Why I am Angry

The Progress being made in Iraq is touted as being an increasingly resounding success, a pat on the back kind of thing between chums who have done the world a great favor. Politicians mince their words as they tell us of all the good things which the dastardly left wing media does not report. Others, such as Ann Coulter and her ilk, still compare Baghdad to Los Angeles or Detroit. “You’re focusing on the bad news’” they tell us. But they are hard pressed to give any good news when asked for it. Good news out of Baghdad is about as specific as Rumsfeld’s famous WMD quote. Somewhere, to the North, the South and maybe a little to the East, there’s been some progress made. A school painted here, a business opened there.

But we cannot simply turn away from the nightmare we have created. Yes, “we” because we allowed that sanctimonious windbag Tony Blair to suck up to George Bush, now crowned George The Ignorant and we allowed both of them to start this war. It will be too easy to slowly relinquish our interest for the disaster that Iraq has become. Every day is another day where the numbers of dead reach the hundreds. We no longer click on the link to find out why another 116 people were found dead in Iraq. We are numbed by the numbers and are weary of death and destruction and yet, we are only reading about it. What if we were there? Here’s an excerpt from the Baghdad Journal:

When will I die? That's the question circling in my head when I awake on Wednesday. I'm sweating, as usual. My muscles ache from another long night of no electricity in weather only slightly cooler than hell. As I dress for work, other questions assail me: How will I die? Will it be a shot in the head? Will I be blown to pieces? Or be seized at a police checkpoint because of my sect, then tortured and killed and thrown out on the sidewalk?

Is this the sign of progress? Waiting for hours for gas that has become prohibitively expensive in a country that is sitting on some of the world’s largest oil reserves? Not having electrical power but for a few hours a day from one’s own generator because the Iraqi government, supposedly supported by the world’s most advanced country, the world’s only superpower, cannot provide electricity to its own citizens, a country running out of medication to treat the victims of bombings and shootings? How can they be running out of medications? What is the US government using the $100,000 a minute that they are spending in Iraq on? I would have thought that at a minimum, medication and hospital equipment should be at the top of the list when one has successfully trashed a country.

But my anger does not come even come from the permanent attempt by the McCains of this world to underplay the catastrophe that Iraq has become in his famous flak-jacketed tour of a Baghdad market, surrounded by marines and watched over by Apache helicopters. It comes from the complacent attitude and the pernicious solipsism that pervades this administration.

"In some ways we probably all underestimated the depth of mistrust and how difficult it would be for these guys to come together on legislation,"
- US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, August 2, 2007,

Underestimated the depth of mistrust in Iraq, a country so ethnically separated that it took a dictator such as Hussein to hold it together? Underestimated how difficult it would be for ‘these guys’ to form a government. Come on Gates! You could have asked anyone, who had any history of being in the Middle East during the past 40 years and they would have told you that invading Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein from power was going to result in a bloodbath of epic proportions and that if the country was not destroyed, its cohesiveness shattered, it would certainly drop into a multi-year internal civil war which would not end before either the country was broken up into separate entities or, another dictator replaced the former one. Everyone knew that that was going to be the outcome, so excusing it with an ‘underestimation’ is not acceptable. It is tantamount to a war crime, which your government, Mr. Gates, committed and for which it is accountable for.

That’s not even the end of it. The cherry on the icing is the arrogance with which American lawmakers are stepping up to the plate not to offer constructive advice, but to chide the Iraqi government for not doing a better job. So the way I understand it is that having invaded a country and caused an absolutely groundless and unnecessary war, having destroyed the infrastructure and poisoned the land, having torn apart the very fabric of society, now the American government is telling the Iraqis that they are not doing a decent job patching things up.

Iraqi legislators are dying like flies and only the police that are supposed to protect them are dying faster. That's the reality of the new Iraq. They have a nerve up in Washington but unfortunately, not much of a brain to connect it to.