I don't know if this has been raised before, but it needs to be raised again if so. Body of War, a documentary directed by Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue, tells the story of army veteran Tomas Young, who sustained paralyzing injuries shortly after touching down in country in Iraq. An amazing man, an honorable vet, and a tragedy. This administration's abuse of trust is a blight on American history that will not soon be forgiven. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Co. - all owe every parent, sibling, spouse, lover or friend a personal apology, and then they need to go to hell. Deeply moving. Watch for the story.
That is a disaster... I wonder how a human can cope with such a terrible loss. I hope Science improves to an extent that we can remove the word "physical disability" from our dictionary. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and other neocons should be punished. War is BAD. War is a waste of human life. "War is the health of the State" --- Randolph Bourne Unbelievable... Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed, and many more have endured serious physical and mental injuries, families devastated, entire cities destroyed. All because of some neocons waiting for the second coming of Jesus. I believe human beings are better than this. And we have to evolve where we can truely be brothers, irrespective of race, religion or nationality.
Gauharjk, I agree with you that this is a disaster, obviously, and I mourn the needless loss of life everywhere. A report by the BBC is now listing anywhere from 150,000 to over 1.5 m loss of Iraqi life (lousy statistics - depends on who you ask: article here). That said, to attribute this all to a twisted version of Christian theology (as with your other thread as well) just misses the mark, it seems to me. In brief, it has been my experience that politics - actions on the ground - rarely happen over ideologies, ideas, religion. Politics happen over a struggle for material interest. In the case of the "Bush Doctrine," I think more of the neoconservative agenda can be attributed to a flawed Wilsonian regression: that one can impose some kind of western style democracy, anywhere in the world, by force of arms; that having done that, one can liberalize a nation such that it will be friendly to the west. That by doing so, America can become a truly global hegemon, imposing the first Pax since Brittanica, and before that, Romana. The key difference among these various would-be regional or global empires, and the key flaw, looking at this solely from a clinical, and not a moral perspective, is that while Rome and Great Britain plied native populations, generally, with cooptation into the mother system, Bush and Co. just don't give a damn, and, believing in infinite American might, would impose the Pax by the threat of power*** (among troublesome populations) or largesse (among "good" subject populations). It's an idiocy, and if anyone espousing such a thing would merely look to history, it would be shown. But it seems to me this is the spine of this administration's agenda, not religion, though certainly religion is a convenient way to justify actions in some populations' minds. But no more than Constantine's "conversion" to Christianity can be attributed to a sudden inspiration of faith, as opposed to a realization that the particular brand of the "righteous king" extant at the time could be useful in justifying his wars of conquest, can we really conclude the Apocalyptic vision publically espoused by Hagee, etc., is really driving things. *** See Charles Krauthammer's views, for example, on "America as a Hegemon" - in a word, "fuck 'em". Beyond the moral flaw in Krauthammer's views, he's wrong. This "hegemon" is stretched to the snapping point, globally.
They are all Trotskyites friend. They see war as tactic, a method. Like brushing your teeth or driving your car. The problem is, they see it as the most effective method to obtain their ideological goals.