February 19, 2007, The Rape of Sabrine
I don't know why I knew River would be writing something today, but, after a long layoff, she posted a few hours ago, on the subject of a young woman who was raped by [our allies, American trained] Iraqi security forces. Read this... from Iraqi blogger River Bend. Just. Read. It.
I'll give you the last paragraph, but that does not excuse you from READING IT.
Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts: It’s worse. It’s over. You lost. You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq’s first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile.
Comments
TD, thank you for this hear-rending link. It continually amazes me how we ignore the lessons of the past, and by that I mean not necessarily the lessons about what happen, but those about how to think about what happened. Imagine a history of WWII, for instance, that focussed solely on the perceptions and images of the war as seen entirely on the american home front? Would our losses in the Pacific, for instance, be revisioned as victories? Those who pointed out the debacles of the Philippines or Wake or Guam, would we accuse them of aiding the enemy? When we think about past wars, we pretty much deal with the human cost, battles, strategies, etc. Most of this is missing from the current debate on the war. Baghdad Burning brings us back to the ground level where we have to assess what the fuck our troops have been ordered to do over the past few years. Reckless, insane patrols from built-up mini-colonies (replete with American fast food, etc.) into territory that may be called friendly, but cannot be understood as such in light of our demented modus operandi. Most people cannot name the battles, the maneuvers, the strategies and tactics used over the past years because they have failed, over and over, and so they have been obscured from view. We cannot even criticize our military, the "greatest in the world." Why is it the greatest in the world? A few months of training? An officer corps that has been de-professionalized and demoralized by the Bushivite commissars? Its notable usage of the wrong materiale for the wrong tactics at the wrong times? Its ability to prevail on its civilian leaders to take military reality into account? One thing we're great at, though, is screwing our own troops for the profit of others, something reminiscent of the black marketeer in Catch-22, who engineered the bombing of his own comrades in order to shift the price of cotton in the Cairo casbah (I'm not sure I got that reference right). OK, I'll stop ranting. From now on, let's begin all discussions of the war with an overview of what is actually happening there. Over and out.
Posted by feudalsocialite at February 20, 2007 9:30 PM