``...I have never been this angry. Bush, the neocons, Americans in general -- I'm beyond fed up with them all. I think what I said before is true (if not truistic), that action begets reaction and the US is riding for a fall,..'' Carl Remick
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At this particular point, I can't figure out what I feel.
While the war was building up I moved between a deeply committed fury against Bush and his war, to a kind of sickening nausea at its apparent conclusion.
So that sequence is over and we move on to the next sequence, the post-combat phase. What is there to say?
Despite what Bush's war planners claim about US military power, let's take a moment and remember the Iraqi people made the US military assault a success by refusing to fight against it. Even if the success of the war plan absolutely depended on this assumption being true, that doesn't change the fact that had it not been true, there was an extreme risk of a major catastrophe for both US troops and Iraqi civilians.
The people of Iraq will probably make the US pretend efforts to re-constitute a government a useless exercise by refusing to support it. But their support is probably irrelevant, since the country's former government functioned without it, so why not the US approved government? As long as the public utilities can be restored to some semblance of working order it probably doesn't matter.
I sense these are people who have been dis-abused of every aspiration, hope or care for anything larger than the immediate well being of their own families. Is that identification and projection or what?
The war turned out almost bloodless and fast. At face value, the only value that counts, the US rightwing won hands down.
The only thing that means anything at all is what Bush and his war mongering rightwing junta say. They say the war is won, none of that other stuff mattered, the public loves them and the press is behind them. A clear shutout all around.
Now I know all of this is a monstrous lie. I can't believe this will be swallowed as a just war, for a good cause that ended in a completely unvarnished Victory of the Good over Evil. Yet there is virtually nothing that measures it otherwise is there?
I wanted some form of retribution, measure for measure to be visited on the Bush junta and everything it apparently represents about the US. But just because I want that so desperately doesn't mean that history will oblige, does it?
It just might be that there is nothing to fall out from one monstrously bad act after another issuing from the US. Sure I can't believe that, but after having been wrong, wrong, and wrong, why not? Hence I don't know what to feel.
Chuck Grimes