roadkill

So here's a quote from terry p.: You can't live other people's lives for them. A quote especially appriopriate in relation to the Iraq "war" (can it really be a war when one side basically swats the other? I don't know.)

I watch all the terrible things happening - to "us" and to "them," although they've got plenty of "us" and we've got plenty of "them." Don't think I feel any of them are excusable. The latest-dead people being dragged through the streets? It's going to be used by the American Right to justify all the people dead by the hands of our current administration (or, since we permitted their control and their actions, us) and it's going to be used by the left to justify bashing Bush, and five people will be dead and nobody will remember their names or why they were there or, you know, the little bitching noises they made in the dead of night. They'll become a political football, and nobody will care why they were killed. Nobody will interview the Iraqis who killed them. They were videotaped, eh? The cameraperson didn't bother getting involved. He just taped. He was News. Life wasn't his business, or sanity. You've got to admire the single-minded idiocy of it.

That we accept the motive of "removing Saddam Hussein" as valid shows how stupid and forgetful we are. No country needs much help when they really want to remove their leader. They do it. Blood, tears, and occasionally badly-spelled magazines are often involved. People die, and the new leader doesn't do anything much different from the old, but people are happy because he's their leader. "That's why they call them revolutions. They always come round again." Pardon the digression. The point here is we went in saying we wanted to kill Saddam and take his weapons, we turned it into something about "freeing Iraq," we told them we were killing them for their own good, we took away their jobs, their relative safety, their water, electricity, and food, and we are somehow surprised when they behave in a less than rational fashion. We didn't remove Saddam Hussein; he kind of left voluntarily and jumped in a hole. We removed pretty much everything else though.

And ten thousand people on their side, several hundred on ours, are dead. Military and civilian alike. The Iraqis never asked for that. Neither did we. How long till someone else more ruthless than Hussyface, but more acceptable to the Bushmen, is put in place? I mean, come on, we all know Saddam was "bad" but we also have to realize we were only seeing the bad shit about him, so we think he's like a thousand times worse. You can do that with anyone. People learn to do that in fucking high school. Grade school, really. And I'm getting pissed off about this because I can't get past the bodies, okay? I can't get past the bodies to the plane everyone on the news seems to be on where it's all Political. Not today. Maybe tomorrow. But not today.

And just for the record? It's everyone's fault.