Desert Rose
I dream of rainI dream of gardens in the desert sand
I wake in vain
I dream of love as time runs through my hand
--Desert Rose, Sting
Oh the song of the future has been sung
All the battles have been won
On the mountain tops we stand
All the world at our command
--Canadian Railroad Trilogy,
Gordon Lightfoot
Good things do not last
Bad things do not end
--Game Shows Touch Our Lives,
The Mountain Goats
________________
The cover of the The Week magazine (3.19.10) illustrates the illusory nature of the war in Iraq.
The assumption is that elections equate with a democracy. Actually, the nature of the election matters, and not all elections signal a democracy.
The illustration implies that the Iraqi people are building a nation, a la Joe Rosenthal's iconic WW II photograph. In fact, we are reconstructing a nation after our democracy destroyed their nation. The U.S. did not vote before destroying Iraq; President Bush simply used the military as a bulldozer. "Yes we broke all the china, but we have owned the china shop long enough now. It's time to give it back to the original Iraq owners," says a Boston Globe editorial. How nice.
And now we delude ourselves into believing that the Iraqis love this democracy that rent their own so much that they are re-building in our image. However, if Iraq were in fact a sovereign democratic state, why does the U.S. president decide whether our troops stay or leave? Isn't this a decision to be made by the people of Iraq?
If they do not or cannot make this determination, then all the purple thumbs in all the elections don't a democracy make. Iraq is not a democracy until the U.S. no longer occupies Iraqi territory.
Of course, Iraq's vaunted democracy is not a done deal even after we may leave, as the cost to be borne by their society as the result of U.S. destruction has yet to be tabulated.
And if flags means anything to the nation they represent, the words on the Iraqi flag -- Allahu Akbar -- proclaim "God is greater" (the text added only after the initial U.S. invasion in 1991.) Democracies do not dedicate their flags to God; theocracies do.
Iraq is not exactly a rose blooming in the desert.
Labels: phony war on terror, PWOT, war on terror
posted by rangeragainstwar at 8:17 AM
4 Comments:
i like the analogy of the china shop. we go in (and it wasn't a top rank shop to begin with, even a casual historian can tell you that iraq, as a colony or monarchy or semi-democracy has never been able to organize anything beyond cursory use of its oil. you drill where the kurds are, need to get it past the sunni to the shia in basra to do anything with it, by the time it gets to the ships there have been so many fingers in the pie that there ain't nothing to serve) and trash to place for a decade at great (on credit cards) expense, making a few presidential cronies astonishingly rich. rich beyond count by the way because there were those billions worth of twenties shrink wrapped on palettes that simply vanished into the night. the other lootings were done by halliburton stock jobbers, and of course, eric prince and his vile mercenaries.
there is simply nothing to be proud of there. nothing. we proved nothing. we have gained nothing and neither have the iraqis.
to put it in good old gunnery sergeant speak:
this here hobo clusterfuck ain't worth cleaning up.
The Soviet Union had elections. Just sayin'.
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
I wonder how many supporters of the Iraq occupation and our building a "democracy" there would consider the US a democracy while foreign troops patrolled our streets and kicked in doors at will.
terrible,
We're not still kicking doors , but we're not gone yet either.
It ain't over till the fat camel farts.
jim
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