No news is good news
Joyful Iraqis dance in the streets, waving American flags and kissing pictures of Bush the Younger. Funny, the images on the news weren’t quite as vivid when the subjects were screaming Iraqi children with their faces torn apart or their legs mangled to fleshy, crimson stumps.
But no one wants to see that stuff. No one wants to see the real face of war, the gory bloodshed and the clumsy massacres. Not without a soothing coat of Hollywood veneer or a bright flash of Nintendo charm.
CNN and NBC just want us to see the proof that their leaders were right all along (except about the weapons of mass distraction, but we dropped that objective like a hot throw-down missile just in time). Pay no mind to the fact that corporate news has vested interests in a short, sweet war, and in the administration that will give it to them.
A glance through a few independent news sources, buried deep in the dark recesses of the Internet where the truth is less submissive, reveals what soldiers have always known – that war is hell. The ghosts of combat must hang thick in the air over Iraq’s shattered cities. And no amount of jubilant “liberated” Iraqi cheering will erase the lingering traces of women butchered, skulls crushed, limbs shredded, bodies mutilated and dying breaths choked with blood.
Forgive me if the suggestion by sanctimonious presidents that this is the only way doesn’t fly far with me.
I’m glad that Saddam is gone. I’m glad that the people of Iraq no longer have to fear his tyranny. But I doubt their fears have ended. They may only have changed shape.
Now they might fear each other as order continues to prove elusive. They may fear the leadership and the intentions of their occupiers, who indicate they may lack the wherewithal to see this little project through. They may fear starvation, dehydration and illness while infrastructures disintegrate.
It’s difficult to endorse our “victory” in Iraq without the distinct, uncomfortable feeling that you’re endorsing our quest to turn the whole world into our own global strip mall.
Talk of the next target already abounds in echelons of politics and information. As Bush begins checking countries off his “list of people to invade” (the list has to be long enough so as to belie any suggestion that oil was a factor), one in 20 U.S. citizens is still unemployed. Women here are still in dire need of liberation from an oppressive patriarchal regime. U.S. children are beginning their lives in a fog of ignorance as schools lack the money to continue art programs or buy books.
As one columnist pointed out, our “insane” society will allocate obscene amounts of money to drop missiles on and shoot people without flinching. But it won’t pay to hire enough teachers to ensure that its children learn math. Such absurdity begs the question of who the real madmen are and where they’re really hiding.
The nightly news format for war coverage has a disturbing familiarity to it. It proceeds a lot like the sports report. Around the country we go, hearing favorable details of the victories and suggestions of game plans for the next match. Who’s the favorite? How’s the coach doing? Progress is demonstrated with easy-to-follow circles and arrows, as though the war were simply another spirited game.
No wonder this country’s president had no qualms about challenging an ornery opponent and sending his team to do the dirty work. For a man who has never seen Iraq and never known the horror of war, it must have held all the sensational promise of a killer athletic match-up. But any idiot with a gun can start a war. It takes a person of somewhat higher functioning to rebuild a nation.
I have to ask what qualifies our country to be the one who saves the world from itself. Because we have the most astronomical GDP? Or the most undefeatable military? It takes more than guns and money to build a peaceful world. I wonder if our culture is strong enough, and healthy enough, for the task.
If we’ve made it our business to save all the world’s peoples from all their buckets of suffering, bravo for us. I’m sure the rich of our nation will be lining up to finance the mission.
So we’ve mourned the passage of war’s first casualty. We’ve assumed custody of a country of damaged people halfway around the world. I hope, for our own sake and for the Iraqis’, that this administration possesses, in some hidden crevice of its ignorance, the responsibility and wisdom it has yet to show evidence of.
