I could feel it coming long before Bush said it today. The Republicans are going to blame those that opposed the war, and forced its conclusion, for the bloodbath and the instability that ensue when we leave. They are going to say that we are the ones that didn’t care about Iraqis.
Let me say in advance of this bloodbath that I really do care about Iraqis. I care a lot. I cared before we bombed, invaded, and broke their country. And I care now.
The Iraqi people are like a grandfather that has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. You have six months to a year to prepare yourself and manage your grief. When the day comes, you are sad. But you knew that day was coming. You are not distraught.
It’s totally different from losing your daughter in a sudden and unexpected car accident. That’s grief. That’s despair.
I don’t think the Republicans understand that people who have been watching the war in Iraq for the last four years have been internalizing their grief all along…preparing for the day when all hell breaks loose. The time is long since past when rational people could expect a remission of the metastasis. One last blast of radiation is not, and has not, solved the problem.
When I look at the estimated 600,000 dead in Iraq I am also thinking of the 2 or 3 or 5 million more dead that might now be inevitable casualties in the future.
I have written angry, despairing, plaintive, posts about Iraq. I’ve been going through the stages of grief for years now.
So, if you want to know why I am so hostile to the Bush administration, it is because I have already factored the future into my measure of their crime.
And Bush can threaten that millions will die if we pull out and I…I already knew that. I knew that two or three years ago. I knew that things were getting progressively worse in Iraq the longer we stayed and fought an impossible war.
It’s not that I don’t care about the consequences of withdrawal. It’s that I have already prepared myself emotionally.
