After watching this clip, (click picture on the right) I just sat stunned, staring at my
computer screen for several minutes... It was so sad. A truly
woeful experience for the thirsty children and a depressing one
for the children taunting them. That is how I see it anyway... Two
groups of kids teasing each other... except the group in need, the
weaker ones, got the brunt of it.
Out leaders sent our children to fight and die in an unjust
war. It was just an ideological sport, sort of an experiment to
those who have no skin in the game. For the troops (other people's
children) who have to live with the horrible reality of war,
there's no competition, it's either kill or be killed. I
can't imagine living every minute of your life in fear of what
might happen to your own being or what you might do to another
living soul.
This film was appalling but I believe it is just
the tip of the iceberg. There are stories yet to be told of
the misery suffered by all who have been thrust into this hornets nest of
unreality and there will be despicable tales of depravity from both
sides.
When, if ever, there is an end to this atrociousness and the
neocon, chicken-hawks, who sit on the sidelines, out of harms way,
can no longer cheer their collection of gladiators on. We will
finally learn just how destructive this folly of theirs really
was. There will be no sadness on their part, there will be no
guilt, for they, like I've said before, HAD NO SKIN IN THE GAME.
And without this tangibility, it's only a test, a trial run, a
game of chess. For without personal presence, one remains
untouched, unfeeling and unabashed to war. War becomes just a
word, just a small little word. But for those who are smack-dab in
the middle of war, it is a macabre, grisly, grotesque encountering
and should never be allowed so haphazardly, to happen again.
thinkingblue (Click
here for a few responses to this posting)
PS: Please read the recent Maureen Dowd article below...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
No One to Lose To
Published: November 25, 2006
After the Thanksgiving Day Massacre of Shiites by Sunnis,
President Bush should go on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and give
an interview headlined: “If I did it, here’s how the civil war
in Iraq happened.”
He could describe, hypothetically, a series of naïve, arrogant
and self-defeating blunders, including his team’s failure to
comprehend that in the Arab world, revenge and religious
zealotry can be stronger compulsions than democracy and
prosperity.
But W. is not yet able to view his actions in subjunctive terms,
much less objective ones. Bush family retainers are working to
deprogram him, but the president is loath to strip off his
delusions of adequacy.
W. declined to tear himself away from his free-range turkey and
pumpkin mousse trifle at Camp David and reassure Americans about
the deadliest sectarian attack in Baghdad since the U.S.
invaded. More than 200 Shiites were killed and hundreds more
wounded by car bombs and a mortar attack in Sadr City. October
was the bloodiest month yet for civilians, and in the last four
months, some 13,000 men, women and children have died.
American helicopters and Iraqi troops did not arrive for two
hours after Sunni gunmen began a siege on the Health Ministry
controlled by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who has a
militia that kills Sunnis and is married to the Maliki
government.
Continuing the cycle of revenge yesterday, Shiite militiamen
threw kerosene on six Sunnis and set them on fire, as Iraqi
soldiers watched, and killed 19 more.
The New York Times and other news outlets have been figuring out
if it’s time to break with the administration’s use of
euphemisms like “sectarian conflict.” How long can you have an
ever-descending descent without actually reaching the civil war?
Some analysts are calling it genocide or clash of civilizations,
arguing that civil war is too genteel a term for the butchery
that is destroying a nation before our very eyes. Anthony Shadid,
The Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his
Iraq coverage, went back recently and described “the final,
frenzied maturity of once-inchoate forces unleashed more than
three years ago by the invasion. There was civil-war-style
sectarian killing, its echoes in Lebanon a generation ago.
Alongside it were gangland turf battles over money, power and
survival; a raft of political parties and their militias
fighting a zero-sum game; a raging insurgency; the collapse of
authority; social services a chimera; and no way forward for an
Iraqi government ordered to act by Americans who themselves are
still seen as the final arbiter and, as a result, still
depriving that government of legitimacy. Civil war was perhaps
too easy a term, a little too tidy.”
It will be harder to sell Congress on the idea that America’s
troops should be in the middle of somebody else’s civil war than
to convince them that we need to hang tough in the so-called
front line of the so-called war on terror against Al Qaeda.
With Iraq splitting, Tony Snow indulges in the ludicrous
exercise of hair-splitting. He said that in past civil wars,
“people break up into clearly identifiable feuding sides
clashing for supremacy.” In Iraq, “you do have a lot of
different forces that are trying to put pressure on the
government and trying to undermine it. But it’s not clear that
they are operating as a unified force.” But Lebanon was a
shambles with multiple factions, and everybody called that a
civil war.
Mr. Snow has said this is not a civil war because the fighting
is not taking place in every province and because Iraqis voted
in free elections. But that’s like saying that the Battle of
Gettysburg only took place in one small corner of the country,
so there was no real American Civil War. And there were
elections during our civil war too. President Lincoln was
re-elected months before the war’s end.
The president’s comparison to how Vietnam turned out a
generation later, his happy talk that Iraq is going to be fine,
is preposterous.
As Neil Sheehan, a former Times reporter in Vietnam who wrote
the Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Bright Shining Lie,” told me: “In
Vietnam, there were just two sides to the civil war. You had a
government in Hanoi with a structure of command and an army and
a guerrilla movement that would obey what they were told to do.
So you had law and order in Saigon immediately after the war
ended. In Iraq, there’s no one like that for us to lose to and
then do business with.”
The questions are no longer whether there’s a civil war or
whether we can achieve a military victory. The only question is,
who can we turn the country over to?
At the moment, that would be no one.
Scientist Richard Dawkins on Darwin, the Sistine Chapel,
and why the world would be better off without religion.
Interview by Laura Sheahen
BRING THEM HOME NOW
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