be the change you want to see in the world

It is one thing to have gangsters come to your neighborhood, plunder your goods, wreck your home, threaten you, kill your family and intimidate you into compliance. But it is quite another thing when they don’t leave, take up residence, and start to draw flies. Flies of the most abhorrent kind.

The biggest crime of the Iraq war is that it is not an “Iraq” war. The key to this understanding lies in the war on terror catch phrase popularized by George W. Bush and his followers: “We’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.”

It is well established that, as reprehensible as Saddam Hussein was, he had no substantial connection with al qaeda. By invading Iraq, the US took the fight with al qaeda to a theatre of war that is not the United States. On the face of it, a good plan. But there’s a problem.

The problem with taking the war with al qaeda to another theatre of war is that the chosen theatre, Iraq, is full of people with lives, loved ones, property and aspirations. Or, it was. There are now substantially fewer people in Iraq. There is markedly less property. Families have been shattered and decimated at levels we may not know for years to come. Civilian casualties are not currently calculable, but good estimates put them in the tens of thousands, perhaps more than a hundred thousand.

Iraq was a country in the hands of a dictator. Its modern, oil-financed infrastructure had deteriorated somewhat due to the costs of Iraq-Iran war, the first Gulf War, as well as neglect stemming from UN sanctions and the resultant choices by Saddam on how to deploy scarce resources.

But the outcomes of this current conflict have left Iraq a broken country, its infrastructure razed, its history plundered, its legacy spent and its spirit hostage to terror that streams in from outside and bubbles up on the inside, born from the pain and frustration of gross injustice.

This is the greatest crime of the Iraq War. When you put aside all the phony, jingoistic reasons for going to Iraq you are left with a few that stand scrutiny. There is the realpolitic reason of regional hegemony, which includes the goal of bases with striking proximity to Iran, Syria, et al. Relatedly there is the global economic reason of access to and control of Iraq’s oil. And there is the diversionary reason of creating a theatre of war that will draw jihadists and others to Iraq instead of allowing them to concentrate on other projects, namely attacks on US soil.

Pardon me. Oh, excuse us. We’ll be using your country for our war from here on in. Sorry about that. Try to stay indoors. In the basement. Behind a bomb shelter door. You might be ok.

Not only did the US attack and largely destroy a country with no connection to its current War on Terror (a great crime in itself), but now they remain, which is an even greater crime. The greatest crime of the entire scenario.

America, get out of Iraq. You are drawing flies of the most abhorrent kind. You are bad neighbors. You are not wanted. Your goals for Iraq are not the goals of Iraq.

Get out.

Where is the mainstream outrage?

More than 6,000 corpses found in Iraq in five months
By Kadhem al-Attabi
Jun 5, 2006, 19:00 GMT

Baghdad - Every morning as ambulance cars and police vehicles rush to the hospital in Bab al-Mo’adham carrying corpses of unidentified victims, a queue of women, teenagers and elderly men forms in front of the morgue as people search for their relatives, fearing they might be found among the bodies.

Usually, one of their family member is lost or kidnapped by gunmen and then turns up after a week or so later as a corpse with gunshot wounds on the body, a further victim of the latest wave of sectarian violence that has swept through Iraq in recent months.

Iraq’s main morgue had never received that huge number of corpses on a daily basis - not since modern Iraq was established in 1920s.

According to statistics by Iraq’s morgues institute, 6,002 corpses were found in the past five months: 1,068 in January, 1,110 in February, 1,294 in March, 1,155 in April and 1,375 in May.

Most of the corpses had gunshot wounds, while others showed marks of burns or electrocution.

Morgues institute officials said that since the institute was established in 1927, it had never received such a huge number of corpses as currently, with the daily average now 35 to 50 per day.

Before the US-led coalition invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the institute used to receive only seven to 10 corpses per day.

In occupied and conflict-ridden Iraq, the morgues have become the daily destination for at least 100 Iraqis looking for their relatives who were kidnapped by militiamen or who were killed in explosions.

‘I came from al-Mada’en in search of my son Saad who was lost 12 days ago and we could not identify him in the photos that we saw inside the hall,’ said Ahmed Ibrahim, 62.

‘For two months, I have been visiting here in search of my husband whom I don’t know anything about since he left for work in al-Shorja marketplace in Baghdad,’ said 41-year-old Elham Khalil.

An official at the morgues institute said that unclaimed corpses are buried in the state cemetery, Karbala cemetery, Najaf cemetery and Mohammed Sakran cemetery in Baghdad.

He said that the burial procedures take place following judicial authorization that requires maps for locating the burial sites in the event that the bodies need to be located later on.

‘Most of the corpses we receive are brought in by police patrols who usually find the corpses in far-off and waste areas and at the gates of the cities, handcuffed, some with gunshot wounds and torture marks,’ the employer said.

Spokesman for the Iraqi Health Ministry said that the ministry has required health officials in Baghdad not to receive any unidentified corpses and that unidentified corpses should only be received by the morgues institute.

‘This will make it easier for citizens seeking their lost relatives,’ he said, adding that the institute keeps information and pictures of the corpses. He said most of the corpses were males.

Sectarian-based violence has mounted in Iraq since the bombing of al-Askary mosque in Samarra last February. The formation of a new government with 37 ministers last month had raised hopes that the violence might end.

But the key posts of interior, defense and national security ministers who are expected to play a key role in tackling sectarian violence, have not yet been agreed on and their duties are currently only being performed by interim ministers.

© 2006 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur

© Copyright 2003 - 2005 by monstersandcritics.com.
This notice cannot be removed without permission.

Leaving aside the initial preponderence of global opinion against the idea of invading Iraq, the Iraq “experiment” should now be judged by its own criteria for success. Viewed in this manner, the process is an abject failure. Full stop.

Combatting Terrorism: The Madrid and London bombings; plots that have either succeeded or been foiled in several Middle east countries including Jordan; ongoing and highly lethal terrosist activity against Iraqi civilians who side with the government there, growing Palestinian militancy, ongoing Islamic militancy in South Asia; these are some examples of the lack of positive impact the Iraq war has had on Terrorism as social and political phenomenon. The obverse argument is more likely to be true: the US has succeeded in growing Terrorism.

Fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here: This is a specious category in the first place, since the real cost to American society has been enormous. The globe is now one. There is in fact no “over there”, and the costs hit just as hard regardless of the geographic arena. The costs are pushing 300 billion dollars, and far more American lives have been lost or forever ruined by this war than 9/11, the largest single terrorist attack in history (with the exception of Nagasaki). But let’s draw an analogy here. US forces have repeatedly criticized as “cowardly” opponents who locate their bases, safe houses and weapons caches in civilian areas. I wish someone would explain how this differs from the idea of “fighting them over there”. Rather than face enemies at home, where the likelihood of mercy for civilian populations is nil, the United States relocates the conflict to a foriegn nation. They go to an Islamic nation and mix themselves in with the citizenry there, ensuring any attacks on them will result in civilian casualties. Then, when said casualties occur, they criticize their enemies for killing their own people. Ironic, isn’t it? Fighting them over there is really no different than locating your base in a civilian area, unless you believe an Iraqi civilian is worth less than an American civilian (which is clearly the case for US leadership, but one wonders about US citizenry). 50-100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in this conflict.

Weapons of Mass Destruction: This topic has been addressed continuously, so I’ll be quick. Purported WMD are either not found, never existed or moved on. All three scenarios are outrageously bad, for their own reasons. On the other hand, the US military is an actual, functional WMD. Their aircraft have strewn uranium across Iraq, repeatedly killed hundreds with single and clusters of conventional bombs, slowly but surely killed thousands and thousands more, razed the infrastructure of Iraqi society and economy to the ground. What IS a WMD? I say the proof is in the pudding.

Spreading freedom and Democracy: This is a euphemism for US foreign policy goals, but one could give them the benefit of the doubt and read it literally as an attempt to provide an exmaple of how civilized nations act, and to foster the same sort of behaviour abroad. Here’s three examples, one for each read:

Siding with Iran

Iraq supports Iran’s right to use nuclear technology for peaceful means and wants a diplomatic solution to the standoff between the Islamic Republic and the United States over uranium enrichment, said Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari.

He also said Iraqi territory will not be used to threaten Iran.

The United States contends Iran aims to develop nuclear weapons, and has led the calls for that country to abandon its program.

Tennis team killed for wearing shorts

THE coach of the Iraqi national tennis team and two of his players were shot dead in Baghdad, apparently for wearing shorts, in a district where Islamic radicals have started to enforce brutal, Taleban-style law.

Hussein Ahmed Rashid was shot at close range with two of his players, Nasser Ali Hatem and Wissam Adel Auda, in the al-Saidiyah neighbourhood, a national Olympic Committee official said.

One of the players, wearing shorts, had left the car to drop off some items at a laundry. When he returned to the vehicle, gunmen in a grey saloon car swerved and blocked the players’ car, witnesses said.

Three men in civilian clothes surrounded the car and ordered the passengers to get out. When they refused, one of the men produced a revolver and shot the players. The coach sat helplessly in the back while the assailants dragged out the players’ bodies and dumped them in the road. Then one of the assailants cocked a handgun and shot the coach in the head.

The dead men were wearing green sports jerseys emblazoned with the word “Iraq�. One of the shirts bore an Olympics patch.

An Iraqi National Guard checkpoint was about 100m from the site of the ambush, but the soldiers did nothing, witnesses said. They added that gunmen had used the same car in the past two months during attacks on the owner of an electrical parts shop and a pedestrian. Local people suspect that the murders have been carried out by the Islamic militants roaming al-Saidiyah and the adjoining district of al-Amariyah.

Radicals have been leaving leaflets at homes, forbidding women to drive or go outside without being veiled. The leaflet also warns men not to wear shorts or dress in T-shirts bearing images or English writing.

In addition, the leaflet forbids men from wearing goatee beards and anyone from buying mayonnaise. The leaflet threatens violators with death.

Islamic militants hold immense power in western and southern Baghdad, and they have been known to kill barbers who give American-style haircuts. The area is regarded as being as off limits to Westerners, where a visit can spell instant death.

Details surface of U.S. ‘atrocity’ in Iraq

It is alleged that a small squad of Marines killed at least three separate groups of people in cold blood — five men in a taxi and two larger groups, including women and children, in two houses in the city of Haditha. It appears to have been a deliberate set of reprisal killings after a Marine was killed by insurgents, according to reports pieced together from those who have attended the briefings.

“This was not an accident,� said Minnesota Republican John Kline, a former Marine colonel who was briefed about the killings along with other members of the House of Representatives armed-services committee. “This was not an immediate response to an attack. This would be an atrocity,� he told The New York Times.

Creating Stability in the Middle East: See above.

I don’t mean to be flip, but these results are just so bad that they exceed the predictions of most naysayers at the outset. The US has lost the moral authority to lead gained from WWII and the stare down of the Soviet Union. It is time for the world to look elsewhere for leadership.

People under the age of 20 have this massive hole in their soul. And they have built their personalities around cynicism. Cynicism means, simply, aping or putting into an ironic form, mocking, existing institutions, instead of building institutions of your own. What I’ve discovered is that because these people have such a deep need for something to believe in that if someone like you, who has a powerful set of beliefs, or someone like I, who has a powerful set of beliefs—I’ve been searching the Gods all my life and now I know them, the Gods inside of us. Or I feel I do. Someone like me or you who can come along and show these people that there is a meaning to life, that there are things worth believing in, that there are things worth being passionate about, they respond immediately. Now, we’re either going to have the new Adolf Hitler’s coming along, who know how to manipulate this need, and do it with the new nationalisms and the new tribalism’s, and the new hate groups, or we’re going to have a you or a me, who will come along and pour a positive message—a positive sense of something to believe in, a positive crusade for emotionality.

The only messiahs who exist are as human beings. We human beings are all basically cockroaches at heart. That is to say, we’re insecure when we’re alone by ourselves, we have all kinds of self-doubts, we have our depressions, and we have all kinds of reasons to believe that we’re nobody at all. But it’s the “nobodys-at-all” who become the Isaiahs of the world, it’s the “nobodys-at-all” who become the Einstein’s of the world, it’s the “nobodys-at-all” who become the Jesus Christ’s of the world. And it’s incumbent on us, having learnt the lesson—we’ve been able to learn a lesson from the history of Christianity. Jesus put together a movement that was based on respect for the humble and the poor, on seeing their possibilities, on seeing that they had to be treated as human beings too.

But what happened to his message? When it was taken over 322 years later by Constantine, Constantine had the cross painted on the shields of his men. And suddenly, Christianity became an excuse for mass murder. Christ would never have allowed that. OK, we know that now. And we know that Christ was just as human as anybody else. Why did he cry out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” when he was on the cross? Because he was insecure about everything he had believed in up until then. He was as human as we are.

It’s up to human beings to be the messiahs. We’re the only ones who are there to do it. And we have to do it. We have to do it. Because if we don’t do it, someone with an equal belief and passion to ours, who believes that the way to achieve things is through the old animal way (…) built into our limbic system, built into the lower parts of our brain, who knows that the best way to unite people is by uniting them in hatred against an outside group; and uniting them in mass murder.

We have to come along before that person comes along. We have to fill that void, and we have to fill it with positivity. It’s about digging into the elemental passions (…) All of this plays a part in trying to give to the new generation a movement that’s based on something extraordinarily passionate. That you can powerfully believe in. That you can use to advance humanity tremendously, absolutely tremendously—but that excises, deliberately, the God of War.

When you find the Gods inside yourself, you’ll find the God of War. You’ll find the God of bloodlust. You’ll find the God of genocide. And he will be one of the most powerful passions in you. And you have to knife him out of existence. You have to freeze him in his own private Hell, and make your positive Gods the Gods that take you over.
And by “the Gods that take you over” I mean you have to find those passions that are so much more powerful than you, than anything you’ve been allowed to express in your life, and making those things the things you work on. In other words, not putting off until you’re 40 or 50 the things you feel passionate about at the age of 15 and 16 - but going directly to those things, and trying to implement them when you’re 20.
Pass ‘Go’. Forget the 200 dollars. Go directly to Park Place. And put your life there, on the line, with all the emotion and power and passion and insight in you.

And fuck the God of War.

- Howard Bloom

Michel Foucault opens his famous The Order of Things with a fantastical taxonomy, derived from a Borges fable:

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that
shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.

The great thing about social media is that there is room for the one and the many. My listing of categories on this blog is particular to me and me alone. I chose this taxonomy, and have christened it a “taxono me” because it is mine and mine alone. It makes sense to me, my life, my way of looking at things.

Further down the page is the cloud of deliciousness. The tags listed there are a hybrid taxonomy of all my bookmarks. It is made up of tags I chose and tags chosen for me by the larger group of people inhabiting the delicious space. It is a tagsonomy.

Out of the taxono me comes the tagsonomy. The particularity of the one is conditioned by the absorbing and “mashing-up” influence of the many.

Interestingly, nowhere in this formula is an authority of final appeal. Isn’ this the way it should be? Individual expression has its space preserved for it. The solitary blog and its taxono me is free and available to all, and the benefits we all gain from allowing the individual to speak, regardless of how nutty they may seem at the time - are realized. On the other hand, the tagsonomy swallows the individual, making it part of itself and adjusting, ever so slightly. But no one force hands down taxonomy in the new space of social media.

This is significant, and something the programmers and activists who are nurturing this space should be proud of and fight to preserve. It is a giving thing. A generous thing that preserves space for the one while never allowing the one a final say.

“Well, there is really something to be said for the
exception, assuming it never wants to become the rule.”

- F. Nietzsche
#76, Part II of Gay Science.