Then the war. My son had just turned three years old when the United States shocked, awed, and invaded Iraq. There were photographs from the war all over The Internet but I didn’t want to look at them. I reluctantly clicked on a link and the first picture I saw was of a little boy, about my son’s age, dead in the rubble with his skull hollowed out. He wasn’t killed by a bus. A safe didn’t fall on him. He didn’t have cancer or any other disease. It wasn’t a terrible accident. He was dead because The United States broke into the country illegally, walked up to this little kid, and blew his brains out of the top of his skull.
Then we found out about the torture prisons.
Then in 2006 The Lancet, the world's leading general medical journal, told us over 650,000 civilian deaths had occurred as a result of the Iraq war.
No matter how many horrible things we learned that our country did … there are always more horrible truths to be uncovered.
The Mỹ Lai Massacre, the mass murder of 504 unarmed civilians in South Vietnam by U.S. forces, took place on March 16, 1968. Most of the victims were women, children, infants, and the elderly. Seymour Hersh broke the story 20 months later on November 12, 1969. The story was horrifying. The pictures of the dead transcended horror. How could anyone look upon the images of bullet torn bodies of women, children, and babies, all dead in a ditch, murdered by American soldiers, and not be fundamentally changed by them? Major Colin Powell led the investigation and reported, "In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between Americal Division soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent." We were told the Mỹ Lai Massacre was an aberration carried out by a few “bad apples.”
Then we found out more.
Author Nick Turse wrote, “In May 1970, a sergeant who participated in Operation Speedy Express wrote a confidential letter to then Army Chief of Staff Westmoreland describing civilian killings on the scale of the massacre occurring as "a My Lay each month for over a year" during 1968–1969. Two other letters to this effect from enlisted soldiers to military leaders in 1971 … describe routine civilian killings as a policy of population pacification.”
In Turse’s book about the history of U.S. war crimes in Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves, he states, “No one will ever know how many U.S.-perpetrated massacres took place in Vietnam. Nor how many hamlets were decimated by bombings. Nor the number of villages laid to waste by artillery strikes. Nor will there ever be an accurate count of the people psychologically injured, maimed or killed.”
Brian DaPalma’s 1989 film, Casualties of War, was based on the true story of American soldiers kidnapping, raping, and murdering a Vietnamese girl. Eighteen years later he made Redacted, based upon the Mahmudiyah killings, the gang-rape and killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the murder of her family by United States Army soldiers. The names of the wars change, separated by decades and thousands of miles, but the same horrific atrocities are re-enacted over and over again … by Americans psychopaths in uniform under the command of American psychopaths in office.
On April 30th 1975 the last U.S. Marines evacuated the embassy in Saigon by helicopter. Thirty-eight years later we’re still finding out new horrors about what our soldiers did during that godawful war. In the years to come what will we find out that will make what we now know about the Iraq war pale in comparison?
The American public has a huge capacity for accepting monstrous behavior. Americans have grown tolerant of crimes committed by our government that in years past convened the Nuremberg trials. Our morally bankrupt corporatists, politicians, and journalists, point their fingers at Hitler and the Nazis to distract us from the reflection they see in their own mirrors. The World's Longest Holocaust In The History Of Mankind took place in this country. Tens of millions of Native Americans were slaughtered, yet an American child can go through 12 years of public schooling and not learn a fraction of what really happened.
And now the calendar says it’s been 10 years since our country invaded and conquered Iraq. It’s an anniversary that demands some sort of recognition so our politicians and pundit-crats have asked us, “Was the Iraq War worth it?”
What an insanely stupid question. At dissenter.firedoglake.com Kevin Gosztola, wrote, “…Numerous headlines for news stories or op-eds reflecting on the ten-year anniversary are framed in terms of costs versus benefits for America.”
Do these sub-humans want us to file away the Iraq War in our memory banks as if an eight year long crime against humanity was some kind of bad investment!!?? What sort of morally degenerate cretin looks upon the dead, the wounded, and the mentally scarred, and asks if the war was “worth it?” Anyone who attempts to gloss over what the Bush-Cheney regime did, what the Republicans and Democrats did, what our media did, what our soldiers and mercenaries did, and turn it into a cost analysis on some effing spreadsheet somewhere is a monster.
Barack Obama spent two paragraphs on the 10th Anniversary of the war.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/03/19/statement-president-10th-anniversary-iraq-war
He honored the American dead and wounded. He honored the families of the American dead and wounded. But he never talked about what we did to the people of Iraq. He didn’t talk about the 1 million Iraqi dead, the hundreds of thousands wounded, or the millions of displaced Iraqis. He didn’t talk about what we as a nation actually did to those people for eight goddamned years.
Today in Baghdad a series of car bombs and roadside blasts killed more than 30 people and wounded 80 more. The troops are gone from Iraq except for a small number under US embassy authority. Iraqis suffer chronic shortages of water and electricity as sewage collects in the streets but thousands of mercenaries a.k.a. “private contractors” along with some of the largest western oil companies, ExxonMobil, BP and Shell, remain.
Mission Accomplished.