I just got done reading this piece written by 7 American soldiers returning from Iraq, including their dismissal of the official Bush administration statements that things are improving over there. In my humble opinion, the linked op-ed article above tells things MUCH closer to the truth than what we'll hear in the papers and the television news.

Lots of valuable diplomatic and military strategic comments in the article, but this one rang the hardest:

"The most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps in bordering countries. Close to two million more are internally displaced and now fill many urban slums. Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and sanitation. "Lucky" Iraqis live in communities barricaded with concrete walls that provide them with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than any sense of security we would consider normal. In an environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act.

Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages. As an Iraqi man told us a few days ago with deep resignation, "We need security, not free food."

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are - an army of occupation - and force our withdrawal."

And I don't want to sound self-centered, but when can WE in America get back to a life of normalcy? When our congress people traded in our civil rights for secret inspections, we didn't want that. When war was declared, and with it a surge in the war against truth (and for propaganda) in media, we didn't want that. When can we have control of our f^cking tax dollars back, so they can go toward health services, infrastructure, and education, instead of war-based activities overseas? We don't want war overseas, we want a country with stability.

In causing the instabilities in Iraq, the Bush administration and their friends have also caused instability in the USA, and probably with trading partners as well. And why is the dollar so weak nowadays?

We loathe what you and your friends have done, George W. Bush. I believe I'm speaking for a LOT of people in the USA, and I believe that its not my job to prove that. Rather, its somebody else's job to try and prove that there could possibly be a majority of people in the USA who would support a destructive agenda such as yours, without the lies and half-truths continually propagated in the media required to support it.

lyrics: "The last thing I need the first thing this morning, is to have you walk out on me." -Willie Nelson

colors: blue

mood: so-so.

chant/prayer/mantra: peace. ad infinitum.


pax hominibus,
joel