Cindy Sheehan catches hearts and consciences worldwide with her struggle to transform personal grief and anger into a drive to save other Americans from the fate suffered by her son and herself and her family. She is met with indifference by a president and a GOP whose only interest is “projecting American will”.
The tragedy goes beyond Cindy, beyond all the American victims of Bush’s crime. We all know that the invasion has killed more than 100,000 Iraqis, most of them innocents. The neoconjobbers tell us it’s all worth it because the end will be an Iraq transformed from brutal dictatorship into a shining light of freedom and democracy. Never mind that they didn’t ask us to “give” them that gift, nor ever had any say in what price they were willing to pay. Never mind that the US is itself no beacon of freedom or democracy — how do you “give” what you yourself do not have?
Never mind that we had no right to impose the gift that keeps on gutting. At least we’re making things better, right? Iraqis, if there were pollsters with the cahones to ask the question would say, Yes, we’re better off now then we were four years ago, right?
No, not even that, judging from the recent spate of gloomy news from Iraqis and journalists. An NYT Week in Review article by Dexter Filkins provides the best short summary I’ve seen in the mainstream press of what’s been accomplished:
In 28 months of war and occupation here, Iraq has always contained two parallel worlds: the world of the Green Zone and the constitution and the rule of law; and the anarchical, unpredictable world outside.
Never have the two worlds seemed so far apart.
From the beginning, the hope here has been that the Iraq outside the Green Zone would grow to resemble the safe and tidy world inside it; that the success of democracy would begin to drain away the anger that pushes the insurgency forward. This may have been what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was referring to when, in an interview published in Time magazine this month, she said that the insurgency was losing steam and that rather quiet political progress was transforming the country.
But in this third summer of war, the American project in Iraq has never seemed so wilted and sapped of life. It’s not just the guerrillas, who are churning away at their relentless pace, attacking American forces about 65 times a day. It is most everything else, too.
Baghdad seems a city transported from the Middle Ages: a scattering of high-walled fortresses, each protected by a group of armed men. The area between the forts is a lawless no man’s land, menaced by bandits and brigands. With the daytime temperatures here hovering at around 115 degrees, the electricity in much of the city flows for only about four hours a day.
….
Americans, here and in the United States, wait for the day when the Iraqi police and army will shoulder the burden and let them go home.
One night last month, according to the locals, the Iraqi police and army surrounded the Sunni neighborhood of Sababkar in north Baghdad, and pulled 11 young men from their beds.
Their bodies were found the next day with bullet holes in their temples. The cheeks of some of the men had been punctured by electric drills. One man had been burned by acid. The police denied that they had been involved.
“This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened,” Adnan al-Dulami, a Sunni leader, said.
Tragedy is a terrible thing. Senseless tragedy is even more terrible. “We” have failed miserably to accomplish any good in Iraq at all. Even the solace of good intentions, of an end that justifies, if not the means, at least something worthwhile, is denied Cindy Sheehan and the rest of the Iraqi and American victims of Bush’s crimes. If the US were a consultant hired to improve the Iraq company, it would now be bankrupt, disgraced, and facing devastating criminal and civil liability.
All that is left to us now is to get the hell out, make what reparations we can, and place our nation and our “leaders” at the mercy of a world court. Justice will not be done, lives and nations will not be restored, but perhaps we can still obtain a little satisfaction, at least, for the recipients of Bush’s deady embrace.