© Merle Harton, Jr. | About | XML/RSS

Like Germans after the Holocaust

The news today that US forces in Iraq shot and killed a pregnant woman being driven by her husband to the hospital to deliver their baby leaves me with those complex, uncomfortable feelings we must get when being held down, struggling, writhing, in the twin shadows of disbelief and foreboding.¹

There is worse thought to think here: we, the American people, are together responsible for this. We are to blame. It is our collective guilt. As much as the Busheviks want to grow Democracy, like Johnny Appleseeds wandering resolutely around this weed-strewn earthly sphere, we must still face the fact that we are not merely a Democracy but a Republic. As a Republic, we voted these people into federal office; we re-elected these people; we pay for their evil deeds with our tax dollars; we allow our representatives, whom we also elected, to serve as enablers for these rulers now totally sotted on the liquor of fermented power, corporate hegemony, racism, misanthropy, and unspent political capital.

1.  "Two women, one pregnant, were killed by US troops on the way to the hospital in the central Iraqi city of Samarra when their car mistakenly took a road restricted to military traffic, police said. / Nabiha Mohammed Jassim, 35, was being rushed to the central Samarra hospital to give birth in the company of her cousin Saliha Hamad Hassan al-Aswadi, and driven by her brother when the two women were shot dead by US soldiers." See AFP, AP, May 31, 2006. And this seems not to have an end: In 2003 US troops killed 5 women and 5 children in a similar fashion at a checkpoint in central Iraq (Washington Post, Common Dreams News Center, March 31, 2003); in 2005 "five members of an Iraqi family were killed when US forces opened fire on their vehicle outside a military base near the city of Baquba" (BBC News, November 21, 2005). There are many other such news stories.

Related Tags: Bush administration, Iraq, Jassim, Samarra

Pay no attention to those people behind the curtain

I happened to be half-listening to a Christian(ism) show on television and there were three of them praying for our troops in Iraq and at the same time perpetuating the hideous myth that the blood-bath going on there is somehow related to the enduring freedom of Americans here in the US.

Today the Washington Post reports that the US military is going to redeploy troops from Kuwait to the western province of Anbar, thereby increasing the US military presence in Iraq. Also in the Washington Post today is a poignant story on the separation wall still being constructed in the secular nation called Israel.

Perhaps soon we will finally have our pair of tragedies for the 21st century. In the one, in Israel, a ghetto for the Palestinian people; in the other, in Iraq, after the slaughter of the Iraqi people is finished, a four-mile Emerald City where Crusaders and local government officials alike can move about freely and safely in the shadow of the new 104-acre American embassy.