We, who sit thousands of miles away, watch the tragedy that is current day Iraq unfold on our television screens. After a while, the daily killings all seem to blur into each other. Not much catches our attention anymore. The tick tick tick of human life expiring at a steady click becomes part of the background noise. We perk our ears and focus our eyes every now and then when something really dramatic occurs that breaks the monotony of mayhem. Otherwise, life lumbers forward and we busy ourselves with our work and our family. This monotony is captured well by E.M. Forster’s pen:
And again and again fell the world like the ebb of a dying sea.
I suspect life is also like that in Iraq. Where the daily killings, even though they are immediate, are taken in stride as life tries to survive and make sense of the horrors all around. I suspect this, but the Iraqis live this. Today see this reality for yourself through the eyes of an Iraqi citizen. Read the post entitled "Lynchings and Holy Wars" on the blog Healing Iraq. See man’s inhumanity to man and ask yourself if you believe that Iraq is not already over the waterfall.
Today, I grieve for Iraq, I grieve for her people and I grieve for her children.
I leave you with the words that stirred Hemingway. A meditation by John Donne:
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated…As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness…No man is an island, entire of itself…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Thank you for your post.
Well done Mash. I wote the other day about our invasive nature as a country, well GW’s nature:
“How can we prop these governments up in front of their society (Arabs, Muslims, etc,) and tell them that they look just fine in Levi’s and Stetson’s? It is no more our place in that, than it is our place to be letting our Sons and Daughters die in a strange land for beliefs that are not embraced by those that we have come to “save”. What if Billy Graham knocked on your door tonight and said he was here to “save” you? Or if the “Supremes” showed up at the clinic and said they were there to “save”you?”
And I cry for the Sons and Daughters of both nations.
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Paul Jordan Said:
‘It is no more our place in that, than it is our place to be letting our Sons and Daughters die in a strange land for beliefs that are not embraced by those that we have come to “save”.’
The evangelical undertones in our decision to invade Iraq has not been covered well. Ultimately, this need to “save” them may turn out to be the real reason in the President’s mind for invading.
I suspect that when the President and his cronies reflect on how the invasion and domination of Iraq is (to be
seen and portrayed as )a salutary one, this is first and foremost a means by which they escape the otherwise obvious character of their enterprise–predatory, and acquisitive.
In other moments they understand that their notions of “victory” in Iraq and “freedom” for the Iraqi people imply an outcome which results in the complete subjugation of Iraq’s people and politics to the geopolitical interests of
the little oligarchy of globalisation-obsessed technocrats who have a grip on the US governmental apparatus.
For Bush and Cheney, the use of the term “democracy” is purely incantatory. Apart from its value as a shiny trinket with which to disract and dazzle politically unsophisticated Americans, they have no use for the term “democracy”.