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Friday, Oct. 28, 2005

WHATEVER HAPPENS TODAY -- whatever happens to White House officials or to the Bush administration or the Neocon movement that has seized control of United States society, the UK and in many ways the world, it's not really going to be justice.

It will be a genuine, certified miracle if someone in the Bush White House is accused of a crime in connection with the fraudulent march to the Iraq massacre and the outing of a CIA agent whose job was to protect us from terrorists getting weapons. Even one good harpoon will connect us that much more firmly to the truth. And that will hopefully raise awareness and assist with some of the progress the world rather desperately needs to make right now.

But it won't bring back the people who have been killed, from those who fell with the World Trade Center after repeated warnings were ignored and indeed capitalized on; to those whose lives were lost in the apparent charade of not catching Bush family friend Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan; to the untold thousands whose lives have been lost and homes and families shattered in Iraq.

The political process has the power to do damage that it cannot undo. And that is why we must pay attention to it. It is difficult to imagine the loss of one life, but we need to remember that according to a study published last year in The Lancet, the respected British medical journal, 100,000 Iraqis have lost their lives as a result of the US invasion and occupation. This has been reported by The Guardian, the Washington Post and CNN. And the estimate is one year old.

Even if you consider the widely reported underestimates of 25,000 (remembering that the United States is, conveniently, not counting the Iraqi dead), you cannot say that this is any way to "liberate" a country, unless you mean liberating a lot of people from their bodies. And with 25,000 to 100,000 dead, you can be sure the number of injured and grieving is many, many times this. So people who say we are doing the noble deed and protecting Iraqis from a dictator and spreading freedom are, basically, in total denial.

Iraq is a country that has been ravaged by war since around 1980. Even if you don't count the effects of living under the Saddam dictatorship -- much of which occurred when he was an official or unofficial ally of the United States, funded by the CIA and provided with many horrifying weapons -- there was the 10 year war between Iran and Iraq. The United States provided guns to both sides of that war, legally to Saddam, illegally to the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Then there was the bombing of the country in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Then there was the ongoing bombing between the end of that war and the beginning of what we now think of as the Iraq war. So we are now occupying a country that has been bombed nonstop for a quarter of a century. This sounds a little like Vietnam, where we had a behind-the-scenes war going back into the late 1940s that lasted until 1973. At the time US forces left Vietnam, American newspapers all cried, "A quarter century! Never again!"

Millions of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians killed. Fifty-four thousand American servicemen and women killed. Hundreds of thousands injured, poisoned, sent home half-mad. And the massacre continued in Cambodia, where Pol Pot took over where the United States left off, killing millions of his own people -- a situation ignored by the United States.

It did not take long to start again. Indeed, it was just seven years between the end of Vietnam and the beginning of the United States messing with Iran and Iraq. And now the dead are piling up on our doorstep once again.

But statistics of body counts are fucked up. They are stupid and we pay too much attention to them, or not enough; we hide our feelings behind them, and just about everyone ignores history. Images on today's and yesterday's Planet Waves cover speak much louder than numbers. The anonymous fallen soldier arriving home at Dover Air Force Base, depicted yesterday, is somewhat more ominous than a number. The Hildebrandt family, now shown on the cover, is the other side of yesterday's photo (linked at bottom). Multiply this grief by 2,000 families for a sense of the impact. Don't forget to include the friends of the men and women who went to serve in Iraq in a war based on lies and treason.

Prosecuting Scooter Libby for outing a spy, for lying about prewar intelligence, or for whatever he gets nailed for, is not going to solve, or heal, any of this. In truth, whatever criminal prosecutions may come today are the beginning of a long, hard slog -- to borrow a phrase from Donald Rumsfeld, who should be in jail, where he cannot hurt anyone. And we really need to remember that there are many, many people involved who will walk away from mass murder and treason with impunity. As of last night, Karl Rove was apparently in a very good mood. But he is not prescient.

While we may be marveling at what happens, what strange political developments occur in Washington and denying that we ever voted for the Bush-Cheney ticket, we cannot forget the actual effects of what has happened; we cannot forget the motives for what was done to Iraq and to the United States. We cannot forget the damage cannot be fixed, and that politics does not heal human grief. We cannot forget that this is our world.

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Fallen soldier arrives at Dover Air Force Base
http://www.planetwaves.net/home/home_soldier.html