Just Look at What We've Done - 30,000th. post

[sinkingfeeling]

I really don't think I can stand it anymore. My mind is filled with visions of the death, misery, and destruction my country has inflicted on the Middle East. I say Middle East because the results of our 'Project for the New American Century' have expanded beyond the borders of Iraq.

I came to DU after reading something Will Pitt had posted way back in late 2002. I was seeking anybody that agreed with me that invasion was the worst possible thing we could do. I found them on DU. I picketed, I protested, I marched on Washington, crying out, "Not in My Name". But it was futile.

I still have some travel books from the late 1990's that tell of the ancient wonders one might visit in Iraq and Syria. I wonder how many remain. There are pictures of a modern day Iraq under Saddam before the first Gulf War and the devastating sanctions that killed Iraq's economy and took the lives of a million people, mostly women and children. At that time, Iraqi women were able to vote, hold political office, own property, obtain an education, and those rights were a part of the Iraq's 1970 constitution! People had universal health care and educational opportunities. They lived in a secular state, side by side with various religious sects.

But G.W. Bush and the evil being, Cheney, could not be denied. And what is the result of a decade of 'war' and occupation? First there were the IEDs and suicide bombers that killed people trying to go about their lives ruined by unemployment, the disbanding of Iraq's army, the lack of electricity and clean water. Pensions were gone, as were government subsidies. Then more and more violence between the Sunnis and Shias. No body capable of ending it. Now these poor people live among the rubble of bombed buildings and cruel religious laws as ISIS or ISIL continues to grow. Thanks to the USA who created them and armed them.

There are 2 million widows and 5 million orphans created by this seemingly endless war. Women have lost most of their rights and are victims of men.

I think about the young Syrian boy I met in Alexandria, Egypt two years ago. His beaming smile and joy at finding an American to talk to. His parents had sent him to Egypt to avoid him being taken into the Syrian army. I wonder if his parents are still alive and I wonder if he isn't a part of ISIS now. The USA did this. We treated people in the Middle East as if they were animals. We starved their children and droned them and bombed them. And many Americans are amazed at how fast ISIS has grown.

I want to run, I want to flee this country. I want to stand on a hill and scream, "Please forgive me". I don't think I can stand much more.

[woo me with science]

1. We don't do this. Our corrupt, corporate-purchased, criminal government does.

Part of why I keep coming back to DU, despite the thick Third Way/corporate propaganda machine that lives here now, is the voices of the many good, principled Democrats who insist on telling the truth and fighting to keep alive the principles that made most of us Democrats in the first place.

We don't have a representative government anymore. We have an oligarchy, and a vast propaganda machine that keeps most of the country unaware of what is really being done in our name.

I think your post would have many more recs if a Democrat weren't in office, but we are still fighting the propaganda that tells us to circle the wagons depending on which team is in office.

The truth is that systemic, bipartisan, monied corruption drives the madness you describe.

I hope we are in a learning phase. As long as they keep us divided and excusing the continuation of this madness as long as it comes from our own side, change will never come. But I think we are learning, and something is rumbling in America that wants to reject the corruption. I hope we're learning.

Congratulations on 30,000 posts.