Wednesday, May 05, 2004
I'd like to start this off by saying I don't enjoy talking about this, but if I don't write some of this out, I'm going to go nuts.
A guy from my town, a soldier, was killed in a non-combat related accident the other day in Afghanistan. I'm not going to mention his name because what I'm about to say could upset people. Now the local media is all over my little home town and talking about this death and how it affects everyone. I don't remember him, though from his age, he must have graduated only a year ahead of me. I'm sure, like many future soldiers, that he was 'sorta quiet', came from a lower-middle class home and was a 'good guy' who 'stayed out of trouble'. They say he's left behind a wife and two children, I feel terrible about this, as I'm sure everyone does. That's not the point.
In six weeks, no one but his family and those close to him will remember.
Last week a former NFL 'star' died. Suddenly, he's the most 'heroic' casualty of the action. He'll probably get all kinds of praise for the rest of the year and will, most likely, go down as one of the 'important' casualties of the war, in history books. Now, I'm not saying that his efforts weren't heroic in and of themselves. He was indeed a hero. I've read articles on his courageous decision to leave fame and fortune go and join his brother in the armed services. But why is it that he's more heroic than this soon-to-be nameless guy from my town? Is it just because he gave up wealth--the riches that other people never get the chance to be offered? Is heroism now defined by class, too? (I say 'now,' though I know it's not new).
We call all of the people who died in combat (and even those who died in accidents, like the young man from my town) 'heroes,' but somehow, when it's a rich, white, famous person who dies, they're MORE heroic. Now, It's one thing when the Media does something like this. That's the way they operate. The problem is that we, as Americans, play along with it. What gives? Are we so duped as a country that we think that if we're not rich, white and famous that we're nothing? Why is it that the people that die for the safety of the richest are always the poorest? I have too many questions today, but that's only the beginning of my problems with this whole thing. There is something more that bothers me.
At last count, something like 760 coalition soldiers have died in Iraq (with nearly half of the fatalities occurring after Sadam Hussein's capture), I'm not sure how many have died in Afghanistan, but the numbers are suggest that close to a thousand, in total, have died in one of the two takeovers (Afghanistan and Iraq) since the first invasion. I'm not going to harp on Bush--I'm done harping about him. The action was taken, the action happened, and there's nothing that we can do to retroactively stop it. What I will harp on, though, is the exit strategy of all of this. Whatever it is, I can not believe it's effectively laid out. This whole June 30th thing? I don't think that all of what's escalating in Iraq is going to allow us to leave that simply. We're doing so much fighting and defending our alleged peace-keeping efforts at this point, that we can't even properly begin the re-building efforts of infrastructure--let alone government.
But If we just up and left now, that would be even worse than staying. We've got Iraq like a bruised, beaten child in a corner. We may be trying to help, and our efforts MAY be well intentioned, but Iraq's people are scared, hurt, angry and don't know what they can do to fix the imbalance, that, to many of them, we've imposed. To just go in, blow shit up and then leave is probably the most dangerous thing we could do. Peoples' lives were destroyed by our bombardment and invasion. Civilians, something like 10,000, have been killed--all of whom have families, very ANGRY families. Certainly Sadam was a bad ruler, and certainly he was a tyrant, but are we so arrogant that we can go in, irrevocably maim millions of peoples' lives (most of the bombing occurred in major cities and 75% of Iraq's population is urban), and then just leave, thinking 'we did our part?'
There is a bigger problem with thinking that we can just leave now. We've gone in and put out what our president and his administration had deemed a fire, but there is still a bed of coals that we have been quietly stoking the entire time. Our exit strategy looks more like a bullet's than anything at this point: we went in with 'surgical strikes' and now we're leaving a gaping hole as we exit a country whose people we've killed, whose leaders (albeit tyrants) we've ousted, whose homes we've destroyed and whose hope we've only marginally brought back--and for what? Oil profits? Even if all of this has been to ensure the US' oil interests and to make daddy Bush richer, you'd think that we would be a little cleaner than what's happening now. There isn't a clear plan to install any form of real government into Iraq. There has been no global agreement on what should be done in terms of the mess we've made. Further, it doesn't appear that our leadership knows where to go from here. I don't think they even know what's going to tip the scales.
What happens when the number of deaths in Iraq succeeds the numbers killed at the World Trade Center? Are we going to finally say 'enough' then? And when we finally DO leave, how is this administration going to deal with the power vacuum it's created with the forced overturning of the leader of an already seething country? Lastly, and most important to me, how are we going to get our kids out of there without further damaging that delicate power structure?
The people that are dying over there, unlike the 35 year old action stars that will be portraying them in movies years from now, are young. They're scrawny kids who, often, are just trying to find some structure or a way to pay for college. At the bottom of our society is a group of people so starved for upward mobility that they have to take whatever outs this system gives them. The most obvious and tantalizing is to some is enlistment. The heroic thing they did was not to try to 'save our country' from unnamed evils, or to spread our perverted notion of democracy--or even dying in battle. Their heroism was trying to better their lives. All political views aside, I want them home--so they can do that.
The problem is, though, that if we just bring them back, might we have created a bigger monster in Iraq and Afghanistan--and further the whole middle east--than what was there?
A guy from my town, a soldier, was killed in a non-combat related accident the other day in Afghanistan. I'm not going to mention his name because what I'm about to say could upset people. Now the local media is all over my little home town and talking about this death and how it affects everyone. I don't remember him, though from his age, he must have graduated only a year ahead of me. I'm sure, like many future soldiers, that he was 'sorta quiet', came from a lower-middle class home and was a 'good guy' who 'stayed out of trouble'. They say he's left behind a wife and two children, I feel terrible about this, as I'm sure everyone does. That's not the point.
In six weeks, no one but his family and those close to him will remember.
Last week a former NFL 'star' died. Suddenly, he's the most 'heroic' casualty of the action. He'll probably get all kinds of praise for the rest of the year and will, most likely, go down as one of the 'important' casualties of the war, in history books. Now, I'm not saying that his efforts weren't heroic in and of themselves. He was indeed a hero. I've read articles on his courageous decision to leave fame and fortune go and join his brother in the armed services. But why is it that he's more heroic than this soon-to-be nameless guy from my town? Is it just because he gave up wealth--the riches that other people never get the chance to be offered? Is heroism now defined by class, too? (I say 'now,' though I know it's not new).
We call all of the people who died in combat (and even those who died in accidents, like the young man from my town) 'heroes,' but somehow, when it's a rich, white, famous person who dies, they're MORE heroic. Now, It's one thing when the Media does something like this. That's the way they operate. The problem is that we, as Americans, play along with it. What gives? Are we so duped as a country that we think that if we're not rich, white and famous that we're nothing? Why is it that the people that die for the safety of the richest are always the poorest? I have too many questions today, but that's only the beginning of my problems with this whole thing. There is something more that bothers me.
At last count, something like 760 coalition soldiers have died in Iraq (with nearly half of the fatalities occurring after Sadam Hussein's capture), I'm not sure how many have died in Afghanistan, but the numbers are suggest that close to a thousand, in total, have died in one of the two takeovers (Afghanistan and Iraq) since the first invasion. I'm not going to harp on Bush--I'm done harping about him. The action was taken, the action happened, and there's nothing that we can do to retroactively stop it. What I will harp on, though, is the exit strategy of all of this. Whatever it is, I can not believe it's effectively laid out. This whole June 30th thing? I don't think that all of what's escalating in Iraq is going to allow us to leave that simply. We're doing so much fighting and defending our alleged peace-keeping efforts at this point, that we can't even properly begin the re-building efforts of infrastructure--let alone government.
But If we just up and left now, that would be even worse than staying. We've got Iraq like a bruised, beaten child in a corner. We may be trying to help, and our efforts MAY be well intentioned, but Iraq's people are scared, hurt, angry and don't know what they can do to fix the imbalance, that, to many of them, we've imposed. To just go in, blow shit up and then leave is probably the most dangerous thing we could do. Peoples' lives were destroyed by our bombardment and invasion. Civilians, something like 10,000, have been killed--all of whom have families, very ANGRY families. Certainly Sadam was a bad ruler, and certainly he was a tyrant, but are we so arrogant that we can go in, irrevocably maim millions of peoples' lives (most of the bombing occurred in major cities and 75% of Iraq's population is urban), and then just leave, thinking 'we did our part?'
There is a bigger problem with thinking that we can just leave now. We've gone in and put out what our president and his administration had deemed a fire, but there is still a bed of coals that we have been quietly stoking the entire time. Our exit strategy looks more like a bullet's than anything at this point: we went in with 'surgical strikes' and now we're leaving a gaping hole as we exit a country whose people we've killed, whose leaders (albeit tyrants) we've ousted, whose homes we've destroyed and whose hope we've only marginally brought back--and for what? Oil profits? Even if all of this has been to ensure the US' oil interests and to make daddy Bush richer, you'd think that we would be a little cleaner than what's happening now. There isn't a clear plan to install any form of real government into Iraq. There has been no global agreement on what should be done in terms of the mess we've made. Further, it doesn't appear that our leadership knows where to go from here. I don't think they even know what's going to tip the scales.
What happens when the number of deaths in Iraq succeeds the numbers killed at the World Trade Center? Are we going to finally say 'enough' then? And when we finally DO leave, how is this administration going to deal with the power vacuum it's created with the forced overturning of the leader of an already seething country? Lastly, and most important to me, how are we going to get our kids out of there without further damaging that delicate power structure?
The people that are dying over there, unlike the 35 year old action stars that will be portraying them in movies years from now, are young. They're scrawny kids who, often, are just trying to find some structure or a way to pay for college. At the bottom of our society is a group of people so starved for upward mobility that they have to take whatever outs this system gives them. The most obvious and tantalizing is to some is enlistment. The heroic thing they did was not to try to 'save our country' from unnamed evils, or to spread our perverted notion of democracy--or even dying in battle. Their heroism was trying to better their lives. All political views aside, I want them home--so they can do that.
The problem is, though, that if we just bring them back, might we have created a bigger monster in Iraq and Afghanistan--and further the whole middle east--than what was there?
