We are still shocked. We were never awed. We have not adjusted.

[kpete]

Vanity of Vanities: The Iraq War Seven Years Later

Saturday 20 March 2010

by: t r u t h o u t | Staff Editorial


We are still shocked. We were never awed. We have not adjusted. The senseless waste of our blood and treasure, our honor and our reputation continue. Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom - the latter unleashed seven years ago today - have morphed into a single Operation Enduring Occupation, set to bankrupt this country financially as well as morally, to destroy our own security as it has that of the over 31 million people who populate Iraq and 32 million people of Afghanistan.

The Price of Freedom

Operations sold to the American people as protecting our freedoms have been used as part of a corrupt apparatus - like every other protection racket since the beginning of time - to restrict, reduce and infringe on those freedoms, not only the civil liberties enshrined in the early English common law (habeas corpus, trial by jury ) and the Constitution's Bill of Rights (free speech, free association, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment), but also our so-called freedom to shop (the "ultimate repudiation of terrorism" dixit George Bush), undermined not only by the financial collapse and ensuing economic crisis, but also by the inviolability of the federal military budget. Our language has been deformed ("Homeland," "preventative war," "enemy combatant," "enhanced interrogation," "freedom," "security"); our society, militarized and privatized - with the legitimate government monopoly on violence outsourced to military contractors.

Just as heavily-armed Blackwater troops were immediately deployed to Katrina-devastated New Orleans, and the San Diego police department deployed the same long range acoustic devices used for crowd control in Iraq at recent town hall forum there, we expect it will only be a matter of time before other innovations tested against the Iraqis, such as predator drones, are used in operations against US citizens in our homes and cities.

And as Benjamin Franklin might have agreed ("They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." {notes for a proposition at the Pennsylvania Assembly, 1775}), perhaps we deserve what has happened to us for allowing ourselves to be cowed into colluding in the ultimate crime against humanity, one which the Nuremberg tribunal powerfully condemned: "To initiate a war of aggression ... is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

more:
http://www.truthout.org/vanity-vanities-the-iraq-war-seven-years-later57824

[patrice]

1. It is our moral duty as Americans to resist War Slavery.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

2. K&R

:kick: