This Wretched War

I read today in the New York Times yet another story of this truly god-damned (in the Reverand Wright sense) war in Iraq. No matter what aspect of this horror is being discussed, it disgusts me to read it, hear it, or see it on TV or the Net. This particular piece by Timothy Egan focuses on how invisible the war is to the country and the damage that's been done to soldiers who survive the conflict and come home. Evidently suicide rates among them are soaring. Just in passing he mentions that this war has cost twice as much as WWI in inflation-adjusted bucks, and ten times as much as the First Gulf War. The vile little fraud in the White House whose hands are stained with the blood of hundreds of thousands of deaths in this war he lied through his smug teeth to get us into, including over 4,000 Americans killed and over 30,000 wounded, many of these crippled for life, shows his solidarity with the parents of the killed by giving up golf.

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said in a bizarre interview with Politico last week. “And I think playing golf during a war sends the wrong signal.”

Don't you love the way he refers to himself in the third person, "the command in chief"? He never lets us forget that he's got the power, does he? Don't forget he's also "the decider."

But I digress . . .

To me, one of the most horrifying aspects of this war is what it does to the people we send over there to do our dying for us. War debases people; it turns them into animals. Why aren't we being inundated with reports of the war crimes our own returning veterans admit? Check out the videos here. Why aren't we being shown pictures of the thousands of kids we're maiming and killing over there, like the picture of the little girl above?

Why aren't we out in the streets by the thousands saying NO to this criminal waste of life, money, and precious resources? Is it because we're as callous and criminal as the president and the war profiteers who see no reason for this nightmare to end? What has this war done to all of us?