(4 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
This week with all of the focus on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war, I’ve been reading a lot of analysis of the war and its legacy. I think that most of the commentators that I’ve read thus far have either missed or failed to appropriately assess the gravity of at least one legacy of the war.
I think that the crucial legacy of the Iraq war is how inconsequential the dissent of the people is to those that make the decisions. I was listening to Democracy Now the other day when they had Arundhati Roy on, and they said that 50 million people around the world had protested against the commencement of hostilities. If I am remembering correctly, I and my family joined between a million and a million and a half Americans around the country who marched in protest on that day.
The voices of millions of people didn’t make a difference.
We pointed out that they were clearly lying. It didn’t matter. They got their war on.
As time wore on and the war became increasingly unpopular, that didn’t seem to matter, either. There was no stopping the powers that be.
They tortured people and disappeared people and later bragged about it on national teevee.
There have been no prosecutions, only a “forward looking” president who has expanded some of the worst policies of his war criminal predecessors. In the pursuit of his inherited wars and his own new ones, he has committed what many see as war crimes of his own. Among them are his assassination programs, “signature” murders and the cruel and inhuman punishment of at least one whistleblower.
Nothing seems to stop these people and there is no force in our “democracy” that seems to be up to the task of making things right.
That, I think is the most momentous legacy of the Iraq war – our system seems to be a military juggernaut that is utterly unaccountable to anyone.
1 comments
I’m glad that you laid it out this way. It’s the bigger picture that so many are missing.
We are rolling along, as things get worse and worse, more out of control, and more out of our hands.
The next time that someone tells me that I am an alarmist, a hair on fire doom and gloomer, I will remember this. They are whistling past the graveyard.