hypnocrisy

Ridor paged me yesterday calling me a hypocrite. He said:

Santini, you are hypocrite at its best. Always ready to attack the US Government when it made a mistake, but vanished when the Americans were being mutilated, abused and bombed by others.

I thought this was interesting and wanted to look at it. First off, I didn't vanish. On Thursday, April 1st, I wrote about the bodies of the men who died in Iraq and were maimed and mutiliated by an Iraqi mob. I was really affected by this and said:

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.

The big difference between me and a lot of people on the news is I really wanted to find out why. Nobody seemed to be interested in finding out why. The WHY is really important to me. I don't think anyone is naturally a brutal savage. They are pushed in that direction. In this case, having your country bombed, invaded, having people picked up off the streets, having your wives and children raped made the people in Iraq a little angry, and they had a lynch mob. That is the Why. I also suspect they knew about the torture in Abu Ghairib and were pissed about that too. Come on, when the planes hit the world trade center, how pissed off were YOU? I know I was damned pissed off. UNDERSTANDING WHY IS NOT THE SAME AS EXCUSING SOMEONE.

Now, the second part, about being a hypocrite. We went into Iraq, led by Dumbya, on a string of lies which were eventually proved to be false - the weapons of mass destruction that weren't there, the stockpiled weapons in places that turned out to be hospitals or schools but were destroyed anyway. Our LAST, LAST line of defense was, we went into Iraq to help the Iraqis and save them from Saddam, who tortured and killed them. For us to go ahead and torture and kill people - with this in mind - destroys any legitimacy we had in the area. Bush was very, very stupid to allow this to happen... and very, very stupid not to predict it might have happened.

Because, like I said, it's important to understand why. And our soldiers are out in this foreign company with huge fucking spiders the size of your entire leg. They are fighting someone - they don't know who. They are told to save the Iraqis then to shoot them. Their friends are dead, their salaries are cut, and they are forced to stay in Iraq longer and longer. If something like this had not happened, I would have been very surprised. Bush made them poor, defenseless, hungry (remember the Halliburton food scandal?) and left alone in a country which is very much against them - again, something that's Bush's fault. There were so many ways he could have gained the support of the Iraqis it's ridiculous.

The big point is Rumsfield or Bush or whoever is in charge seems to really like sitting back and watching people snap. They use people to the breaking point and they destroy them. How many more Americans have to die because of their fun war games? When are we going to free the Iraqis? When are we going to move beyond this whole stupid us/them party and start COOPERATING AND GETTING THE WORK WE NEED TO DO OUT OF THE WAY? And when will we punish Dumbya for what he's done to our troops and our country?

Ridor, I don't twist facts to my agenda. We have bad leadership and yes, I do criticise that leadership. But BUSH IS NOT AMERICA. He's just the man with the hands on the reins.