or an ear to hear", Iraq today represents everything any human could imagine as being something he "wouldn't wish on his worst enemy".
The lesson here for each American is that this fate also awaits we Americans who one day will have something more than our money which our "leaders" want.
Mere money is not enough for our breed of tyrants. Ultimately, they will want what Hitler wanted from "his" people - unquestioned obedience and unquestioned sacrifice to his/their slightest whim.
Before the age of their "enlightenment" and their introduction to democracy, the various religious sects within Iraq lived and worked together, but worshiped separately. Today, thanks to their having been given natural resources that our country needs, every aspect of life in "the cradle of civilization" has been turned into an unimaginable hell by our leaders. Today through the CIA, Pentagon and Mossad sponsorship of organized religious strife within the Iraqi society, there is no longer a civilization. Today there is nothing but chaos, hatred and terrorism as each segment of the former culture turns on its neighbor. The culture is feeding on itself. And that is just what our homegrown and Israeli- grown warmongers want. How can the Iraqis defend themselves and their resources against "The Empire" if they are determined to kill the neighbors with whom they lived and worked before we got there. The objective is to foster and perpetuate hatred that leads to division and therefore to a disorganized attempt for the Iraqis to protect themselves and their property. (Of course, right now it looks as if they are perfectly capable of protecting themselves. The Iraqis have brought virtual defeat - or at least never ending war - to the most powerful military in the world).
Our CIA and assorted military intelligence organizations have worked for years with the most fiendish secret police organizations in the world to perfect "interrogation"/tortures that are too gruesome to even contemplate while prancing around the world stage in the costumes of "freedom, democracy, enlightenment, dignity" and above all "arrogance". We are benevolent conquerors. We are from the US government and we are here to help you. We are here to kidnap you, put you in a prison from which the only escape is death and to torture you in the name of "winning the war on terror that we have manufactured". "Don't you understand"? "This is what freedom means". "This is what democracy will mean to you when you get the 'hang of it'"
This is what all the fuss about torture of enemies is about. This is the reason the world had a Geneva Convention. In today's war, Alberto Gonzales tells us that this agreement between nations isn't applicable to our present "war"because we aren't fighting a nation state. Therefore, bringing our soldiers down to the barbaric level of the enemy is quite acceptable in the eyes of the "Great Decider".
The Geneva Convention was not and is not a quaint piece of paper with no relevance today. This is what the world learned about the horrors of war and the barbarism that awaits expression by combatants. This lesson was learned the hard way by our soldiers in every war we have fought during our entire history. How would Alberto Gonzales know anything about the reasons for this agreement between nations? He has never seen fit to learn first hand about the reasons for this convention. Finally, war was "civilized" by the world community by adopting the Geneva Convention. Today, that agreement lies in ruins because of a fool and his criminal advisors - none of whom have ever had the courage to serve their country in a war. It is up to our 19 year old video game playing soldiers to pay for the sins and the crimes of their leaders (sic) as these criminals make a mockery of the Geneva Convention and the protection it provided our soldiers. Our soldiers will pay for Abu Ghraib and our black prisons and rendition for a very long time to come. "Civilized War" has been killed by our leaders whose history is that of cowardice and treachery - as they wage war for peace.
Any combat veteran will tell you there are no such thing as "civilized wars". It is a matter of killing before you are killed - and in Iraq that may involve carrying a "throw-down" shovel in case you kill a hadj that hasn't gotten around to trying to kill you yet. Today's war is a culmination of all the things we have learned since WWII (except how to avoid war). Today's war(s) are the result of our children's having mastered all the gruesome and violent video games they find to entertain themselves, the dumbing down of our educational system, morals passed to us by Hollywood's silver screen of hedonism, the totally mind destroying effects of television and a relentless lack of morality from our politicians, our friends, our neighbors and ourselves. All this bad experience and lack of a moral direction as a nation has led us inevitably to Abu Ghraib, and charges of our military personnel killing innocent civilians - including children - at close quarters. (It is still all right to kill civilians whether they are children, infirm, women or elderly if you do it from a distance). We don't think about charging the gunship pilot or the pilots of bomb and missile platforms with crimes against humanity for the "collateral" killing of these people). We don't think about pursuing the really guilty - like our leaders - (sic) for the barbaric actions of our troops. No, our troops are taught to kill without remorse. (There will be plenty of time for remorse when our troops are back home trying to get a night's sleep without nightmares and the screams of the "enemy" and ones comrades).
No, war is supposed to be hell and we are going to make sure that this reputation is not tarnished by our troops. Our troops are taught that dying for one's country is not an objective; making the enemy die for his is. How he dies, what honor is involved in killing him is not in the vocabulary of those who design our wars. Our leaders (sic) are not even virtuous enough to design "just" wars. No, any old excuse for war will do. There is money to be made. Our old weapons can be sold to our next enemy. There are new devilish, unimagined weapons to be designed and tested on new battlefields - all at the expense of the gullible, patriotic electorate. How can our nation lose on a deal like this?
It seems to me that we citizens would learn from history and the examples of previous wars, but that is not to be. First, we aren't taught history - except by John Wayne - as he fights the "Indians" in our West or fights on the "Sands of Iwo Jima" or as a Green Beret in Viet Nam. Each of his causes is righteous and although the enemy "fights a good fight" he is no match for the "justness" of our causes and our patriotism to genocide or "just plain old making money".
It seems to me that we citizens would learn that although wars are great little "money making machines", someone has to pay for Halliburton's no-bid contracts and Lockheed's "smart bombs". George Bush sold we gullibles on the theory that the Iraqis should pay with their oil for our benevolence in freeing them from the oppression of Saddam Hussein - or was it the atomic and biological weapons they didn't have that they were supposed to pay for? One becomes confused with all the reasons we found for them to pay us for destroying their country, its infrastructure, its society and poisoning them with depleted uranium contamination for the next 4.5 billion years. We didn't tell them that as an added bonus, and at almost no extra charge, we would relieve them of the worry of how to spend 8.8 billion dollars of their reconstruction funds by stealing them. We didn't dwell on what would happen to Saddam's Rafidain Bank and its 17 trillion dollars in assets when they became "free". Instead we taught them new torture techniques using electric drills that our CIA has been perfecting for years; we gave them "death squads" perfected from our experience in Central America and run by our very own CIA and Pentagon. How could any country not be proud to accept and be grateful for such kind offers?
Conclusion:
It is hard to imagine a country more depraved than ours at this particular point in the history of the world. It is hard to imagine, even the Roman Empire as it descended headlong into the abyss of its own decline and destruction, being more oblivious to the obvious consequences of its actions than we Americans are today. Our latest war is grinding toward the infinity planned by its architects while our war designers put two more simultaneous wars on the "keep warm" drawing board. Iran has upset our chief moron because it refuses to appear worried by his idiocy; North Korea has a lot more people they are willing to lose than we do. So, the prognosis for the very, very sick United States is not encouraging.
by Nolan K. Anderson [send him email], who is a retired engineer and a veteran of Korea who was once a "conservative" until he found there was nothing left to conserve and as a veteran hates to see a tour in Korea go to waste. Nolan is a Populist Party columnist.
