- "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die
in Vietnam [Iraq]?..How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for
a mistake? - John Kerry, 1971
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- "How will he [Bush] meet his god having slaughtered
so many men and women? He has committed so many crimes I want to defend
my home. If a stranger invades America and the people resist, does that
mean they are terrorists?...Everyone [in Falluja] has been labeled a terrorist.
These are all lies. - Ahmad Manajid, Iraqi Olympic Soccer Team Member
-
- "My problems are not with the American peopleThey
are with what America has done in Iraq: destroy everything. The American
army has killed so many people in Iraq. What is freedom when I go to the
[national] stadium and there are shootings on the road?" - Adnan Hamad,
Iraqi Olympic Soccer Team Member
-
- "We don't wish for the presence of Americans in
our country. We want them to go away." Salih Sadir, Iraqi Olympic
Soccer Team Member and team leader
-
- "You cannot speak about a team that represents freedom.
We do not have freedom in Iraq, we have an occupying force. This is one
of our most miserable times.Freedom is just a word for the media. We are
living in hard times, under occupation." - Head coach Adnan Hamad,
critical of George Bush,s exploitation of the Iraqi Olympic team in recent
re-election advertisements
Gunboat soldiers of wars past and brutal, bitter at the truths spoken thirty
years ago, have taken us back to bloody deltas and haunting demons, purposefully
smearing one man and making an entire nation relive memories still too
fragile to exorcise from the collective mind of the American people. Traversing
waters of painful history so that we ignore the now toxic waterways of
the Tigris and Euphrates, tools of proxy and pawns of convenience have
only succeeded in reminding us of the putrid morality and dishonor residing
in mansions old and white that have and continue to stain the once bright
American beacon of light.
-
-
- Taking us back to the jungles of Vietnam so that we can
forget the present debacle in the deserts of Iraq, gunboat soldiers and
their puppeteers wish to deviate an amnesia-riddled populace from the lands
of the once Fertile Crescent, manipulating our short-attention span away
from a foreign policy blunder more and more resembling a cocktail offering
equal opportunity to an amalgam of failure, including a massive debacle,
quagmire, catastrophe and collapse rolled into one.
Iraq is on the verge of implosion, a pussing scab never to heal, forever
to pain America through the salts of bitterness and the unyielding defeat
of failure. The inevitability of failure cannot be denied nor can it be
questioned. It is only a matter of when, not if, as alien lands and divergent
peoples resist and revolt imperial armies and crusading delusions. How
can the sinister intentions of the few, nothing more than a malignant cluster
of miscreants at the top, bring down a nation of so much splendor and potential,
belonging to the total spectrum of humanity, not just the sewers of the
elite?
-
-
- Trapped in the sand dunes of Mesopotamia the American
dream has awoken to, unable to extricate one soldier from an occupation
besmirched by the leadership of George W. Bush and his neocon vultures.
Condemned soldiers of misfortune find themselves in, their caste of indigence
and lack of opportunity helping seal their fates, fighting and dying for
mistakes, furthering the power trips of the elite, suffering through the
indifference of their anointed leaders and sacrificing for the welfare
of another nation. How many more will have to die or have their extremities
ripped apart for a mistake and a fight sought by few to the detriment of
the many? How many more sons and daughters will we have to bury, when the
world entire smells the decaying smell of failure and sees the maggots
prospering in our carcass?
Something has gone terribly wrong when the same people you are claiming
to have liberated, showering them with the mirages of American freedom
and democracy, exhibit nothing but animosity and hostility toward you.
Such is the situation in Iraq, vividly exhibited by members of the Iraqi
Olympic Soccer Team, who echo the sentiments of the vast majority of their
countrymen. To understand the comments emanated, with the strong emotions
and powerful words used, Americans must see themselves through the eyes
of Iraqis. We must empathize with and place ourselves inside their lands
and cities and homes. Only then will we understand why members of Iraq,s
soccer team, like so many of their fellow citizens, feel the way they do,
spouting bitterness and animosity towards the devastation enveloping their
nation, and why the debacle that George W. Bush and the neocons have created
will inevitably be doomed to fail.
The question thus becomes how many more American soldiers and Iraqi citizens
need to die for a mistake? How much more suffering, death, destruction
and human evil, both here and in Iraq, needs to arise from the rotting
flesh of a minute cabal of lunatics that took two nations to war and hundreds
of millions of people towards division, hatred and perpetual conflict?
Who will be the last person to die for the mistake of an inept and ignoramus
leader? How much more human energy need be extinguished until the people
of America have their insatiable hunger for conflict, revenge and blood
satisfied?
Yet statements such as those made by members of the Iraqi Olympic soccer
team will never be disseminated to the American people who continue to
be trapped in the quicksand of propaganda and mass manipulation delivered
by a complicit corporate media loyal only to its parent companies and the
government they own. Once more, it seems, the truth of what the Iraq debacle
is will be sequestered, never to see the light of day and forever to be
altered so the masses remain clueless to the implosion about to befall
the American occupation of Iraq.
Iraq has become a phantom that is not seen, lingering in our midst yet
invisible to the conscious. The intensity of guerilla war and the devastating
attacks by Iraqi freedom fighters and the resistance routinely go unnoticed,
instead only making a ten second sound bite proclaiming the death of dozens
of dead-enders, thugs, Baathist remnants and foreign fighters. It seems
the reality of who it is American troops are fighting cannot be blurted
out since it was our forefathers who waged the same kind of war for Independence
more than 225 years ago. We would not want to call the Founding Fathers
and their army of patriots terrorists,, would we?
The fact is we have become the occupiers, the Red Coats exploiting and
subjugating the Iraqi people, and today their George Washington,s, their
patriots and minutemen are waging battles to rid their lands of us. And
so the nonsense about bringing freedom and democracy, to Iraq fails to
disappear as straight-faced journalists and anchors who know better continue
disseminating lies that mask a truth that can never be uncovered. Because
if we are today,s Red Coats, and Iraqi freedom fighters are yesterday,s
American Revolution, wouldn,t that make us the bad guys, nothing more than
imperial thugs seeking out world conquest for natural resources and human
exploitation? Would not invaders and occupiers lose all altitude in the
moral high ground, waging war and destroying an entire society so that
the thirst for black blood can be quenched and the geo-strategic goal of
empire building satisfied?
The Bush administration would rather distort the success of the soccer
team in its favor, politicizing and spinning its triumph of the human spirit,
like it does everything else, airing an advertisement exploiting those
that despise what it has unleashed, even while team members openly condemn
what the occupation has done. The administration, with its legions of spinmeisters,
professional liars, propagandists, manipulators and marketers is also doing
everything in its power to muzzle the truth from ever escaping the deserts
of Mesopotamia. Iraq is such a mess, such a cesspool of chaos that any
news coming out of there inevitably damages a president whose sole preoccupation
is how best to politicize, spin, connive, lie and corrupt himself and his
pack of wolves back into office.
With an occupation that resembles the very real and frightening nightmares
we desperately seek to wake from and never experience again, with every
decision made only succeeding to make volatile an already highly flammable
situation, the question must be asked if American foreign policy knows
what it is doing, both to the present populace and the future to come.
Every action leads to reaction, every cause has its effect, and just as
butterflies flap their wings, typhoons of rampage can we expect. What
is our purpose in the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates? Who is the greatest
beneficiary in this failed experiment? Why did we invade, based on lies
and deceptions? For what reason must so many, on both sides, keep dying
and getting injured, forever to be maimed, if not in body then in soul?
The need to preserve in the American mind the illusion of American grandeur
and the façade of the occupation,s noble intentions prevents the
corporate media and its minions from reporting the gravity of the situation.
The very idea of America the Beautiful must remain intact; the illusion
of bringing freedom and democracy to barbarians, must be made to persevere.
For if the truth of what America and its military have done to Iraq and
its people is ever made known, mirages of grandeur and virtue would vanish
like a morning fog, and the dream of America as the enabler of liberty,
human rights and worldwide peace and harmony would come crashing down with
the force of ten thousand Tomahawk missiles raining from the sky above.
-
-
- The American people would see that our government is
not what it portends to be. We would finally see the devastation upon
land and man that the greatest military machine unleashes in the name of
freedom and democracy. We would see our soldiers winning the battles but
losing the war, losing their humanity amidst the growing hatred of the
Iraqi people. One step forward and one-hundred back, the United States,
only success is in exporting death and importing shame, in bringing misery
and returning bodies devoid of energy. It has only achieved the monumental
rage now boiling in Iraq and the Middle East that only grows and that will
last entire generations, forever condemning our presence in their lands
and infiltration into their affairs.
If allowed to see truth, we would finally be privy to the images denied
us for decades, of third-world countries decimated and poisoned, their
people slaughtered and laid to waste, rotting among cesspools of misery
and mechanisms of slavery. Destroyed homes, cratered cities, unending
cemeteries and children playing in raw sewage would only begin to erode
the blinders that have for too long hidden us from a world devastated by
our government,s foreign policies and military interventions. What our
eyes have never been allowed to see would finally blind us in shame.
-
-
- Hospitals lacking medicines, the infirm dying, doctors
who can no longer use their ability to save condemned collateral damage,
and a healthcare system in shambles might finally open our minds to the
evils our government does in our name. Malnourished children, bloated
babies, all with lower immune systems and all with severe mental deficiencies
that have and continue to foster stunted intelligence thanks to a decade
of economic genocide imposed by the US continue to suffer. Those sanctions,
you may recall, left over one million Iraqis dead, over half of them children.
Genocide by clandestine economic depravity is still genocide, under the
name of sanctions or under the rubric of containment of one man. One man
for one million deaths plus the destruction and impoverishment of a once
flourishing society is a formula created by sinister men and only understood
by the malevolent that walk among us. All in a day,s work for a government
we trust and military we cherish, both of which unleashed the fires of
hell on a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11 or the so-called fiction
labeled the war on terror,. And we wonder why they hate us?
-
-
- In this present imperial exercise in futility for natural
resources, strategic base construction and war by proxy, anywhere from
10,000 to 40,000 innocent Iraqi deaths and hundreds of thousands of severe
injuries have been estimated thanks to America,s invasion and subsequent
occupation. Given that the population of the nation is 25 million, this
is an alarming number, signifying a huge percentage of the population.
The United States, on the other hand, lost 3000 energies on 9/11, out
of a population of 285 million. What we have done to Iraq pales in comparison
to the World Trade Center, in essence superceding 9/11 on a magnitude 1000
times worse, reaching titanic proportions of death, destruction and incredible
and ongoing suffering. So much suffering for a nation 9/11-innocent and
WMD free, so many monstrosities created to enrich the military industrial
complex and the Corporate Leviathan.
Crimes against humanity have been omnipresent, thanks to the human evil
festering in Washington and a complicit media whose failures betray its
motives. The warmonger junta and its minions belong at The Hague, or better,
Texas, death row. For the Iraqis, unlike America, their 9/11 still festers,
never healing or dissipating, continuing to murder, contaminate and decimate
on a daily basis, each day becoming greater in scale as the terrorist invasion
and occupation upon their nation continues to send them further down the
sewer of eternal damnation. Their nation and society will take generations
to recover; their hatred of America may never erode.
-
-
- The devastation has been so severe, and the destruction
of an entire society so systemic, that to awaken the fiction-living, bubble-inhabiting,
fantasy-aspiring, chemically-altered, stupor-existing, pill-popping American
mind from its catatonically endemic state with the unfiltered truth of
the wasteland created in Iraq would send shockwaves through our brainwashed
and acquiescent society. We have been led to believe in victory, in altruism
and the exportation of the American way of life abroad. Deceived we have
been conditioned to think all is well in Iraq, that the occupation is only
temporary, just as long as is needed to stay the course,, and that only
a few bumps in the road are in the way of instilling freedom and democracy
on a people ever-thankful for their liberty.
Through the manipulations of both the media and the Bush administration
the charade that is the Prime Minister and the Interim government breathes
life, gorging on our naïve belief that sovereignty has been passed.
Never mind that 140,000 American troops remain, going from holy city to
holy city to unearth the seeds of Armageddon from the embittered population.
Never mind that the Iraqi economy has been privatized to serve American
corporate interests, that democracy is another term for crony capitalism
and that advisers, sit at every ministry, becoming the overlords of the
Iraqi government. Never mind that oil revenues are being pilfered, that
it is being usurped by American oil conglomerates and that much needed
profits are going not to the people of Iraq but to Bush cronies, contributors
and profiteers.
The biggest scam in the history of the world is taking place, with Iraqi
oil that should belong to Iraqis disappearing, its revenues enriching American
interests, while only two percent of $18 billion in reconstruction money
has been spent. Where, then, is all this remaining money? Where is the
much marketed reconstruction of Iraq, meant to alleviate the painful life
of the average Iraqi citizen? Where are the schools, the medicines and
the improved infrastructure? Where are the electricity and the security
once promised but yet to be delivered? The trail of sorrow, the trail
of corruption and of highway robbery begins with Halliburton and others
like it, nothing but fronts to the greatest misappropriation of American
taxpayer funds and Iraqi oil revenues ever devised. The criminals in office,
through their abuse of power, are orchestrating the complete looting of
the American treasury, giving our hard earned wages to the American and
Israeli military industrial complexes and the Corporate Leviathan.
Getting rich has never been this easy, and, with an unquestioning and indifferent
American public who refuses to ask for transparency or accountability,
the pilferage of their taxes will likely persist and the evisceration of
education, healthcare and social services gutted.
Officially, the one-thousandth soldier has now died, his transfer tube,
clandestinely sneaked back under cover of warm darkness and cold indifference,
surpassing a barrier few ever thought reachable. Thanks to Kevlar vests,
6,500 can claim to be alive, though forever destined to live with the demons
of missing appendages, seared bodies and tortured souls. Unofficially,
however, the tally of dead and injured is much higher, easily pro-rated
by the day or week through the macabre accounting schemes of the same criminals
sponsored by Enron and at the helm of Halliburton. The American public,
after all, naively believes every distortion and propaganda spewed by the
Department of War, even when the first casualty of war is the truth and
when deception is part of and indeed a major tool of war. Can we possibly
imagine the same administration that lied to us into war, concocting bogus
and sexed up intelligence, that has not once told the American people the
truth about anything it has ever done and whose president can be psychoanalyzed
as a compulsive liar would ever tell us the truth about deaths and injuries?
Hiding bodies under cover of sky lit night and sneaking the maimed and
burned under the radar should be proof enough that our men and women are
getting slaughtered and torn to shreds in Iraq.
-
-
- When there has been a pattern of incessant lies coming
from the Pentagon and White House, at the same time that a barrage of propaganda
streams into our conscious, it seems unbelievable American citizens take
the word of their government as if descended from the heavens above. Perhaps
ingrained in each of us is the belief that governments are altruistic entities
with our best interests as their main focus. Maybe it is denial that leads
us to trust what cannot be trusted, a refusal to acknowledge that we are
being used and taken advantage of.
-
-
- In the end, it is possible that we do not want to learn
the truth for fear of what it might divulge, awakening us to the failure
and chaos, the unrelenting guerilla war that will never subside and whose
tenacity will only escalate, the incessant war crimes being committed in
our name and the proposition that America will lose yet again to a "third-world,
rag-tag, decrepit waste of a nation. It is pride that bites the most,
and it could help explain why the vast majority of us would rather dwell
in the fields grazing like sheep, seeking to be led by our shepherds in
government, wanting no part in escaping the fiction we have been living
for so long.
History, for those who heed its lessons, is against the occupying forces
who invade another people,s land. When history repeats itself, as it is
now, it is because those who sought what could never be achieved failed
to learn or understand the codes of human mistakes littered within the
verses of man,s short recorded time. The sands of time were not consulted,
and the price of ignorance are we today suffering. Man does not change
over short periods of time; indeed, mentally our brains and bodies haven,t
for hundreds of thousands of years. We are prevented from rapid leaps
of change by the inertia of evolution, both mental and physical. The same
creature of violence, territorial competition, instinct of survival (selfishness),
hierarchy, sexual drive, and animal passions and emotions resides inside
us. Is it any wonder war, death, violence and destruction are endemic
in our collective history and civilization, regardless of which corner
of the globe we reside from, as common in humanity as the television and
movies we watch, saturated to the brim with images and plots mirroring
the symptoms of our disease?
The devastation of the Cradle of Civilization is but the latest resurrection
of the virus we cannot purge from our human nature. And it will not be
the last, for it will continue as long as we fail to realize the reality
of who and what we truly are.
Lingering in the sands and air of Iraq are remnants of the malevolence
of human evil. The nation whose rivers Tigris and Euphrates helped spawn
human civilization has been poisoned by toxins so deadly and disease-ridden
that it will take billions of years to once more be cleansed. Thousands
of tons of Depleted Uranium (DU) munitions have been used by the US military
in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, not to mention in Gulf War I also.
The equivalent of thousands of Hiroshimas has been unleashed upon the
peoples of Mesopotamia, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of US
soldiers as well. Depleted Uranium is radiation, overwhelmingly dangerous,
and enormous amounts of it now taint the environs of Iraq. As a result,
cancers, leukemia and pandemics of disease have increased exponentially,
only to grow more pronounced in the coming years and decades. Child deformities
that have never been witnessed are now commonplace, so grotesque are the
babies born to send chills down one,s spine. The genetic code and DNA
sequence of Iraqis is being destroyed, mutating due to the radiation in
the air, the ground, the water and the food. The United States has unleashed
nuclear war onto millions of innocent people.
This devastation cannot be seen on television or read in newspapers, it
will never be mentioned by a government intent on covering up the greatest
mass genocide in history. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions,
are dead men, women and children walking, waiting for America,s radiation,
the ultimate WMD, to strike them down with one disease or another. Entire
generations of children will be born deformed or with mutated genetic codes.
Deformities in newborns will continue to rise, becoming prevalent with
the passage of time. Iraqis have been poisoned, just as Vietnamese once
were (toxic defoliating chemicals) and continue to be. They have been
sentenced to death and perpetual misery thanks to the murderers in Washington,
the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex.
And if you think they do not know what they have unleashed or what is transpiring,
think again. Once more, our government covers up what it does not want
the masses to know. One of the most devastating implications of DU is
the fact that hundreds of thousands of American soldiers have been exposed
to the radiation emanating from the same bombs, munitions, bullets and
artillery they have fired. What is happening to Iraqi civilians can also
be seen in the men and women of Gulf Wars I and II. Already, 11,000 veterans
of Gulf War I have died, most of them in the prime of their lives, and
over half of those who served, about 325,000 out of 580,400, suffer various
medical ailments related to their time in the Middle East. The same symptoms
are starting to be seen with military personnel returning home from Iraq.
Child deformities, cancers, disease, premature death and ceaseless pain
and suffering are the sacrifice America,s soldiers and new veterans must
endure to do the dirty work of the elite in government and those who run
the vast military-industrial complex.
Once again, however, the corporate media refuses to do its job. It refuses
to inform the American public or to report the truth of the devastation
that our government and military have condemned Iraq and its people with.
It fails yet again to report the betrayal of American soldiers by their
government, many of whom have been sentenced to death by their exposure
to DU. Our corporate media serves no truth telling purpose. On the contrary,
its only role is to disseminate propaganda and lies, manipulations and
brainwashing material. It hides a reality we are not supposed to see,
distracting us with brainless fiction and purposefully guiding us down
the wrong path so that lost we remain inside forests of disinformation
and ignorance. The system is at work, and its great accomplishment can
be seen in the total control of the dumbed-down, worker-bee, short-term
memory, amnesia-laden, ignorant-conditioned and apathetically-subservient
creature called the average American citizen.
In worlds once teeming with happiness and vibrancy disease now prospers.
In rivers that once birthed life only sewage and toxins now flow. The
Cradle of Civilization is now the Cradle of Devastation; its deserts glow
with radiation, not human warmth; its cities crawling with trash, not commerce;
its oil is disappearing into the pockets of westerners, not transferred
to the purses of breadwinners; its economy has been neo-liberalized and
privatized, assuring market colonization and economic strangulation; untold
thousands have died and many more have yet to perish, their children now
born mutants and deformed creatures fated by human evil; occupation will
last years, if not decades, tormenting Iraqi society every second of every
day; guerilla war has been reincarnated, sure to outlast the invading army.
The inevitable failure continues and the futility of persisting will only
exacerbate the loss of life, limb and mind. The defeat of military might
is already assured while winning battles yet losing the war. History does
not lie, nor does the strength of the human spirit. Freedom fighters, the
resistance and Iraqi patriots will not relent, they will not stop fighting
until the last group of American combat boots leaves the sand-filled ground
they love. Their land has been invaded, exploited, occupied and robbed.
Their people have been humiliated, carpet bombed, raped and dehumanized.
Their holy cities have been destroyed through the sacrilege of bombs and
bullets. Entire neighborhoods have been made to vanish, tens of thousands
now lie buried.
Human history and nature does not deceive, it does not manipulate and it
certainly does not lie. The path has been forged for millennia, leading
to constant battles for freedom and wars for sovereignty. Those invaded
and occupied never stop against those thinking themselves overlords of
alien lands, peoples and resources. The human spirit never alters, from
the dawn of time, it refuses to be conquered. Iraq is no different, and
is why through the study of history we can see the inevitable failure and
defeat of the United States.
It is already happening, and it will only continue, snowballing until ego-driven
leaders see the fallacy of their power trip and the corrosiveness of their
mistakes. Until then, the prolonged march of death down the road of perdition
will go on, killing, maiming and destroying minds, forever scarring lives
and futures.
Who will be the last man or woman to die for a mistake? Who will be the
last to die for the ineptitude of leadership and the corruption of morality
of those at the top? We can stay the course and thousands more can be killed,
thousands more can be maimed in body and mind, and thousands more mothers,
fathers, sons, daughters, wives and husbands can forever mourn the death
of their loved ones. Or we can learn from history, learn from our mistakes,
see the writing on the wall and get the hell out of the debacle that Bush
and the neocons have manufactured.
The cause is lost, the war has been determined and the inevitability that
is American defeat now lingers in the air we breathe, becoming the foul
odor penetrating our lungs. We can get out, saving thousands of lives
on both sides, moving on with our lives, preventing the blowback that is
sure to come, or we can remain, thinking in our omnipotence and our pride,
thinking of fake freedom and democracy, in our macho chest-thumping that
victory is near, and slowly but surely becoming entangled in a battle extending
its cruel tentacles outside the borders of Iraq from which our world may
never return. Thousands more will die, thousands more will suffer and
the great American Empire will come tumbling down.
The choice is up to us. It is up to America. Remember history and its
many lessons, for in it can the mistakes and errors of man be deciphered.
Remember the lasting images of the last days of Vietnam, and the 58,000
Americans and millions of native inhabitants who lost their energies in
a war of madness. Watch The Battle of Algiers (1965), a great and educational
movie about the colonization of Algeria by the French and the urban guerilla
warfare that followed. Focus your attention to Chechnya and Palestine,
for that is what Iraq is to become if America stays. Gaze upon human nature,
and realize the inevitable war of attrition that is to come by freedom
fighters against American soldiers who are trapped in an unending vicious
circle of devastation not of their own making.
Only the people can act, for those in government will not, for they care
not an ounce for you or I or the hundreds of thousands of cannon fodder
soldiers now risking life and limb that call urban and rural communities
home. They are but pawns in the game of power and control, mere expendable
grunts doing the military-industrial complex,s dirty work. Those sitting
pretty in houses old and white and in the bordello called Congress would
rather your son or daughter die than declare that a mistake has been made
and a debacle is taking place. Those that represent and those that we
elect are cowards, some of the most immoral and dishonorable people to
walk the green grasses of Earth. They will do nothing, and so we must.
-
- Upon the radiation-filled deserts of Babylon can the
ruins of invaders past be seen. In the streets and faces of Iraq the truth
is hidden. Like a giant maze that must be traversed and understood reality
awaits. From the mouths of soccer players can the writing on the wall
be seen. Who will be the last person to die for a mistake? The cradle
of devastation eagerly awaits our reply.
-
- _____
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- For further reading on the government's treatment of
soldiers:
-
- http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_4212.shtml
- Exclusive! The Exploitation of the American Soldier:
Part I of II: Of Caste Drafts and Society's Complicity, Manuel Valenzuela
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