Never again, again

Merle Borg

05/04/04 "ICH" In a sadly perverted way, we owe a debt of gratitude to the interrogators for those pictures in the Abu Ghraib prison. Like the photo of the little burning girl in Vietnam, these pictures will speed the end of another unjust war and save untold thousands of lives. Truth screamed at us forty years ago through the terrified eyes of a child just as it leers at us today through the smirks on our interrogators faces. Truth reveals itself. No amount of spin can hide it forever. 

The Vietnam war was billed as a way to contain the godless spread of communism. America would stand up and stop it. After straffing, bombing, poisoning, and eventually being kicked out of that unfortunate country, we discovered communism didn't want to spread. Vietnam, split since WW2, was merely trying to re-unify. 

The untold truth today is that powerful people in Washington have decided to install a puppet government in Iraq. From that hapless nation we will protect Israel, control Mid East oil, and maintain a thumb on China and India as two thirds of the world switches from muscle to machine power. To install this government, we again find ourselves at war.

An unfortunate chain of events brought us to this quagmire. We ignored the increasing Islamic bitterness of stationing our troops in the holy lands of Saudi Arabia and we dismissed the festering Islamic resentment of our one sided support of Israel. Our simple minded president repeatedly ignored warnings about a pending Al Qaeda attack and after Islamic extremists took down the World Trade Center, he used the tragedy to invade a country that was not involved. 

The invasion was packaged as a way to protect ourselves against weapons of mass destruction, to overthrow a cruel tyrant, and to establish freedom and democracy in the Middle East. No weapons have been found however, and in winning the hearts and minds of Iraqi's, we have destroyed their institutions and their infrastructure and allowed the looting of their museums and hospitals. We are killing them at a ratio of ten to one. We have curbed their freedom, shut down their newspapers, and now it turns out we are torturing their citizens. 

We have lost lives, credibility, money, friends, and turned another generation of our precious children into monsters. Our "War against terrorism" is recruiting terrorists at an unprecedented pace. No war has ever been so completely and so justly lost. It is time for our leaders to fall on their swords, for the U.N. to take over in Iraq, at our expense, and for us to say "Never again", again. 

Copyright: Merle Borg <merleborg@cox.net>