Anwaar
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Speak the truth and keep on coming.
Posts: 463
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Post by Anwaar on Nov 30, 2006 15:14:19 GMT 4
As America Slept
by Anwaar Hussain
It all happened while America slept.
As America slept, airline jets appeared in the azure blue New York Skies some five years back and within minutes bumped through tall wonders of human achievements reducing them and their occupants to a tangled mass of steel, concrete and human flesh. While the world stood horror-struck and frozen from the pain of the victims and the sheer scale of the crime, somewhere in some dark unlit corners of America, a small leering cabal of malicious, hateful and warmongering few backslapped each other. But America slept.
As America slept, this small but ruthless group of men stole democracy from the American people and almost knocked her over with a noxious blow of fascism. The political philosophy of these creatures sent instant shivers up the collective spine of global citizenry. But America slept.
As America slept, its citizens' liberties were curtailed, their freedoms taken away, their economy bankrupted, their private lives spied upon and their nation kept in a constant state of fear. Riding on the wings of ‘terror’, their leaders sleep marched America into history's hall of shame. But America slept.
As America slept, not very much later these humanoids had firmly hurled their country on a perpetual warpath not of self defense, but of fear, insecurity, suspicion, hatred, anger, reprisal and a blind, jingoistic patriotism that continued to take its toll on humanity. But America slept.
As America slept, for the first time since the Wehrmacht swept through Europe, the world witnessed a major power launching an unjustifiable war, placing an entire people under military occupation and carrying out acts of collective and visible punishment against civilian populace. The American media’s shameful collusion in this deception was unbelievable, as unbelievable as the fact that this war, based on undeniable lies as it was, was sold to the American people as the gospel truth ordained by God. But America slept.
As America slept, they failed to realize that the logic of occupation was naturally despotic, that the brutalized and impoverished people of Iraq and Afghanistan needed facilitators to help them decide their own fate not occupiers, that the world, having finally taken off the blinds of 9/11, had now seen through the plot and the world now knew that far from benefiting the Iraqi and Afghan peoples this whole operation was an unashamed imperialist robbery of their resources. But America slept.
As America slept, its leaders misspent in a hurry the international sympathy and goodwill it had earned on 9/11. The distasteful dramatization and gloating of America’s main stream media not withstanding, the images of the crumbling World Trade Center were soon replaced in the world's mind by images of horrific explosions in Baghdad and gruesome images of dogs snatching bites out of dead Iraqis in cities like Fallujah. By acting as the lackeys of the miniscule Zionists and fighting their wars, its leaders deliberately alienated 1.3 billion Muslims making them a target for the Muslims' wrath. But America slept.
As America slept, the malicious cabal of villainous rogues that took over the reins of their great country, along with a supporting cast of bloodsuckers, money grabbers and human lowlifes, speedily put on the world stage a gaudy show full of sadism, trickery and revolting absurdity. These charlatans destroyed the lives of millions of individuals and, sure enough, now that curtain is finally coming down on their repugnant acts, the stage is invariably full of blood and gore. Of course the dead of this one show will never ever rise again. But America slept.
As America slept, its media slept too. They couldn’t see the horrendous atrocities that the United States military was visiting upon unarmed Iraqis who never posed any danger to their beloved country. They couldn’t catch on their eagle eyed lenses the raining cluster bombs, the showering napalms, and the tortures in the dungeons. They couldn’t report the rising death toll in Iraq when it shot past the half million mark. They couldn’t inform of Fallujah that was razed to the ground and its citizens-men, women and children alike-gunned down by the valiant American troops and left on the streets for the dogs to feed on. But America slept.
As America slept, their G.I. Joes were pumping up Iraq with depleted uranium, napalm bombs, cluster munitions and poisonous gases while its leaders weaved a torture trail across the world telling Americans to stay the course. Under the malevolent watch of these men, intense sessions of pain were conducted in distant dark dungeons spread around the globe with such regularity that America became the biggest patron of torture by proxy in the history of planet earth. But America slept.
As America slept, along with their well fed children, the rate of birth defects, leukemia and cancer among Iraqi children under the age of 15 in those districts where the use of DU had been the most concentrated increased dreadfully, ensuring that a generation of beautiful babies was going to turn into one of unsightly cripples. But America slept.
As America slept, their great nation continued to sink deeper into the heart of darkness. With each passing day their beloved America scaled ever greater heights of hideous glories. The waters of the Euphrates were made crimson with the blood of innocent people whose lives were snuffed out on the orders of a man rewarded for his colossal crimes by his great nation. But America slept.
As America slept, a thousand cuts were delivered to it by its own. Now that it is half awake and hemorrhaging heavily, it reels and stumbles from these deep incisions. But is it awake really?
Now as America awakes, with a sickening sense of reality, it finds itself moored in pools of innocent human beings’ blood. And as the death toll in Iraq reaches the three-quarter of a million mark, it finds its leaders debating whether or not it is a civil war going on in Iraq. Is it awake really?
Now as America awakes, it finds itself tottering at the abyss of moral bankruptcy while its leaders continue their feverish globe trotting hat in hand begging all and sundry to be saved from their own follies. In merely five years, the big mouths have become beggars and their once great nation, heaving from under the massive pile of more than half a million corpses, stands discredited, dishonored and humiliated in the court of world opinion.
But is America awake now? Where are the hangman’s ropes if it is?
Copyrights : Anwaar Hussain
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Post by Olive Ream on Nov 30, 2006 16:25:59 GMT 4
A remarkable piece - true to form Anwaar. Loved it!
You ask if America is awake? I think every effort is being made to keep the public comatose. God help us all.
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Post by Virgil on Nov 30, 2006 17:52:12 GMT 4
Thanks Anwaar, A most excellent piece. In my view, Americans are not awake at all, just turning over in a drugged sleep trying rationalize the crime before they are forced to understand, hoping to avoid understanding, it is a crime. No public voice in America says it is a crime, although there is a pitiful chorus of many who are screwing up enough courage to say it is a tactical error. Regards, Virgil
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Post by Carl on Nov 30, 2006 17:53:06 GMT 4
Yes we slept but worst of all as a great power we did not act as good father would, impartially. Today, I am 81 I hope that we have learned to open the conversation with love and kindness. American civil war was a one of sorrow and destruction of life. It is hard to believe what has happened in the last years. Keep up the good work and things will get better. Carl
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Post by Karen Mazer on Nov 30, 2006 18:25:59 GMT 4
America. We were hit on the back of the head by this cabal. While we were reeling from the hit and in a state of shock, this group of fascists took control of our congress post haste! As some of us traumatic shock victims came out of our shock and awe daze almost immediately after 9-11, we were called conspiracy nuts by the right wing and by loved ones who lacked critical thinking skills. Unfortunately our population has been so dumbed down over the last twenty-odd years that it took two more national elections and over 200,000 dead for the rest of us to catch up. Some slept, some were in a coma and the rest of us were living in a bizzaro world nightmare. I can understand the PTS by most and the shock of others too scared to look at the truth (for a while), but I cannot forgive the neocons . They are the toadies throughout time. The bully followers. They can mean the downfall of any country, any time in history. They support the lies and revel in brutality. These people are just as responsible as this regime for the tragedy in the world. Those of us who cried foul were made to feel like traitors! Our elected officials were either as out of it as the rest of us or were paid off or threatened by these uber carpetbaggers. All I know is we have been raided and invaded by un-americans. They came from our own government. An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it. Mohandas Gandhi
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Post by Danny on Nov 30, 2006 18:31:00 GMT 4
wow, you really sound the alarm anwaar. write on! there is an awakening slowly occurring, perhaps not becuse of morality but eco pressure. An 8.3pc crash in US industrial orders and an admission by the Federal Reserve chairman that Washington does not know how bad housing really is set off another day of wild gyrations on the currency markets. www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2006/11/29/cndollar29.xm
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Post by Dave on Dec 1, 2006 1:50:26 GMT 4
You are just as bad as the America you envision.
You are asleep.
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Post by Virgil on Dec 1, 2006 7:38:09 GMT 4
The $73 Billion Defeat Jews' Jaws Zero Shark America Six ? First of all, the reason America's invasion of Iraq does not work is because it is a stupid, fascist fraud. Second of all, the reason George W. Bush does not work as president is because he is a stupid, fascist fraud. After that, things get worse. It remains a fantasy that Republican American Fascism will give up power in 2008 if turned out by the American people. A Republican America Fascist coup took place in 2000 and that New Order is designed to stick, to take over, to rule, to dictate no matter how any damned election goes. The Republican American Fascist plan is stupid and simple: war, war, war, war and by the time 20008 comes around the world will be declared too unsafe for democracy in America. Republican American Fascism is less than ten years away from hanging Democrats by the neck with piano wire. Fortunately, the best-laid schemes of rats and Republican American Fascists oft go awry, and that is the story we approach here today. This Earth will be dead by 2065.
Virgil
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Post by Jon on Dec 1, 2006 10:00:02 GMT 4
I don't understand what happened to the US, as soon as I saw Bush & his daddy on election night 2000, I knew they had cheated to win the election, and having watched the debates, and seen a man who would have been lucky to find his home state on a map, and seeing him ordained president, I said that within 1 year we would be in a major war, and it only took 11 months. I saw through every cheat and lie from the election, through 9-11, Katrina, graft greed and corruption, and I state right now, I do not believe I am smarter than 90% of US Citizens, so why could I see what they couldn't? I believe it was because my eyes were opened years ago, when working at the Pentagon, and I saw that nothing had changed, but the same people with eyes wide open to the truth of the lie of Vietnam, had now closed their eyes, refusing to look any more, to fat, and comfortable now. I watched in disgust as people got in fights to get the "New Hot Gifts" for their loved ones, and thought to myself, is this nation worth saving any more? I ask all who bother to read what I wrote here that same question, do you think the US is worth saving any more! One more thing, as I have friends from around the World, and many in the other nation of North and south America, I here again and again that these nations are sick of hearing the citizens of the USA called Americans, as if we owned the name, so in the tradition of nomenclature, and the knowledge that it is generally the last name of a person who gives the area designated its name, I ask that the Americans seek to change the name of The United States Of America, into the United states of Vaspucci, and that we citzens here off be called Vaspuccians ;D
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Post by Jeff on Dec 1, 2006 10:46:14 GMT 4
Dear Anwaar,
Again, you wrote an excellent piece. However, you give my countrypeople too much credit for possessing some form of humanity.
I am in the middle of the horror of the thought process of America. Most Americans slept for a bit, then they awoke and cheered on the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Today, they still cheer, even more loudly because the plans of the administration are in shambles.
Recently, a former friend who found Jesus about five years ago, sent an e-mail to his mailing list. He mentioned that he was still proudly pro-war. I sent him a picture of the 15-year-old girl who was raped and killed by U.S. troops and mentioned who she was. Then, I asked, "How the hell can anyone consider himself to be pro-war today knowing all that has transpired?" He never responded.
As an American, I am upset more by the actions of my ountrypeople than I am by those of the government. At least the government is acting in its own self-interest. The "average" person on the street is now a bloodthirsty bigot. They will send their 12-year-old son to his bedroom if he slips and says the word "shit." They, they will watch the news and cheer on the slaughter. Good Christians all. Then, the father will go upstairs and talk in a soothing manner to the boy who erred in his wording, all the time seeing his "Uday Dead on Arrival" doll and the kid dressed in mock military camouflage.
Unfortunately, we, as U.S. citizens, are mired in this thought process and it will only get worse as the U.S. is beaten oversees by the people it tried to subjugate. Only the American people are not up in arms. They are not sleeping. They are the cheerleaders for genocide and are proud of their new role.
Jeff
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Dec 1, 2006 13:11:59 GMT 4
Jon asked the question, "Do you think the US is worth saving any more?" Hell yes! The country I happened to be born in isn't totally filled with brain dead hateful people and thoughtless consumers. There's plenty of us, young and old, who have had their eyes wide open; maybe always. I listen to and talk with a lot of personalities and I find a mixture of awareness. This awareness depends on: your upbringing, access to news, IQ, education, stability of family life, economic status, sometimes religion; the list goes on & on. I, at one time, was pissed at so many here for not seeing the truth of matters but the truth of it is that some of us are hep to the horrible reality and some aren't; maybe it's in our DNA, or perhaps it's our karma! Still, aware or not, people have short memories and a lack of historical perspective. Although I admit our current administration has reached unparalleled depths of depravity, the scandals, bribery, lust for oil, etc., there's nothing new here. Can't understand how a chimp was put into the White House? Read about the Harding scandals of the 1920s sometime. At this time, our nation was spiritually tired. Wearied by war and the nervous tension of the BIG RED SCARE, citizens hoped for quiet and healing. They were sick of Wilson and his talk of "America's duty to humanity," callous to political idealism; they hoped for a chance to pursue their private affairs without governmental interference and to forget about public affairs. Women's skirts were shockingly short, the flappers were dancin' up a craze, bootleg whiskey was much sought after, and Chicago had a big crime wave. In steps President elect, Warren Harding, a really handsome guy who looked like a president, he wanted to make everybody happy, called them 'neighbor.' He might have looked good but he had a limited scope of political experience and was almost unbelievably ill-informed. His mind was vague and fuzzy. Its quality was revealed in his public speeches; he had frequent attacks of suffix trouble: "normalcy" for normality, "bethrothment" for betrothal [is this ringing a bell, sound familiar?] Anyway, in its short two years and five months, the Harding Administration was responsible for more concentrated robbery, juicy scandals, and corruption than any other in the whole history of the Federal Government. He also handed out offices of appointment and seats of power to old cronies eager to share in fortunes like he was Santa. Harding had no sooner arrived in Washington when a swarm of businessmen with cigars stuck in their cheeks and rolls of very useful hundred dollar bills in their pockets began to infest the Washington hotels. After the strange death of Harding and the investigations began to uncover the amount of graft under his watch, how did the American people take to the disclosures? Did they rise in wrath to punish the offenders? Hell no! The harshest condemnation on the part of the press and the public was reserved, not for those who defrauded the government, but for those who insisted on bringing the facts to light. Newspapers across the country read: "Democratic lynching-bee," "poisoned-tongued partisanship," "pure malice," and inquires were called "in plain words, contemptible and disgusting." Newspaper readers echoed these sentiments; substantial businessmen solemnly informed one another that mistakes might have been made but it was UNPATRIOTIC to condemn them and thus to "cast discredit on the Government," and that those who insisted on probing them to the bottom were, " nothing better than Bolsheviki." The fact was that any relentless investigation of the scandals threatened to disturb the status quo and that was the last thing the dominant business class or country at large wanted. They had voted for "normalcy" and they still believed in it. Alas, history repeats itself until we get it right....I think that's worth fighting for....to get it right, for once and for ALL. Thank you for your time, Michelle
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Post by brianboru on Dec 1, 2006 13:23:15 GMT 4
Again, you fail to clearly identify the demons in human form who are responsible for most of the anguish in the world. You misapply the term fascism and again use that bugbear, the German Wehrmacht, as an analogy. Why is it Nazism and Fascism which are held up to the world as the ultimate evil against which all other evils are measured? Why never Communism?You know who founded communism and spread it and brought about the death of over a hundred million people, don't you? Nazism and Fascism were political systems which evolved in reaction to the threat from the real monsters who were victorious in 1945. All we know about those systems comes to us through a filter set up by the victors. Remember, the world we live in today is the world created by the winners of 'the last good war', as one of the monsters once said. You suggest that the smirking, psychopathic imbecile in the White House is really in charge. He, like all the puppets that have squatted there for the last seventy-five years, simply take their orders from the real rulers of America. The same goes for Britain and all other white countries. Those rulers are the jews. They totally control all facets of life now in the western world: the media, the finance and the military and police. You know this. Sixty million Slavs, east europeans and Germans were murdered by jewish bolshevism. The christian cult which was foisted on us by the same vampires fifteen hundred years ago caused us untold misery over the centuries. We are their prime victims, yet your site has and undercurrent suggesting that the troubles of the world would be solved if the whites got their act together. Let me tell you: jews are not whites. They move through our society as though they were but they are always apart and consider all people as just sub humans to be enslaved or murdered. Their actions show this. Unless you clearly identify the problem it will not be solved. The jew parasite depends for its survival on maintaining its camoflage as just a victimised white tribe with a strange religeon, rather than the monstrous, malevolent vampires that they really are. Unless they are clearly identified as the source for the world's woes the situation will only get worse. Don't muddy the waters with terms like Zionism or neo conservatives. It's the jews. Shout it clearly.
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Post by bill01 on Dec 1, 2006 18:38:09 GMT 4
“I don’t give a damn about world peace.” These words actually came out of the mouth of Joe Scarborough last night as they continue their war on language. As another example of ludicrousness, this week’s public ( and televised ) debate is whether or not NBC is justified in calling the Iraq debacle a “Civil War”. To further our humiliation as a nation, the two sides of this media question are having a less than dignified slap-fight over this wording.
Considering more people have died in Iraq now than in our own “Civil War”, it really doesn’t make any difference what you call it unless you are not “offended” by the word Genocide. While these “expert” commentators grapple with the damage to their ego that the term “Civil War” inflicts, these people continue to die.
Repeatedly I return to the media problem because of its incredible influence. This is a TV nation and for the working class it is generally the only source of information. This man ( for making that statement in primetime ) should be fired immediately. This is not the “type” of person we need in this country to be interpreting world events for us. Someone who does not understand the necessity to end world conflict is barely worth speaking to, much less listening to.
There is no doubt that people are “waking up” in this country. However, the incessant media hypnotism campaign is desperately struggling to keep them asleep and to convince those of us who are watching, that they actually still are. The dam has broken however and on a variety of levels, the truth is coming to light. The campaign of misinformation that has governed this planet for so very long is quite certainly in it’s “last throws” but I don’t expect it to go quietly…
Bear in mind how incredibly difficult it is for the ego to accept being wrong. Particularly in a country where you are never trained to do so. However, recognizing and correcting error is the only path to growth and like it or not, the world is growing. It will be very painful for some as the myths that have been perpetrated as reality are dispelled. People in this country will have to endure some very real ‘birth pains” of their own as they realize the magnitude of what this country ( or The Corporation ) has done to this world.
Have faith my brother. There is no way back. Remember that we are still just looking at the illusion. The Truth is something very different and is on its way at God Speed, right on schedule. All we have to do is keep doing our job…
A beautiful piece my friend… Moving as the truth always is. In fact, expect to hear from me later as well. Since our media has failed to examine, failed to respond, and has painfully misconstrued President Ahmedinejad’s letter, it now becomes my “job” to do so.
All is Well…
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Anwaar
Administrator
Speak the truth and keep on coming.
Posts: 463
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Post by Anwaar on Dec 3, 2006 17:52:48 GMT 4
Rumsfeld: US failing in IraqA leaked memo shows that the former Defence Secretary thinks a major change in strategy is needed, focusing on a staged pull-out of troopsPaul Harris in New York, Sunday December 3, 2006, The Observer In a move that will send shockwaves through the White House a leaked memo from former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in which he admitted American failings in Iraq and called for a major change in policy, emerged yesterday. The classified memo, obtained by the New York Times, revealed that the ultra-hawkish Rumsfeld believes that US forces in Iraq are not achieving their aims. He submitted the memo to the White House just two days before he resigned his post at the Pentagon. The rest here : tinyurl.com/yzypkn
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Anwaar
Administrator
Speak the truth and keep on coming.
Posts: 463
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Post by Anwaar on Dec 4, 2006 21:46:57 GMT 4
Has He Started Talking to the Walls?
By FRANK RICH, The NYT
IT turns out we’ve been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to understand what’s going on with President Bush. The text we should be consulting instead is “The Final Days,” the Woodward-Bernstein account of Richard Nixon talking to the portraits on the White House walls while Watergate demolished his presidency. As Mr. Bush has ricocheted from Vietnam to Latvia to Jordan in recent weeks, we’ve witnessed the troubling behavior of a president who isn’t merely in a state of denial but is completely untethered from reality. It’s not that he can’t handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn’t know what the truth is.
The most startling example was his insistence that Al Qaeda is primarily responsible for the country’s spiraling violence. Only a week before Mr. Bush said this, the American military spokesman on the scene, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, called Al Qaeda “extremely disorganized” in Iraq, adding that “I would question at this point how effective they are at all at the state level.” Military intelligence estimates that Al Qaeda makes up only 2 percent to 3 percent of the enemy forces in Iraq, according to Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News. The bottom line: America has a commander in chief who can’t even identify some 97 percent to 98 percent of the combatants in a war that has gone on longer than our involvement in World War II.
But that’s not the half of it. Mr. Bush relentlessly refers to Iraq’s “unity government” though it is not unified and can only nominally govern. (In Henry Kissinger’s accurate recent formulation, Iraq is not even a nation “in the historic sense.”) After that pseudo-government’s prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, brushed him off in Amman, the president nonetheless declared him “the right guy for Iraq” the morning after. This came only a day after The Times’s revelation of a secret memo by Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, judging Mr. Maliki either “ignorant of what is going on” in his own country or disingenuous or insufficiently capable of running a government. Not that it matters what Mr. Hadley writes when his boss is impervious to facts.
In truth the president is so out of it he wasn’t even meeting with the right guy. No one doubts that the most powerful political leader in Iraq is the anti-American, pro-Hezbollah cleric Moktada al-Sadr, without whom Mr. Maliki would be on the scrap heap next to his short-lived predecessors, Ayad Allawi and Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Mr. Sadr’s militia is far more powerful than the official Iraqi army that we’ve been helping to “stand up” at hideous cost all these years. If we’re not going to take him out, as John McCain proposed this month, we might as well deal with him directly rather than with Mr. Maliki, his puppet. But our president shows few signs of recognizing Mr. Sadr’s existence.
In his classic study, “The Great War and Modern Memory,” Paul Fussell wrote of how World War I shattered and remade literature, for only a new language of irony could convey the trauma and waste. Under the auspices of Mr. Bush, the Iraq war is having a comparable, if different, linguistic impact: the more he loses his hold on reality, the more language is severed from its meaning altogether.
When the president persists in talking about staying until “the mission is complete” even though there is no definable military mission, let alone one that can be completed, he is indulging in pure absurdity. The same goes for his talk of “victory,” another concept robbed of any definition when the prime minister we are trying to prop up is allied with Mr. Sadr, a man who wants Americans dead and has many scalps to prove it. The newest hollowed-out Bush word to mask the endgame in Iraq is “phase,” as if the increasing violence were as transitional as the growing pains of a surly teenager. “Phase” is meant to drown out all the unsettling debate about two words the president doesn’t want to hear, “civil war.”
When news organizations, politicians and bloggers had their own civil war about the proper usage of that designation last week, it was highly instructive — but about America, not Iraq. The intensity of the squabble showed the corrosive effect the president’s subversion of language has had on our larger culture. Iraq arguably passed beyond civil war months ago into what might more accurately be termed ethnic cleansing or chaos. That we were fighting over “civil war” at this late date was a reminder that wittingly or not, we have all taken to following Mr. Bush’s lead in retreating from English as we once knew it.
It’s been a familiar pattern for the news media, politicians and the public alike in the Bush era. It took us far too long to acknowledge that the “abuses” at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere might be more accurately called torture. And that the “manipulation” of prewar intelligence might be more accurately called lying. Next up is “pullback,” the Iraq Study Group’s reported euphemism to stave off the word “retreat” (if not retreat itself).
In the case of “civil war,” it fell to a morning television anchor, Matt Lauer, to officially bless the term before the “Today” show moved on to such regular fare as an update on the Olsen twins. That juxtaposition of Iraq and post-pubescent eroticism was only too accurate a gauge of how much the word “war” itself has been drained of its meaning in America after years of waging a war that required no shared sacrifice. Whatever you want to label what’s happening in Iraq, it has never impeded our freedom to dote on the Olsen twins.
I have not been one to buy into the arguments that Mr. Bush is stupid or is the sum of his “Bushisms” or is, as feverish Internet speculation periodically has it, secretly drinking again. I still don’t. But I have believed he is a cynic — that he could always distinguish between truth and fiction even as he and Karl Rove sold us their fictions. That’s why, when the president said that “absolutely, we’re winning” in Iraq before the midterms, I just figured it was more of the same: another expedient lie to further his partisan political ends.
But that election has come and gone, and Mr. Bush is more isolated from the real world than ever. That’s scary. Neither he nor his party has anything to gain politically by pretending that Iraq is not in crisis. Yet Mr. Bush clings to his delusions with a near-rage — watch him seethe in his press conference with Mr. Maliki — that can’t be explained away by sheer stubbornness or misguided principles or a pat psychological theory. Whatever the reason, he is slipping into the same zone as Woodrow Wilson did when refusing to face the rejection of the League of Nations, as a sleepless L.B.J. did when micromanaging bombing missions in Vietnam, as Ronald Reagan did when checking out during Iran-Contra. You can understand why Jim Webb, the Virginia senator-elect with a son in Iraq, was tempted to slug the president at a White House reception for newly elected members of Congress. Mr. Bush asked “How’s your boy?” But when Mr. Webb replied, “I’d like to get them out of Iraq,” the president refused to so much as acknowledge the subject. Maybe a timely slug would have woken him up.
Or at least sounded an alarm. Some two years ago, I wrote that Iraq was Vietnam on speed, a quagmire for the MTV generation. Those jump cuts are accelerating now. The illusion that America can control events on the ground is just that: an illusion. As the list of theoretical silver bullets for Iraq grows longer (and more theoretical) by the day — special envoy, embedded military advisers, partition, outreach to Iran and Syria, Holbrooke, international conference, NATO — urgent decisions have to be made by a chief executive who is in touch with reality (or such is the minimal job description). Otherwise the events in Iraq will make the Decider’s decisions for him, as indeed they are doing already.
The joke, history may note, is that even as Mr. Bush deludes himself that he is bringing “democracy” to Iraq, he is flouting democracy at home. American voters could not have delivered a clearer mandate on the war than they did on Nov. 7, but apparently elections don’t register at the White House unless the voters dip their fingers in purple ink. Mr. Bush seems to think that the only decision he had to make was replacing Donald Rumsfeld and the mission of changing course would be accomplished.
Tell that to the Americans in Anbar Province. Back in August the chief of intelligence for the Marines filed a secret report — uncovered by Thomas Ricks of The Washington Post — concluding that American troops “are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar.” That finding was confirmed in an intelligence update last month. Yet American troops are still being tossed into that maw, and at least 90 have been killed there since Labor Day, including five marines, ages 19 to 24, around Thanksgiving.
Civil war? Sectarian violence? A phase? This much is certain: The dead in Iraq don’t give a damn what we call it.
Source : The NYT
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