Sunshine has departed our lives

(MG) Below are excerpts from Professor Juan Cole's blog that recently moved me to take a spiritual journey of memory and of heart for events removed by 24, 38, and 39 years. Professor Cole's prose moved me to a place of ultimate enlightenment, and I now begin to understand why "every time the sky begins to snow, you cry."

It was with a heavy heart that I read that 10 Coalition troops were killed on Monday, 9 of them Americans. The guerrillas who attacked the US outpost also wounded 20 other soldiers, 5 of them seriously.


Militiamen in Basra killed a British soldier.


I'm sad about all this because we won't have round the clock cable television coverage of them, or lower the flag to half mast for them. And although we do not yet know the names of those killed, we know who they are like.

(MG) No more stinging indictment of media and political indifference to our troops' sacrifices has been made than this. The Virgina Tech mass murders have predominated the headlines and cable news cycles recently. "The Media", TELLS us WHAT to think about by the emphasis on what it covers, what it presents, and the attendant time devoted to each story. On the flip side of this album, "The Media" also defines and tells us WHAT NOT to think about.

(MG) It is no accident that what we are asked to NOT think about (by "The Media") and what we are asked to NOT think about by the cheney administration, are one and the same things. If Eisenhower were to give the Cross of Iron speech today, it would be much more than the military-industrial complex that he would warn about. It would be a combination of

military-
industrial-
corporate-
educational-
media-
infotainment-
fundamentalist "Christianity"-
mysogonist-
racist-

complex

(MG) Many more elements and cohorts are clearly working their destructive self-enriching murder, evil and mayhem together, in the name of "democracy" and "American values". I have hopes for the "American People", we usually have the wisdom to see the ultimate folly of our political leaders' ways.

(MG) Sadly, it takes such a long time, and the excitement of wargasms, in the beginnings for the majority opinion to catch up to those who were, from the first, opposed to the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

(MG) This is another example of "The Media" playing their full part in, the patriots' game. Presenting the sock-puppet in command as a dynamic, uniting figure, giving voice to the blow-hards and blackguards who screamed "bloody traitors" at those who dared voice dissent to the invasion, an atmosphere of fear is created - fear to speak out, or, even to discuss the issues.

Come all you young rebels and list while I sing For the love of one’s country is a terrible thing It banishes fear with the speed of a flame And makes us all part of the patriot game My name is O’Hanlon, I’m just gone sixteen My home is in Monaghan, where I was weaned I’ve learned all my life cruel and England to blame And so I’m a part of the patriot game It’s barely two years since I wandered away With the local battalion of the bold I.R.A. I read of our heroes and I wanted the same To play up my part in the patriot game
This island of ours has for long been half free Six counties are under John Bull’s tyranny So I gave up my boyhood to drill and to train To play my own part in the patriot game
And now as I lie here my body all holes I think of those traitors all bargained and sold I wish that my rifle had given the same To those quislings who sold out the patriot game

(MG) I'd be willing to bet everything I own now, or ever will, that in my lifetime, and in my son's lifetime, the anti-war people in America will be on the right, proper and moral side of every conflict into which this nation plummets, at the urgings of those who would wrap themselves in the flag, and hide behind the dead soldier they send to war.
...

Saddam is gone. There was never any threat to the US or UK from Iraq, and there is not now one. What is the mission, for which these young people have given their lives this spring? What do we tell their children about why their daddy is no longer there for them? Is it just Karl Rove's best guess about what will win the next election? Better business for Dick Cheney's golf buddies among the Big Oil CEOs? George W. Bush's cokehead emotional shallowness and inability to admit he ever made a mistake? What?

(MG) What do we tell the children? My high school senior English class was taught by the teacher I most admired. When discussing God Save the Queen by Rudyard Kipling, Mr. Behn accepted my interpretation of the following lines:

Beget you the sons your fathers begot,
And God shall save the queen.

(MG) To me, they rang only of irony, sardonic irony. But then, within my world, my Uncle Jim had been mortally wounded by enemy artillery / mortar fire in Vietnam, and I was not viewing the world through the eyes of the imperialist, nor through the eyes of the nationalist. Our experiences color our perceptions.

(MG) And the great "problem" presented by the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the great "problem" for the American people was that so few of them were directly affected. Also, the TV coverage had that video-game / star wars "feel" to it. We were like unto Luke Skywalker taking out Darth Saddam. I sat in front of the idiot box for hours, in stunned sorrow, because,

(MG) I had seen this thing before. In my lifetime, I had seen war. And I learnt well one of war's costs - it costs the lives of ones you love. My entire generation had seen this thing before. But those born after 1975, when the last U.S. military helicopter air-lifted from the embassy in Saigon, on 1 April, had only seen the "glorious" wars - waged upon Grenada, and waged upon "The Tyrant, Saddam", when, as bush 41 said,

"We've finally kicked the Vietnam Syndrome"

When I was back there dazed by cable TV
Someone put forth the proposition to me
that we can kick the Vietnam Syndrome.

kick the Vietnam Syndrome?
Kick the Vietnam Syndrome?
We CANNOT kick the Vietnam Syndrome

We ask our men and women in uniform to risk their lives, sometimes to sacrifice them, for the security of our nation. But the security of our nation is not in doubt. We ask defense attorneys to defend someone who might be guilty, and prosecuting attorneys to attempt to convict someone who might be innocent, since justice requires a fair trial, and guilt and innocence are seldom clear. In the same way, we sometimes send our military into a war, the justice of which is not clear. They have done their job, the job the American and British publics gave them, uncomplainingly. But if the prosecuting attorney suddenly finds evidence that the defendent is innocent, he has to drop the charges. Iraq is innocent. It isn't a threat to the US. It may now be a threat to itself or its region, because of the civil war. But it and its region will just have to deal with that. And they will deal with it better if we don't keep getting in their way.


That is why the Democratic majority in the House and Senate agreed on a date by which they want US troops out of Iraq. Because enough sunshine has gone out of our lives, enough children are without a parent, enough lives have been blighted, for a mission that no one has been able to define with any clarity.

(MG) And take the magnitude of Americans' losses, our sorrow and suffering, 3,300 troops dead, lives forever snuffed out, young, way too young, 20,000+ troops with severe traumatic losses of limbs, body parts, sanity, take the magnitude of that,


(MG) and try to put yourself in the sandals of an "everyday Iraqi" living in a country in which the invasion has taken close to 1,000,000 lives; another 1,900,000 Iraqis have left the country, another 2,000,000 Iraqis have been displaced from their homes.

(MG) we cannot even begin to measure the sunshine that has gone out of their lives, the number of children without parents, the number of parents without children, the number of school children living with 100 times WORSE than the Virginia Tech shootings everyday, the malnutrition, the dysentery, every Iraqi life has been blighted, and blighted many times over ... but here is the difference ... the Iraqi people have defined the mission with abject clarity,

(MG) "Mom, isn't that what war is always about Castles and Kings?" the then 9-year old son of Anne Bayse asked. Castles and Kings, land/property/wealth and power. Anne's son was 9 then. He's 19 now. He's serving in Iraq, while his mother, an author, gives eyewitness testimony to the apartheid and cruelty she has seen the Israeli defense forces inflict on Muslims and Christians in Jerusalem