The news that isn’t news echoes through the streets of the U.S. and the Middle East in remembrance of what occurred three years ago today: the United States invaded Iraq. The reasoning our leaders have offered us for instigating this conflict has changed many times since March 19, 2003, and it is always abstract and unclear. I deduce from this pattern of deceitful detail-variance that we can safely assume they have no honest reasons of which they are not too ashamed to share with their own citizenry.
From my assessment of this war’s history and drawing from my own experience as a Marine who served within it, I believe this is a struggle that has so far only incurred costs; it has yielded no returns. The most precious of tangible things: the lives of loyal soldiers and nearby civilians, the material wealth of several countries, the irreplaceable natural resources we have expended en masse; along with the most precious of intangible things: the innocence and purity of cultures, the peace and acceptance they once shared, the stability of international ties; these have all been compromised or sacrificed, each to varying degrees, all to no avail. Whatever outcome we are seeking, we have not yet found. There is still no peace; there is now no Democracy. Resulting from an ironic sequence of events, the United States’s effort to spread its Democracy to Iraq resulted in the loss of the very democracy its own citizens once enjoyed. Now it is we who need liberation!
The Bush administration has, since even before it swindled the presidency in 2000, planned to invade Iraq and topple Saddam; this is no longer labeled as a belief of irrationally minded far-leftists, it is substantiated by material evidence as objective fact. The Conyers Report to congress details how several key players in the Defense Department in conjunction with our nation’s top republicans have carefully orchestrated the justification for Operation Iraqi Freedom and skillfully manipulated the fear and confusion engendered by the tragedies of 9/11 to achieve their agenda. Our own government has disgraced the memory of those that died in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and “a field in Pennsylvania” by using their deaths as leverage to further corrupt policies, policies for which they could find no other justification.
The Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, issued a letter to those who serve in our armed forces this morning thanking them for their dedication. I have read the letter and it sickens me. If he believes the words he has written, Donald Rumsfeld is clearly not of a healthy mind. The thought-process employed by most Americans in evaluating Al Qaeda has resulted in their affixing the label of “terrorist” to its militants without much effort, but that same thought-process would struggle desperately to determine what exact mental disorder(s) Donald Rumsfeld is stricken with. As a student of psychology, I offer the naive diagnosis that he suffers from paranoid schizophrenia accompanied by grandiosity. It is also very likely the defense secretary has a grandiose type of delusional disorder, or perhaps a narcissistic personality disorder; the possibilities are potentially limitless*. His assessment of “progress on all fronts” testifies to the presence of some or all of these afflictions; “progress on all fronts” is a laughable conclusion, indicates he is delusional, and reminds us that he has never, himself, worn a uniform. He actually describes the beliefs of foreign peoples, beliefs that we have an admittedly narrow understanding of, as “twisted ideology”. That word choice alone guarantees the persistence of bloodshed, a persistence the Defense Secretary probably desires. He claims we will never forget those wounded in combat. He is probably right; they will never be forgotten because they will never stop tugging on the sleeves of politicians, begging for the continued medical care they so desperately need but cannot receive because V.A. programs endure funding cut after funding cut**, effectively denying the victims of Donald’s senseless war their necessary medical care. The casual and impersonal tone he undertakes in expressing his condolences for the fallen 2317 serviceman of this war to their surviving comrades is heavily laden with hackneyed words and phrases. That Donald Rumsfeld has never sustained a loss is transparent; his efforts to soothe veterans are artificial and betray that he feels nothing of compassion. Even worse and further proving his lack of humanitarian concern, he makes no effort to extend any form of sympathy or to even acknowledge the innocent Iraqis we have mistakenly slaughtered during our occupation; these losses mean nothing to him because the casualties are not American, they are Arab. The message he is sending through their omission from his letter is the bodies are not “Us”, they are “Them”, so to Donald Rumsfeld and his Defense Department, they do not matter. The number of “them” is, itself, unknown to us because, as expressed by General Tommy Franks, we consciously turn a blind eye.
Throughout the entire duration of the Iraqi war, the administration has been desperately trying to rationalize it. The fictitious tales they’ve offered us have undergone several overhauls through the years, often altering their core principles to such a severe extent that they become unrecognizable, but the only details that never change are the ones that make the least sense. An attempt to impart American lifestyles and build an American-sembling political structure in Iraq is, by its very nature, absurd. Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Anthony Shadid points this out in his book “Night Draws Near” when he illustrates that the Iraqi people were already like Americans prior to the American invasion. They were our Middle Eastern counterparts, having the most in common with us, but because of our government’s pig-headed bigotry, Iraq is now host to our Middle Eastern adversaries, having the most cause to hate us.
So, as concerned citizens from all over the world take to the streets and remind the rest of the world that this conflict is still here and is still gravely unjust, I propose we all reflect on the past three years of our lives and think about what our government has done. With our tax dollars and silent consent, they have crushed a nation, killed thousands, dissolved global tranquility, advanced ethnic-based hatred, alienated our European support, lied and covered their exposed lies with more complex lies, sullied America’s name and inverted America’s inner identity, exploited their own people and cultivated those people’s fear and anxiety, and their character and style alone in doing all this ensures continued unrest for the years, perhaps generations even, to come. What has this accomplished? We have Saddam. Ask yourself, after putting the costs I’ve listed beside the three words that precede this sentence, were we ripped off? Perhaps paid a bit too much? These questions, while important for consideration, should not occupy are minds nearly as much as the following questions, the centrally thematic and perhaps exclusively pivotal questions that conceivably own the only keys to our society’s redemptive-hope: What lies ahead? Where are we going to go from here? What are we, as Americans, going to do to mend what has been so seriously and catastrophically mangled? What will we demand of our government to recover what has been lost? Once men like Rumsfeld have been gathered up and disposed of, what will we do to prevent the recurrence of such sadomasochism rising to positions of geopolitical influence again? Is merely impeaching our current president going to be enough or do we have to go farther to procure for the world the justice it deserves? We must find answers to these questions if we hope to ever reestablish the United States as a country worthy of international trust and restore our image as deserving of the world’s real estate we now stand on.
* Donald’s Language skills are notably exceptional for an individual so afflicted; he is nonetheless symptomatic, especially seen in his profound severances of thought and emotion, and the gross disparity between the reality he perceives and the reality in which the rest of us live.
** These assessments of V.A. funding examine more than the single variable of the budget’s bottom line (which actually indicates increases, but those increases are insignificant). I’ve determined these marginal increases are actually funding cuts by taking several prevalent variables into account i.e., the significant increases in the number of veterans in need of those funds, the inflation of medical costs themselves, the increases in veterans’ out-of-pocket “co-payments” which are falsely represented by the government as “budget increases. All of these lead to a smaller per-veteran distribution of available benefits, essentially a complicated methodology of cutting funds.
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