The Young War

     From March 6, 2003, to March 6, 2005, I wrote an account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and related matters called The War File.  Similar to this blog, it gave me the opportunity to express my thoughts and feelings about the rich and powerful, world events, domestic affairs from the trivial to the important.  Mostly, it illustrates how my perspectives on U.S. foreign policy and the psychopathic personalities who wield it haven't changed; in fact, my views on these subjects, going back to the 1980s, have been consistent.  My study of the John F. Kennedy assassination and later on President Reagan's on-camera lie denying U.S. support of the Contras triggered me, making me realize the extent to which governments and their allies in the news media use deception as a matter of regular practice.
     Although there's much about the world right now I could write about, I'm using this post to display a random selection from The War File, the entry for June 28, 2004:

     L. Paul Bremer jumped the gun.  Iraq is now a sovereign state, run by Iraqis, for Iraqis.  That's the officially approved idea.  The handover was scheduled to occur this Wednesday [June 30] but was moved up two days to foil possible terror plots.  Bremer gets to go home forty-eight hours sooner than expected and American politicians and pundits can feel proud of the epic accomplishments of Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Thousands killed, wounded, left homeless.  Guerrilla warfare, rising tensions between Shiites and Sunnis, a well-organized Kurdish army of 75,000 soldiers who might prove unwilling to obey the Iraqi governing council's edict for all militias to disband.  The country still suffers from frequent electrical blackouts.  Unemployment is very high.  An American occupation force of 100,000 soldiers will remain.  Will they be popular, now that Iraq is "free"?
     Bush and Blair are optimistic.  It's easy to feel upbeat when you don't have to smell the stink of Third World death.  They've spent the last few days at a NATO summit in Istanbul.  Bush has gladly given some of America's responsibility for "shouldering the burden" of the Iraq mess to other NATO members.  After vigorous energy spent alienating NATO members prior to the war, Bush now seeks to buddy up to them.  They cave in to his wishes because, truthfully, all nations fear the United States of America.
     Donald Rumsfeld was at the NATO summit and said in an interview that we mustn't forget the Iraqis killed by terrorists.  He refers to the many bombings that have occurred since the war "ended."
It's true that hundreds of Iraqis have died from terror attacks in 2003 and 2004, but Rumsfeld neglects to mention that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed by American forces and the U.N. embargo of 1990 to 2003.
     Another big lie: Bush, during a press conference, made reference to Saddam Hussein; that the former Iraqi leader destroyed his country's infrastructure.  No journalist in that room had the guts to call Bush on this reprehensible distortion of the facts.  Saddam Hussein did not destroy Iraq's infrastructure.  During the Gulf War of 1991 and the 2003 war, mostly American warplanes and
cruise missiles destroyed Iraq's electrical power stations, bridges, buildings and communication centers.  From 1991 on the country has been wrecked, and during the 1990s the first Bush and then the Clinton administrations pressured the U.N. to maintain the strictest and most destructive embargo on any nation in recorded history.  Hussein and his government were not permitted to repair the damaged and destroyed infrastructure caused by Operation Desert Storm.  Parts needed to fix electrical power plants were often denied because they were regarded as "dual-use" items--objects with civilian but also potential military applications.  With unreliable electrical power plants, Iraq's water treatment facilities bogged down, tainting the country's water supply.  By 2000, raw sewage ran down some Baghdad streets.  The effects of bad water and the recurrent lack of power had its most horrendous effects on Iraqi children and on the elderly.  They died in droves.
     Imagine: malnourished little kids with no medicine [due to the embargo] afflicted with diarrhea, shitting themselves to death so that George Herbert Walker Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush could punish Saddam Hussein into submission.  Three fine Christian presidents have each remarked that our beef is not with the Iraqi people, but with Saddam Hussein.  They've demonstrated this sentiment by killing over a million innocent Iraqis, before the 2003 war even began.
     Rumsfeld and Bush do not want us to think about those victims.

     Hussein, as we now know fourteen years since I wrote the above, got a noose around his neck.  Rumsfeld, the two Bush presidents, Clinton, are all war criminals at large with more blood on their hands than hundreds of historical serial murderers combined.  "No Drama" Obama continued the killings, even assassinating two American citizens, one of them a sixteen year old boy.  Trump seems bent on bombing and shooting everyone that fits his narrow definition of enemies.  He wants to unleash the military on thousands of refugees from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, seeking to cross Mexico to reach the U.S.  They flee drug gangs, police corruption, terrorism, all of it generated by the U.S.-prosecuted drug war.  Like an unredeemable alcoholic, the U.S. will not accept responsibility for the destructive conditions it creates and the lives it ruins.
     American leaders continue to embrace triumphalism, brutality, and an arrogance rivaled only by the most chauvinistic Israelis.  It's impossible to say for sure, but I can't accept the idea that the Fascist creeps running America and many other nations will be able to sustain their rule beyond the horizon of the mid-century.  The world, dying as it is, most definitely transforming into a planet that will be increasingly an alien world to human life, won't help out the idiot tycoon class that chose to do nothing to save it.  The needed revolution against the powers that be may simply come in the form of some really bad weather, combined with growing anarchy, humans forming into enclaves, nations growing quickly irrelevant, survival of the strongest and the luckiest.  If luck includes negotiating the contours of Hell.
     My country has visited Hell on other nations many times.  Iraq, of course, still tells us something.  I wrote the above account of human failure, hubris, lies and stupid cruelty fourteen years ago when I was forty years old.  My father was dying of esophageal cancer at the time.  He hated George W. Bush by 2004.  A lifelong Democrat, the 9/11 attacks nevertheless bothered the shit out of him.  He accepted Bush's invasion of Afghanistan and later supported Bush's rationale for invading Iraq.  We argued once about Dick Cheney's Halliburton connection, how it enabled him to profiteer from the war.  My father said, "We were attacked by people who want to kill us!  If Cheney makes some money from the war that's fine with me."
     A year later, though, with no WMD showing up, my father knew he'd been lied to by Bush and other administration officials.  I knew Bush was lying from the start; I never trusted the son of a bitch and I still don't.  I assumed from the very beginning of his phony stolen presidency that he would lie all the time; that, like his father, he would commit egregious acts of inhumanity against innocent people in other parts of the world.  I was right about George W. Bush, who now, grossly, enjoys popularity among idiots on the Left  because he seems so much better than Donald Trump.
     They're both killers, they both violate human rights, they both deny global warming, they're both useless as leaders.
     As my father lay dying during his final two weeks, the 2004 election yielded the result we now know.  My father had stayed awake as long as he was able, watching the election reports but the winner was not yet known when he fell asleep.  The next morning, he asked my mother, "Who won?"  She had considered giving him the white lie that Kerry had won.  My father, who was unconscious most of the time during those last days, would have then gone to his death believing that Bush and Cheney would've been out of the White House in two months.  My mother decided she couldn't lie about it, though, and said, "Bush."
     My father cried.
     He and I finally agreed in our identification of human scum.

                                                                             Vic Neptune