What the hell is there to say, really? Other than what I've said over and over again?
"...that sucker was shot in the head eight years ago, when a clown-car full of rage-drunk idiots and cynical thieves tried to sneak into a foreign land and steal it on the cheap, justifying their theft with lies and evasions, muffing the thievery with ignorance and arrogance, and then taking years and years to accept that they couldn't change thousands of years of human history and hundreds of years of poverty, misgovernment, sectarian hatred, and Ottoman incompetence by their pure will alone. The entire mess was doomed from the start, it just took eight years for the fantasists in D.C. to recognize it was walking dead, and the only beneficiaries of its zombie progress since then have been the various outfits that have made millions looting the Occupation and the Malikist strain of Iraqi Shia who now stand to consolidate their kleptocracy with the help of the pals to the northeast.One thing that the usual idiots and the reliable-liars-of-the-Right are saying that makes my jaw drop is that it's time to get our war back on to go shovel this water, again, like somehow it's going to work out any better than it did the last time.
It's not "over" for the ordinary Iraqi, mind you. The mess that Dubya and Dick created when they knocked over the Baathist toybox in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates won't be "over" for years, or decades. The social, economic, and political disaster that the idiots who truly believed that they "made their own reality" will haunt the poor bastards that live in that haunted land for generations."
To which I have no better reply than to quote the section of Zee Edgell's work Beka Lamb that pretty much sums up in 131 words what happens to those who have tried to hustle the Valley of the Tigris and Euphrates since the Fall of the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258:
"I know. But nothin' lasts here, Beka. Tings bruk down."
Her Gran leaned the fork carefully against the frying pan, pushed the window over the back stairs and propped it open with a long pole. Then she said:
"I don't know why, Beka. But one time, when I was a young girl like you, a circus come to town. I can't remember where it was from and don't ask me what happened to it afta. The circus had a fluffy polar bear - a ting Belize people never see befo'. It died up at Barracks Green, Beka. The ice factory broke down the second day the circus was here."
Beka's Granny Ivy was crying. Her apron tail was over her face, and she said again and again,
"It died, Beka. It died."
6 comments:
I want to say something meaningful; but you and I both know I've run out of meaning about his debacle of deceit and death...
We both have. There IS no "meaning" left to this bottomless pit of ruin and merciless hatred.
Was there meaning to the Thirty Years war? In some ways, it produced the world we know today.
And surely this fucking disaster will in some way shape the Tigris region 500 years from now, as the monstrously insane religious wars of the 15th Century shaped the modern West.
However, for the Swabian family whose farmstead had just been visited by the troops of the Protestant Elector one polity over that long view was probably lost in the immediacy that the men were all inside the burning farmhouse with their throats cut and the women, from grandma to preteen granddaughter, were being viciously gang-raped out in the barn before their own deaths.
So, yes; in the long run we're all dead. Unfortunately we're living in the short run, and in the short run this recent round of killing and destruction is no more meaningful for the dead, the maimed, the raped, the homeless, and the ruined than it was for that German family 500 years ago...
For God's sake, man!
Uh well in better news, my province (Ontario) just elected a Liberal premier despite all polls showing a Progressive Conservative (an ironic name) minority. Seems Ontarians didn't like 'Tea Party North' and they even lost 10 seats, the party leader resigned as the polls close.
So there's some sanity up here. Maybe it will infect you down south... uh eventually.
"For God's sake" is a particularly apt turn of phrase, Chief.
You are correct that there is nothing comforting I can say to the Iraqi family down the street, worried sick about their relatives. No doubt the survivors will wring some lessons from the ghastly wreckage of war. Perhaps, one lesson will be to remove God from the business of war in that part of the world. I don't know, maybe they will take the opposite lesson.
I remember being a young safety officer on the range. Watching a just-shot shell leave the gun and proceed rapidly down range and hearing the communicator report "shot" over the radio. In the twenty or so seconds before the communicator reported "splash", I remember thinking that, if some horrible error had been made, there was nothing that could be done to change the fall of shot, even though the round had not yet hit the ground.
Well, for Iraq, the round was launched back in 2003 but the "splash" keeps getting worse.
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