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Desolation
Row
By
Chris Floyd - 22 April 2003
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In recent days, the perverse moral calculus that guides
the masters of war in the White House has revealed itself with startling
clarity -- laid bare like the gurgling intestines of a 3-year-old child
whose skin has been flayed by a fragmentation bomb.
As the desolation -- sorry, liberation -- of Iraq continued
apace, the Masters moved quickly and efficiently to secure the country's
oil fields, but they blithely and deliberately failed to secure the lives
of innocent people left in bombed-out cities without any system of law
or governance. Unlike oil rigs -- which, after all, can be restored if
something happens to them -- the actual human beings destroyed in the chaos
that followed the invaders' high-tech blitzkrieg cannot be replaced --
not even by no-bid, $7 billion reconstruction contracts to Dick Cheney's
Halliburton.
You'd think that conquerors who'd come to "liberate" a suffering people
would have brought enough troops to actually secure the territory and the
lives and livelihoods of said suffering people -- as they conquered it.
Of course, this kind of thing is unglamorous work, not very telegenic;
what's more, you can't just farm it out in fat contracts to your political
cronies. So why bother? Who cares? What's a little "untidiness" -- as Don
Rumsfeld called the slow, agonizing deaths of worthless "collateral damage"
lying untreated in ransacked hospitals when you're remaking the world?
As that other breaker of nations, Joe Stalin, used to say: "When wood is
chopped, chips fly."
The oil-securing conquerors also failed to safeguard
Iraq's storehouses of antiquity -- irreplaceable treasures from the earliest
days of civilization, which first arose on this land's now-cratered, uranium-soaked
soil. Here, humanity first learned to write, count, make medicine, form
cities, create laws, map the stars. Here, humanity first began its excruciatingly
slow -- and obviously incomplete -- emergence from the dictatorship of
instinct, the shackles of genetic programming, the blind, voracious animal
need that still thrashes in the mud of our monkey brains.
Priceless artifacts that recorded this millennia-long struggle for
emergence and transcendence were destroyed in the space of a few hours
during the orgy of looting that swept Iraq in the conquerors' wake. Although,
in Baghdad, a few ordinary American soldiers tried to intervene at first,
they were quickly ordered away by their superiors [sic] and forced to stand
idle while mobs of destitute Shiites -- brutalized by former CIA asset
Saddam Hussein, by punitive sanctions that devoured their society and strengthened
the hand of their oppressor and by days of indiscriminate bombing that
blew their loved ones to bits -- smashed the heritage of our human commonality.
But let's be fair. The Oval One's occupiers did manage
to secure two important buildings in the midst of the rampage: the Interior
Ministry, with all of Saddam's juicy intelligence files -- why let good
torture go to waste? -- and, of course, the Oil Ministry. In fact, the
file-grab has already produced a shocking revelation: It seems that Moscow
and Baghdad were sharing intelligence in a joint effort to combat Osama
bin Laden -- you know, the guy whose "close connection" to Saddam was the
main reason that the terror-rattled (and deliberately deceived) American
public finally supported Bush's war of aggression.
Unfortunately for that rattled and deceived populace, the chaos in
Iraq will only mean more repression in the Homeland. For it confirms the
deepest fears of the Bushist ruling clique. They believe that the veneer
of civilization is wafer-thin, that a single terrorist attack can crack
it -- thus the panicky discarding of civil liberties after Sept. 11. A
few more such blows, they think, will shatter American society to pieces.
So, measures even more draconian will now be promulgated. Last week, the
White House began moving to have the "emergency" powers of the notorious
Patriot Act made permanent. Secret arrests, centralization of personal
data, classification of citizens into ranks of "security-worthiness," unrestricted
surveillance and more -- all are in the works or even now being implemented.
That's how little faith these so-called super-patriots really have in the
United States. It is they, not the dissenters, who despise their own country,
who believe it's too weak and unworthy for freedom.
Of course, their concerns aren't completely unfounded. For the breakdown
we saw in Iraq is indeed an ever-present risk for vastly unequal societies,
where the rich and powerful commit crimes with impunity while the poor
and powerless fill the jails. Where rulers practice the most blatant deceit,
lie and cheat their way into authority, propagate absurd myths about themselves,
paint their common thuggery in the colors of patriotism and religion. Where,
above all, they set the ultimate example of lawlessness for their people:
launching wars against countries that haven't attacked them, teaching that
killing, corruption and ruin -- not law, not communion, not transcendence
-- are the supreme
expressions of civilization, the basis of human society.
It's a dangerous lesson, especially for people shaken by disaster:
war, repression -- or terrorist attacks. That's why the Bushist clique
is worried. True, they are also physical cowards -- dodging wars they were
glad for others to fight -- and weaklings as well, dependent on sugar daddies
and crony contracts to make their way in the world. Such timorous specimens
would naturally underestimate the resilience of American society.
Yet perhaps they have reason to worry. Perhaps what they see in Iraq's
desolation is not just the ruin of an evil regime they once gladly succored
-- but the kind of moral rot they are now engendering by their own example.
Perhaps we should all start worrying.
The Guardian, April 12, 2003
The Independent, April 13, 2003
Village Voice, April 16, 2003
The Guardian, April 11, 2003
Washington Post, April 12, 2003
The Independent, April 14, 2003
New York Times, April 14, 2003
Salon.com, April 12, 2003
Washington Post, April 13, 2003
The Guardian, April 14, 2003
The Guardian, April 14, 2003
CNN, April 13, 2003
Daily Mirror, April 15, 2003
New York Times, April 14, 2003
BBC, April 14, 2003
Washington Post, April 13, 2003
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Financial Times, April 14, 2003
The Guardian, April 14, 2003
The Guardian, April 16, 2003
Glasgow Sunday Herald, April 13, 2003
The American Prospect, April 15, 2003
Cursor.org, April 14, 2003
Sydney Morning Herald, April 13, 2003
New York Times, April 9, 2003
Associated Press, Feb. 28, 2003
CounterPunch, April 7, 2003
CounterPunch, April 15, 2003
In These Times, April 4, 2003
New York Times, April 4, 2003
Tribune Media Services, March 20, 2003
The Times, April 15, 2003
The News Insider, May 20, 2002
The Nation, March 13, 2003
Bob Dylan ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Bob
Dylan
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