The "War on Terror"?
Does anyone across the globe, even Americans, not know in their heart of hearts (granted as molecular as that place seems to be for most Americans) what a MURDEROUS (GENOCIDAL) SCAM FOR PROFITEERING the US-declared ‘War on Terror’ was and continues to be?
The US administration and those bipartisan marriage-made-in-hell partners of neoliberals and neocons (h/t to Obama for that bipartisanship he can believe in) are now lamely declaring victory about Iraq.
The ever-obliging, bottom-feeding media, glue to the American government’s amoral status-quo bullshitting and fascistic matrix, is sentimentalizing it. A faux-Hallmark moment defying the ever-blaring American sirens of cognitive dissonance.
So, according to Pepe Escobar, $3 trillion plus of US tax dollars have been spent for the Iraqi dimension of the War on Terror. (Why is the American economy so screwed up? Granted the “millionaire’s club” of Congress is not personally involved in said plight of economic devastation in America, but the rest of us, the 99%, should by this time be awake to the economically INSANE, let alone ethically grotesque, politically sacrosanct military budget. I said “should”, mind you.)
The US administration’s and media’s declared “worthwhile war” in Iraq cost 4,487 American lives and 32,226 Americans were wounded in action. “Officially” wounded in action. All involved, you can rest assured, have tremendous psychological wounding. Why exactly did they all have to die or suffer? Really?
As for the number of Iraqi victims? Escobar reminds us that the Pentagon does not take such body counts. It didn’t bother counting with the First Gulf War, either. By the way, that ‘zany’ candidate Ron Paul has had the colossal nerve to assert that America's imperialistic devastation of citizens and infrastructures of other countries set up conditions for America’s 9-11 horror. Treasonous Congressman Paul! Apparently that super-exploitable grotesque national tragedy must be used exclusively for blank-check justification as well as blank check anti-human rights and anti-international law ruthlessness of our Orwellian "war on terror" against others (HAH!) thanks to media souped-up American citizen jingoism.
Why would our dysfunctional government be a responsible and accountable member of the world community in what David Brooks has declared this, Post-Morality America? We’ve been on that military industrial security complex slippery slope since forever it feels, does it not?
Anyway, re the number of people slaughtered, let alone displaced (the displaced number I once heard was estimated as four times the number of Iraqi dead), the site “information clearing house” declares the total Iraqi deaths is 1,455,590 for anyone in America who happens to give a shit.
Escobar’s anti-US administration and anti-US-media take on the reality of the US Iraq misadventure:
There was euphoria among many Iraqis for a day or two in April 2003 at such a successful American invasion. But the support soon soured after marines started shooting unarmed civilians amid a growing sense of a hardcore occupation that unleashed bloody sectarian and religious rivalries.
After the Abu Ghraib prison scandal demonstrated how the US was having its (fun) cake and eating it too, and in the fog of civil war, Sunnis and Shi'ites alike decided to fight the occupiers, the Kurds didn't give a damn, while an al Qaeda-affiliated group exploited the opening to root itself among the Sunni minority population.
While the terrorist group has been rendered ineffective by a punishing series of Special Operations raids that incinerated several al-Qaeda leaders, plus bags of cash distributed among Sunni tribals, intelligence specialists fear that it is in resurgence.
The American occupation of Iraq also hampered Washington's ability to fabricate a narrative from the United States in support of the Arab Spring uprisings this year - which caught Washington totally asleep at the wheel.
In the end, the Pentagon had to be dragged kicking and screaming to handing bases over to the Iraqi government. Across the country, the closing of precious outposts in the sprawling US Empire of Bases has been marked by a quiet closed-door meeting where American and Iraqi military officials signed documents that legally gave the Iraqis control of the bases, exchanged handshakes and barely disguised their mutual contempt.
[snip]
Although Thursday's poignant ceremony marked the official end of the war, the Pentagon, just in case, still has two bases in Iraq and roughly 4,000 troops, including several hundred who attended the ceremony. At the height of the war in 2007, during the surge of General David Petraeus, the occupation maintained a sprawling 505 bases and more than 170,000 troops.
According to military officials, the remaining diehards are still being shown Iraqi love on a daily basis, mainly by strategically placed improvised explosive devices set against convoys heading south through Iraq to bases in Kuwait.
Even after the last two bases are closed and the final American soldiers go home to certified unemployment by December 31, under rules of a shady agreement with the government in Baghdad, a few hundred military personnel and a sprinkle of spooks and mercenaries will remain, working within the larger-than-the-Vatican American Embassy as part of an Office of Security Cooperation to assist in extremely profitable weapons deals.
But negotiations could resume next year on whether additional American soldiers, spooks and mercenaries can return to further profit from the action.
Senior Pentagon officers have made no secret that they will indeed miss the action as well as the oil that the US in the end did not secure. Plus there's the matter of all those F-16s Baghdad is being forced to buy; they must be put to good use, and not just lay there frying in the al-Anbar desert.
"From a standpoint of being able to defend against a treacherous al-Qaeda underwear bomber they have very limited to little capability, quite frankly," General Lloyd J Austin III, the outgoing American commander in Iraq, said in an interview over a Big Mac.
The tenuous security atmosphere in Iraq was underscored by a fleet of gunships that hovered over the ceremony, scanning the ground for sneaking al-Qaeda operatives. Although there is far less violence across Iraq than at the height of the US-engineered sectarian war in 2006 and 2007, lots of people still get killed on a daily basis and Americans remain a preferential target of followers of firebrand Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
Will the media spin pass as a promise fulfilled a shameless Obama and his Rasputin-labeled Axelrod will campaign on in 2012? Is this the shabby pretend closure "Good German" media-led-by-the-nose American citizens will allot the Iraq War?
9 years of destruction and mayhem. When will the US power and profits over people hyper-militarized M.O. NOT be okay with American citizens? Too late for millions of human beings, of course. But what about the millions still to die and suffer? When will a fascistic U.S. administration and Congress actually give a shit about what its citizenry objects to, even if or when the American citizenry does manage to eventually grow an internationally expansive conscience through the empathy classes of its own domestic economic and police-state victimization?
[cross-posted on correntewire and sacramento for democracy]
-------------
Our jails are full of minority youth - and the sobs that screwed us walk freely and spend freely - I think we have gotton off easy if we can pull ourselves back from the brink - IF we can.
Our crimes in Iraq began long before 2003.
Our crimes in Iraq began long before 2003.
I consistently and unapologetically refer to it as the Warmachine. its all about framing. that much the republicans actually understand correctly. you might also ponder the issue of Low Information Voters which seem to have a significant effect on elections.
Oh boy, I wish I could make that mandatory reading in schools. Excellent piece. R
snowden, thanks for comment. such a strong and enraging point you make.
vzn, yes, "low info voters" but to bitter me things are so insane that if you are a "low info voter" you are begging the status quo powers to be to "lie to me, since I am morally and intellectually and emotionally LAZY!" People are not connecting the dots or don't care even if they do or the most sympathetic stance are those suffering so much as victims of American economic domestic terrorism they are drowning and struggling for their own survival and can't afford the empathy from their own hysteria, stress brings narcissism of course. Framing is everything and the shameless framing of the Repubs and the Dems is nauseating!
libby
Thoth, thanks for your validation of a blog I confess came out of a very cynical and bitter libby. :)
Here is some additional feedback on Iraq and the US situation right now:
James Cogan on wsws:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/dec2011/pers-d27.shtml
"The US occupation of the country has amounted to a conscious policy of sociocide—the destruction of the very fabric of a society. Formerly mixed suburbs have been transformed into sectarian enclaves, and the people have been traumatised by bitter memories of communal violence. The Iraqi population as a whole has been left to endure radioactive and other forms of contamination, dysfunctional water and electricity supplies, a ruined health and education system, and the loss of a large proportion of an entire generation of men. Well over one million people were killed, with millions more wounded and still more millions turned into refugees."
"Crimes of immense proportions have been carried out by the Bush and Obama administrations to ensure American domination of Iraq and the Middle East. The last thing that the withdrawal of troops signifies is the exit of the US from the long-suffering country. It can be said with certainty that State Department and intelligence operatives are intriguing to ensure that US interests are served, if necessary through the promotion of sectarian conflicts and dismemberment of the country."
vzn, yes, "low info voters" but to bitter me things are so insane that if you are a "low info voter" you are begging the status quo powers to be to "lie to me, since I am morally and intellectually and emotionally LAZY!" People are not connecting the dots or don't care even if they do or the most sympathetic stance are those suffering so much as victims of American economic domestic terrorism they are drowning and struggling for their own survival and can't afford the empathy from their own hysteria, stress brings narcissism of course. Framing is everything and the shameless framing of the Repubs and the Dems is nauseating!
libby
Thoth, thanks for your validation of a blog I confess came out of a very cynical and bitter libby. :)
Here is some additional feedback on Iraq and the US situation right now:
James Cogan on wsws:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/dec2011/pers-d27.shtml
"The US occupation of the country has amounted to a conscious policy of sociocide—the destruction of the very fabric of a society. Formerly mixed suburbs have been transformed into sectarian enclaves, and the people have been traumatised by bitter memories of communal violence. The Iraqi population as a whole has been left to endure radioactive and other forms of contamination, dysfunctional water and electricity supplies, a ruined health and education system, and the loss of a large proportion of an entire generation of men. Well over one million people were killed, with millions more wounded and still more millions turned into refugees."
"Crimes of immense proportions have been carried out by the Bush and Obama administrations to ensure American domination of Iraq and the Middle East. The last thing that the withdrawal of troops signifies is the exit of the US from the long-suffering country. It can be said with certainty that State Department and intelligence operatives are intriguing to ensure that US interests are served, if necessary through the promotion of sectarian conflicts and dismemberment of the country."
No comments:
Post a Comment