anniversary 4th - I monster

Written a few years back, before the 2nd aniversary of the two month war

I, monster

Watching the American news on sbs, I see something terrible and deeply ugly, and its me.

Nightly they parade a silent brigade of the dead, the photos of US soldiers killed in Iraq as their names and photos are released by the military, and as I gaze over the myriad faces, a sense of righteous pleasure falls upon my soul. The more names, the greater the feeling.

By the end of the American phase of the Vietnam war nearly 200 US soldiers were dying per week, it had taken over ten years of constant warfare to rise to such numbers, in the first years of involvement in that civil war, the number of dead was below that currently occuring in Iraq. Before we and our allies departed, eight hundred deaths a month for over five years with not a single sideways step towards peace in reality, and rarely a consideration of the thousands of Vietnamese civilian dead, unless it was to underscore the weakness of the “insurgency” through the infamous body count. What is the weight in body bags a nation can bear before it wakes and seeks a new way to carry a burden. Is it lessened when the cause is one mans political folly, a war of choice, not in any way necessity, no matter what may now tumble out on the shifting sands of rationale.

I wait for that moment when we are swept into the maelstrom of grief, when our first soldier is struck down by the freedom fighters of Babylon, and I shall experience that same emotion. Australia has so far had it easy, a token force, forgotten, neglected by the world as part of the ongoing occupying force, patrolling the calmer streets, safe behind the sturdy barricades of Baghdad airport, secure in the off country bases training the puppet army to put down its own restive populace. We declared that we were no longer responsible for anything which occurrs within the borders, that we were not there as occupiers, as peace keepers, as anything, let alone a source of morality to the poorly trained, over weaponed, US military machine set upon the peoples of Iraq. We are cowards of the highest order.

I feel a sense of rejoice with the rising toll of American dead mainly because it is the only real pressure that preys upon the mind of the american populace. A debt burden which will cripple a dozen future generations doesn't seem to faze them, coupled with the nations most irresponsible tax cuts since the Regan years, fueling the worlds bond markets and placing the crumbling infrastructure of the solitary super power on a one track super train to oblivion (ok, i can argue on this one, but i am allowed poetic license, I’ve earned the crumpled yellowing sheath, so i might as well get some use out of it).

Lessons in history are easy to come by, and when paired with bad hollywood, perpetually fatal. Black Hawk Down is the simplified morality tale of 18 american deaths in somalia, yet another US political and military failure, however the lesson that was taught to the post vietnam syndrome generation, was that the excursion was failure due to the government fear of the consequences of war, death, the death of ones own countrymen. Accusations of foreign policy cowardice on the part of the US has led to the ability of the voters to absorb a hundred times more casualties in an equally futile expression of internal politics played out upon a foreign soil. Many still believe Iraq was behind the world trade centre attack. Many still believe it was the media which cost them the vietnam war, no matter what the reality of the situation, poor history combined with unquestioning patriotism is a sure fire hit movie, not good policy.And so i feel pleasure at anothers suffering, knowing that eventually that suffering of the other will become unbearable and lead to the end of a vast imperial experiment. Its just a matter of waiting until the scales, balanced in torn flesh, tip. So does that mean i, an atheist who despises fundamentalists of all colours, am for the fundamentalist forces within Iraq, yes and no, and in there is my pain, my hypocrisy.

I support the freedom fighters of iraq, the nationalists who are fighting to free themselves of the yoke of being occupied by an imperial adventure brought to you by the fox network and the craven vitality of politicians, using the deaths of innocent iraqis caught in the cross fire, to bolster their ideological credentials before the polls. But those same freedom fighters are themselves governed by a crude regime of islamic fundamentalism, or so i am led to believe by our curiously obsequious, generously accepting media. Yet each snippet of information i am given from the lips of the "insurgents", "terrorists" and "evildoers" or "baathist remnants" is veiled as much in the rhetoric of nationalism as it is in islamic fundamentalism, leading me to the conclusion that the principle desire is simply self determination, more than the wish to impose monotheism upon a non compliant people. Polls showing that only 2% of the iraqis see our forces as liberators, while over 60% would welcome the instant withdrawal of all foreign forces, no matter what the outcome, strengthen this thought.

A year ago, the mere mentioning of a civil war within iraq, was seen as tantamount to talking treason, now it is used as a justification for our hanging on till the bitter end. Prior to the invasion, one of the scenarios scornfully rebuked in justifying our indecent rush to war, was the fear of civil war, the complete disintegration of the country. The break away of the kurds, and then an invasion of northern iraq by the turks in an attempt to quell internal kurdish dissent, of shia against sunni, of kurds against muslim, of sunni against shia, all backed by sympathetic neighbors turning their own hands at macro politics 101 for the mid east.

There has never been a civil war within iraq, despite it being as cobbled together by the colonial powers, as most other arab nations were after W.W.1. Now our aim is to provide the Iraq with a strong man to bind the country together beneath his/her iron fist, much like Saddam, only with better taste than to slaughter his own people in numbers that can be categorised under the banner headline "massacre" on CNN. Though as our strong allies in the war on terror, Russia have shown us in Chechnia, this can be an awful lot of mass graves before anyone broadcasts footage of the newly dug earth seeping a strange red oooze.

But for any complexities, real and imagined, reigning in that climate of perpetual turmoil, i am drawn back to my desire to see death, knowing that it is the ultimate answer to the equation, knowing that a thousand iraqi deaths will not equal one australian death in determining our role in this charade of decency, knowing that 10, 000 american deaths may equate to an answer, and knowing that 50, 000 iraqi deaths will barely register in the fine print running beneath the headlines on Fox.

We are demanding democracy of an enemy we proclaim as our joyful friend through force of arms, somehow pretending we are not fighting for peace through the fog of history as distorted as the intelligence we used to justify embracing the bullet clearing a pathway to a poisoned ballot box.

Cheny rules Bush rules John Negroponti rules Allawi rules the Green Zone.

Who rules Iraq?

The lottery of the dead.

Screw Flanders.