The march of folly, that has led to a bloodbath (Robert Fisk)

[laststeamtrain]

The march of folly, that has led to a bloodbath
The Iraq War: Three Years On

By Robert Fisk

03/20/06 "The Independent" -- -- It is the march of folly. In 1914, the British, French, and Germans though they would be home by Christmas. On the 9th of April 2003, corporal David Breeze of the 3rd Battalion, 4th US Marine Regiment - the very first American to enter Baghdad - borrowed my satellite phone to call his home in Michigan. "Hi you guys, I'm in Baghdad," he told his mother. "I'm ringing to say 'Hi, I love you. I'm doing fine. I love you guys.' The war will be over in a few days. I'll see you all soon."

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Was this because we no longer have leaders who have experienced war at first hand? When I grew up, Churchill and MacMillan were Prime Ministers, men who fought in the First World War and who led us through the Second World War. Eden had been in the wartime Cabinet with Churchill. Tito had been wounded by German shellfire in Yugoslavia, Jack Kennedy had commanded a torpedo boat in the Pacific, de Gaulle fought in the Great War, and later helped to liberate France from the Nazis, but Blair, however much he may claim to be a friend of God, has no such distinction; nor Bush, who dodged Vietnam; nor Cheney, who also dodged Vietnam; nor Gordon Brown, nor Condoleezza Rice; nor John Howard of Australia. Colin Powell was in Vietnam; but he has gone, trailing his ignominious February 2003 UN performance on weapons of mass destruction.

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For this was to be an ideological war. From its creation by the loonies of the American right - as a pro-Israeli policy to aid Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu - and then foisted on Bush, to the hell-disaster that Iraq now represents, the real war had to be turned into myth; nightmares into dreams; destruction into hope; terrible truths into profound mendacity.

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What was it Bush told us a few weeks ago? That 30,000 Iraqis had been killed since the invasion, his very words a racist admission; for what he actually said was: "30,000 more or less". More or less, give or take a few hundred. Would he have dared to say that US casualties were "2,000 more or less"? Of course not. Our dead are precious; they are individuals with widows and children. The Iraqis? Well, they are lesser beings whose casualties cannot be revealed to us by the Iraqi Ministry of Health, on orders from the Americans and British; creatures whose suffering, far greater than our own, must be submerged in the democracy and freedom in which we are drowning them; whose casualties "More or less" are probably nearer to 150,000. After all, if 1,000 Iraqis could die by violence last July - in Baghdad alone; and if they are being killed at 60 or 70 a day, then we have a near genocidal bloodbath on our hands. Iraqis, however, are now our Untermenschen for whom, frankly, we do not greatly care.

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http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12426.htm

[BikeWriter]

1. Tell it like it is!

[Hissyspit]

2. I believe Fisk brought up the Iraq 1917/today comparisons several years

ago and they ring even more true today: "History repeats itself, but never in the same way."

(I made the above saying up, but obvious it owes much to Nietsche's concept of 'eternal return' and Edmund Burke's 'those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it' quote, and maybe some of W.H. Auden's 'Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind,' if just a little bit, but most certainly and furthest back to Cicero who wrote: 'To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.' BUT THE ABOVE WORDING I MADE UP, so there.)

[TomClash]

3. You can synthesize this article into an aphorism

"We have met the terrorists and they are us."