Iraq and Shelley
The Iraq War is over. Or, so we are informed. The BBC:
Obama speech at Fort Bragg marks end of Iraq war
US President Barack Obama has marked the end of the Iraq war with a speech at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, telling troops, “welcome home!”
His address paid tribute to the soldiers who served in the conflict – both those who died and veterans who returned home after long tours of duty.
More than 200 soldiers based at Fort Bragg died over the course of the nearly nine-year war.
The final US soldiers are expected to leave Iraq within days.
The last combat troops departed in August 2010….
But, ‘midst the ticker-tape parades, the wild festivities and American celebration for a war that never should have been fought, that was never supposed to cost us anything, was supposed to be “greeted with flowers” according to a high-ranking Darth Vader, and all the rest, I can only think of Shelley:
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said—‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’– Percy Bysshe Shelley
But I am sure that’s entirely too cynical. All that remains are those gravestones with that Official Logo™.
Hoorah.
Courage.
6 Responses to “Iraq and Shelley”
War is an enemy of life. Why is it not also banned?
We’ve been against it for millennia, but it still happens with shocking regularity. We’re against teenage sex, too, but that happens just as frequently.
Maybe they’re both related on some level.
War is banned; it’s just that war does not take two sides. The UN bans war. Enforcing the ban is the real difficulty.
Too many people forget that it does not take two sides to cause conflict; it takes only one side who is unreasonable and another side that does not wish to die (or be enslaved).
A good example of this is the Korean War. Although I love the series, “MASH”, I always wanted to shout out whenever one of the characters suggested that all that was needed to stop the fighting was for the US to pull out (or surrender, I guess). In the case of the Iraq war (version II, version I was justified) we did not need to go in at that time, but it was still not just a case of, “Leave and it’s over”. In fact, we may find out that it is still not over (at least as far as Iraqi citizens are concerned).
War is terrible; war is hell; war is a failure of diplomacy (no matter what Bismark may think). Never the less, war is likely inevitable whenever there is a shortage of resources and people mean enough to try to corner those resources by force.
In 2002, I suggested that we had bumbled into the old Uncle Remus story of “Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby.”
Thus far, my opinion hasn’t been changed by the facts.
The problem about “freeing” a people is that sooner or later, you’ve actually got to let them be free, whether you agree or not. Otherwise, it’s just colonialism and occupation.
They don’t need us to act as the training wheels on their bicycles, a point reinforced by the SELFSAME IDJITS who thought the war was a good idea 4400 dead Americans and 1 trillion dollars ago are STILL screaming that we need to be in there.
Seriously, when you’ve been TOTALLY WRONG for almost NINE years, why would anyone think you suddenly became “right”?
Just throw us into the briar patch and let’s be done with it.
And yes, I can just about guarantee that the outcome isn’t going to please us, but, like Gitmo, the enterprise was already an offense against any conception of universal human rights, sovereignty, self-determination and the forfeited lives of 100,000 plus Iraqis who were NOT Saddam Hussein, and another 2 million refugees who were, again, NOT Saddam Hussein.
We have committed a grave crime, and all the BS rationalizations in the world won’t change that, nor will remaining indefinitely alter the whirlwind we’re eventually going to reap.
A kid whose parents were killed by US soldiers isn’t going to suddenly ‘forgive and forget’ nor NOT nurse a grudge for a very long time.
Leaving is the right thing to do; absent the possibility that we never went in.
“We have committed a grave crime, and all the BS rationalizations in the world won’t change that”
Exactly.
Rcoutme-
M*A*S*H was a synonym for the Vietnam war. In reality, the show had nothing to do with Korea. Alan Alda was allowed a lot of political adlibbing. Maybe that’s why he didn’t get a lot of quality work after.