A Very Un-Merry Actually Dark and Dour Anniversary

Many would love to flush the events of ten years ago away.  While we may well at this point be so far beyond recovery when it comes to the America we grew up with and the form of government we were bequeathed that learning from history is pointless, could we at least make that possibly-futile gesture?

There are very few politicians wanting to talk today about the events leading up to our uber-spasm of racist colonialism, petroleum conquest, and genocide, since so few of them had the courage to even speak in public other than in support of the warmongering.  It seems doubtful that the major media will want to dwell much on this either, given their cowardly deplorable drum-beating and boot-licking sycophantism in the phony build-up to the wars.  Mr. Pierce, posting at Esquire and eminently book-markable, has a bit to say on this score.  He says it so well that I feel obliged to quote at length:

The "public editor" of The New York Times tells us today that the paper's coverage of the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War is likely to be less of a hoot than back in the drum-banging days when Judy Miller was standing atop a great pile of stove-piped bullshit while Bill Keller threw roses at her feet.

I asked Dean Baquet, a managing editor, about the low-key approach. He said that while a few stories are planned, editors did not see a need for a major project or special section, as they did with the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "The war itself has been dissected to a tremendous degree," he told me. "You have to have something new or fresh to say." He would not provide specifics about the articles that are planned, but said there might be one or two that would make their way onto the front page this week...Is The Times's own role in the run-up to the war a part of this relative reticence, as some readers have suggested to me? Is there reluctance to revisit a painful period in the paper's history? Mr. Baquet said that's not a factor. "The Times has probably acknowledged its own mistakes from that period more than anyone," he said. "We certainly haven't been shy about doing that. We're doing the stories that make sense to us and that offer our readers something worthwhile."

That is, of course, all bollocks. Keller still writes a column. The Times is playing this on the downlow precisely because it never truly has atoned for its role in a fiasco. The op-ed page still welcomes submissions from people whose work on this most grotesque foreign-policy blunder should have been as definitive a career-killer as were Joe Hazlewood's navigational abilities.

I can hardly wait for this week to end. If it's not Dean Baquet, copping a cheap alibi for his newspaper's unforgivable malpractice, it's Richard Perle. who should be displayed in a pillory outside Walter Reed for the next 10 years, being allowed to vomit blood all over the op-ed section of USA Today.

Many commentaries on the Iraq War, including the one to which this is a response, show little understanding of what it means to manage risk. We do not normally consider it to have been foolish to pay for fire insurance when the house does not burn down - or particularly clever to have done so when it does. When thousands of American lives are at stake, insurance, sometimes pre-emptive military action, is not cheap.  

And precisely what risk did you "manage" ? What chance did you take? You gambled with other people's children in a game you'd helped rig. What cost was exacted from you, sitting your fat ass in a swivel chair at a wingnut intellectual chop-shop while kids are still staggering around the wards without legs and arms, or the cognitive functions to get them through the day? What price did you pay? You have to send out for lunch one day? Show me the butcher's bill for the Perle household, you vampire son of a bitch. 

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Thank you sir, ever so much.  I do not believe I could have channeled my personal ongoing apoplexy into anywhere near as coherent a rant.

In honor of the "occasion" there is also the poignant letter penned to war-criminals bush and cheney and their gang of devil-spawn by dying Iraq veteran Tomas Young:

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I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

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