Fool’s Anniversary

Ten years ago this month my country invaded Iraq with imperial hubris and the finest military hardware our tax dollars could buy. Armed to the teeth against a hapless enemy, sold a pack of lies by Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Powell and Wolf Blitzer, and a phalanx of retired generals and admirals, and all the superstar talking heads on the major networks. Less than a month before, millions of people worldwide took to the streets to protest the Bush-Cheney invasion plan, not that it made a difference; Bush flipped the entire world the middle finger and let the dogs of war off the leash.

I remember Bush’s speech to a joint session of Congress. I was sitting with a friend in the Santa Barbara Brewing Company and I stared at the TV screen with my mouth open and my ears ringing. Invading Iraq made no fucking sense -- it was a bizarre pivot from the occupation of Afghanistan and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. I never for a second believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, never believed Saddam posed a threat to any but his own citizens who were already staggering under draconian international sanctions.

The stupidity was staggering, and remains so to this day. What a colossal fuck-up this neocon fantasy turned out to be.

We never bothered to get an accurate census of the Iraqi’s we killed, maimed, or displaced because we didn’t care; we were high on our military invincibility, enthralled by footage of our munitions exploding over Baghdad. CNN reported the invasion the same way ESPN reports NFL games.

USA! USA! USA!

Cruise missiles, “smart” bombs, bunker busters; we were told that our munitions were so technologically superior that they distinguished innocent non-combatants from bad guys, homes from infrastructure, hospitals from military barracks. We bought this BS wholesale. I was ashamed of my country, embarrassed by our arrogance and blindness. Any fool knows that war is messy, a cluster-fuck at best, and in war innocent people die. Women die, children die, elderly people die, no matter what the mouthpieces for the Pentagon say.

Reporters were embedded and co-opted; they wore helmets and flak vests, combat boots, and looked ridiculous. Fuck off, Diane Sawyer, useless twit.

When Shock & Awe became quagmire and death for American soldiers, our cowardly leaders moved the goalposts; we didn’t invade to find Saddam’s WMD, we invaded to give the long-suffering Iraqi people democracy and freedom; and when that didn’t materialize, we decided that we invaded to fight Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.  

It’s unlikely that Bush and Cheney will ever be prosecuted for war crimes; David Petraeus became a hero and media darling for a troop surge that was little more than a funhouse mirror; Rumsfeld went skipping into a comfortable retirement. True to the contemporary American ethos, no one is accountable for destroying Iraq and unleashing a civil war. Our  intelligence operatives tortured Iraqi’s the same way the worst regimes in human history tortured, but we didn’t give a fuck because we felt justified by 9/11.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq required no sacrifice on the part of Americans. Our job was to shop, go to the movies, watch TV, and support our valiant warriors, no matter what, because Boy George and Uncle Dick said so.

History is already in the process of being rewritten, and our depravity in Iraq will be forgotten or forgiven, at least here. Average Iraqi citizens will never forget what we did to them, how we fucked their country over and made their existence more difficult and precarious. We forget, they suffer; we walk away from the destruction we caused, they live with it, every day; we insist on calling it a war, they call it what it was – an armed invasion and occupation.

Happy Anniversary.