Wednesday, March 09, 2005

He who gasps last...

The Preznit: "The advance of hope in the Middle East requires new thinking in the region. By now it should be clear that authoritarian rule is not the wave of the future. It is the last gasp of a discredited past."
Maybe he can sell it to the Saudis. Riverbend isn't buying.
What it seems policy makers in America don't get, and what I suspect many Americans themselves *do* get, is that millions of Iraqis feel completely detached from the current people in power. If you don't have an alliance with one of the political parties (ie under their protection or on their payroll) then it's difficult to feel any affinity with people like Jaffari, Allawi, Talbani, etc. We watch them on television, tight-lipped and shifty-eyed after a meeting where they quarreled about Kirkuk or Sharia in the constitution and it feels like what I imagine an out-of-body experience should feel like.

In spite of elections, they still feel like puppets. But now, they are high-tech puppets. They were upgraded from your ordinary string puppets to those life-like, battery-powered, talking puppets. It's almost like we're doing that whole rotating president thing Bremer did in 2003 all over again. The same faces are getting tedious. The old Iraqi saying sums it up nicely, "Tireed erneb- ukhuth erneb. Tireed ghazal- ukhuth erneb." The translation for this is, "You want a rabbit? Take a rabbit. You want a deer? Take a rabbit."

Except we didn't get any rabbits- we just got an assortment of snakes, weasels and hyenas.
George Bush's "road to democracy" is paved with corpses. American corpses, Iraqi corpses, British corpses, many others but all, really, "ours" because they're all, really, human and so, we hope, are we.

The situation in Iraq sometimes fades from my perception into a blurry, dull pain, the product of what seems to be a distillation of every bad idea that the Bush administration can muster. Then Riverbend comes along and puts a human face on her country and her situation and my focus gets sharp enough to notice again that this is first of all about people. People who have died and people who live in the kind of ever-present fear that is a standard feature of life in a war zone. People who have been removed from job and family on a mission that looks increasingly like a fools errand, returned from across the sea and plunked back down without anything mildly resembling the kind of support system we know is needed for combat vets to successfully re-enter civilian life. Those peoples families, and friends. Every single person in Iraq. Threatened. Every day.

The pain we have caused and the pain we are causing is beyond measure. Is there anyone who really believes there can be a result that will truly compensate that pain.

It's not that there's nothing we can do, though.

There's something we can do.



It's a start.

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