On one/fifteen/oh three worldwide demonstrations were dismissed by the Bush Administration as "focus groups", assisted by US corporate media "reporting", mindlessly supporting the objectives of The Regime, since objectivity is purported to meet with reprisal which threatens the survival of journalistic careers.
Beheadings and kidnappings serve to deter reporters and worldwide aid organizations enabling "private military corporations" like Bechtel and Halliburton to bear "the White Man's Burden" by continuing to aid the occupation, subjugation and devastation of Iraq with a free hand at dismantling the country's infrastructure and siphoning off all the profit they can by using foreign workers as Iraqi unemployment stands at seventy per cent reminiscent of vampire corporations using job exportation to bring Americans workers to groveling subsistence.
Engineers and doctors drive their cars as taxis to feed their families. The costs of war include massacres and slaughter, bullet-riddled mosques with blood stained carpets, children dead, mass graves of innocents. The inextinguishable burning of white phosphorous. Shattered hospitals, families living in the streets, dead and rotted bodies being eaten by cats and dogs for two weeks while the military denied relief teams access to Fallujah's streets. The underestimated death toll, bodies tossed in the Euphrates, Abu Ghraib. Mass execution solutions, neighborhoods bombed to rubble, entire families incinerated in houses where they huddled. Whole towns blown completely out of this world. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Basic service and distribution systems are nowhere near repaired, so people die from hunger, water borne diseases and inadequate health care. And as soldiers are attacked over 100 times in 24 hours, there are many more deaths as a result of fright-triggered random gunfire.
The military killing of so many civilians stems from the fact that soldiers are trying to maintain an untenable position, fighting a guerilla war while the administration ignores that "insurgents" enjoy massive support from infuriated people who remember loving someone who's died so there's no wonder there's anger that shoots from their eyes at US military patrols as they go rumbling by or that there's dancing and cheering and revenge churning as G.I.s die screaming and writhing and burning in insurgent-created military vehicle funeral pyres as if the pain could be ameliorated by cleansing with fire.
These attacks can come from anywhere at any time and be launched by anyone. Didn't we do this in Viet Nam? Is this a re-run?! And we have four supersized, permanent military bases there. I'm stunned! Where the Hell did they come from?! Too much of this war is conducted in secrecy. This is all too deja familiar for me.
Iraqi oil reserves were supposed to support both the war and reconstruction, but Iraq's oil's been removed from world markets driving the price of oil upward. Iraq is importing ALL of its gas and has miles-long fill-up lines. Isn't that funny? Just who benefits from attacks on Iraq's oil infrastructure? Follow the money.
(And remember that 28-page omission in the report of the 9/11 commission?)
Now we're damned if we do and damned if we don't. Whether we stay with the Iraqis or leave them alone. More troops will speed up the spiral of engagement. Withdrawal may enable civil war on top the present devastation.
Most of the people in every other country on the face of the Earth oppose America's agenda in Iraq, but for what it's worth, most Americans don't know any Muslims but may hate them with such a ferocity they can't get too worked up about a few Polaroid picture atrocities.
- Vi Ransel
Vi's works appear widely both in print and online. She conducts Poetry Workshops and gives readings in Central New York. Her latest chapbook is "Sine Qua Non Antiques (an Arcanum of History, Geography and Treachery).
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