Where is the Outrage?
Keith Hazelton
April 19, 2007
“Plan B is to make Plan A work,” in Iraq according to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Peter Pace, as detailed in a recent TomDispatch.com post, twistedly reminiscent of comedian George Carlin's two-step plan to become a millionaire: “First, get a million dollars...”
No doubt Plans C through Z also will be to make Plan A – “victory” – succeed in Iraq. Victory, however, is a too strong word for what has become today only a vague and nebulous concept, unlike the conclusion of the two World Wars of the last century.
Government architects of this carnage now secretly must define victory as the completion and garrisoning of at least four major, permanent military bases in Iraq and a coordinating Pentagon-like “embassy” compound within Baghdad's Green Zone, the ultimate gated community, which is to be staffed by many thousands and equipped with its own water and electricity systems and its own anti-missile defenses.
Outside this fortified embassy compound, this ultimate symbol of imperial power, and away from the Green Zone, ordinary Iraqis try only to survive each day without being exploded into fragments of bone and globs of fleshy goo or roasted alive sitting in a bus as they venture forth and return home to unpredictable, at best, water and electricity services.
(No wonder presidential candidate Senator John McCain looked so uncomfortable strolling through Baghdad's Shorja marketplace last month, despite his bullet-proof vest, 100-soldier armed escort and assault-helicopter oversight.)
In a week that began in America with the horrific murders of students and faculty at Virginia Tech, leaving 33 dead including the mentally disturbed gunman who took his own life, the civilian body count in Iraq on that Monday, April 18th was more than double at 69.
The next day 104 died in Iraq and Wednesday 312 (nearly 200 in Sadriyah market alone), rounding out a week in which 839 Iraqi civilians were senselessly murdered and a similar number injured as they went about their everyday lives, much as the 32 VT victims were attending to their mostly ordinary lives on anything but just another Monday in Blacksburg.
As near as anyone can determine, there were no stadium-filled memorial services nor candle-lit rallies for those 839 dead, nor for the possibly more than 600,000 other men, women and children murdered in Iraq since March 19, 2003.
We rightly are outraged by the senseless killing in Blacksburg Monday. But where is the outrage over Iraqi deaths? Where is their memorial service?
We have – America has – unleashed these angels of death in the Middle East, and no amount of escalations, surges, “plus-ups,” extended rotations or wishful thinking may contain them in the future. No amount of fighting them “over there” may in the future prevent us fighting them “over here” as a consequence of our departure from rational thinking.
It is said the Nixon administration in 1969 considered an escalation of the Vietnam war that would deploy many more troops and include the use of nuclear weapons, but that such plans were dismissed in fear of protest reactions at home that could become so violent America's depleted military would be unable to contain it.
Apparently the current White House administration, despite a similarly stretched military, harbors no such fears.
What do I know? Send me an email. --Keith Hazelton
No doubt Plans C through Z also will be to make Plan A – “victory” – succeed in Iraq. Victory, however, is a too strong word for what has become today only a vague and nebulous concept, unlike the conclusion of the two World Wars of the last century.
Government architects of this carnage now secretly must define victory as the completion and garrisoning of at least four major, permanent military bases in Iraq and a coordinating Pentagon-like “embassy” compound within Baghdad's Green Zone, the ultimate gated community, which is to be staffed by many thousands and equipped with its own water and electricity systems and its own anti-missile defenses.
Outside this fortified embassy compound, this ultimate symbol of imperial power, and away from the Green Zone, ordinary Iraqis try only to survive each day without being exploded into fragments of bone and globs of fleshy goo or roasted alive sitting in a bus as they venture forth and return home to unpredictable, at best, water and electricity services.
(No wonder presidential candidate Senator John McCain looked so uncomfortable strolling through Baghdad's Shorja marketplace last month, despite his bullet-proof vest, 100-soldier armed escort and assault-helicopter oversight.)
In a week that began in America with the horrific murders of students and faculty at Virginia Tech, leaving 33 dead including the mentally disturbed gunman who took his own life, the civilian body count in Iraq on that Monday, April 18th was more than double at 69.
The next day 104 died in Iraq and Wednesday 312 (nearly 200 in Sadriyah market alone), rounding out a week in which 839 Iraqi civilians were senselessly murdered and a similar number injured as they went about their everyday lives, much as the 32 VT victims were attending to their mostly ordinary lives on anything but just another Monday in Blacksburg.
As near as anyone can determine, there were no stadium-filled memorial services nor candle-lit rallies for those 839 dead, nor for the possibly more than 600,000 other men, women and children murdered in Iraq since March 19, 2003.
We rightly are outraged by the senseless killing in Blacksburg Monday. But where is the outrage over Iraqi deaths? Where is their memorial service?
We have – America has – unleashed these angels of death in the Middle East, and no amount of escalations, surges, “plus-ups,” extended rotations or wishful thinking may contain them in the future. No amount of fighting them “over there” may in the future prevent us fighting them “over here” as a consequence of our departure from rational thinking.
It is said the Nixon administration in 1969 considered an escalation of the Vietnam war that would deploy many more troops and include the use of nuclear weapons, but that such plans were dismissed in fear of protest reactions at home that could become so violent America's depleted military would be unable to contain it.
Apparently the current White House administration, despite a similarly stretched military, harbors no such fears.
What do I know? Send me an email. --Keith Hazelton
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