Men With Guns & Stolen Gas

[unhappycamper]

Me and my Brother after I yelled at Bush (who was on his way to Iraq).


Men With Guns & Stolen Gas
by Evan M. Knappenberger | Thu, 09/06/2007 - 7:00pm

In my yearlong experience as an analyst hunting down ‘Al-Qaeda’ cells north of Baghdad, and physically guarding the fields of the area, I came to several opportune conclusions.

The first was really more of an observation: that there is no massive network of jet-setting super-villains who will “follow us home” in the aftermath of Iraq. Al-Qaeda in Iraq is just a name, and has almost no real connection with anything outside of Iraq. To think otherwise is folly, and I am willing to debate this only with people who have spent as much time interrogating and researching as I have. The official assessments given to news outlets, congress, and the cabinet claiming vague threats thousands of miles away are as counter-intuitive as you might expect from an administration that not only dismisses opposing analysis, but axes the bearers of ill-tidings. I invite any official to spend a night on Towerguard on Camp Taji with the smoke of burning trash and the port ‘o-potty lake with nothing to do but talk to Iraqis, face to face, unarmed.

A good number of surviving Iraqis who have been labeled ‘the terrorists’ are mostly farmers and ex-army officers; they cry every night because their families have been threatened and killed. What drives them to criminal action is the same thing that drives your deluded neighbors: they want money (without really working for it); security (at the barrel of a gun); and the power to enforce their beliefs on those they encounter. The ‘AQ’ leaders? They are simply old men in dishdasha’s. They steal gas for their generators (as there is no electricity), and pay their sons and nephews as agents while trying to manipulate the anarchic situation which we created in our zeal to topple a dictator. I posit that there is no concrete ‘Al-Qaeda in Iraq’; only old men that could be comical Tony Soprano imitators, and their unemployed nephews.

The second conclusion I have come to is retrospective, and of a more stoic nature. I began with the premise that most Americans’ intentions are generally good. By good, I mean morally sound according to a system of philosophy which values human life over senseless violence. How, then, do we commit atrocities in the name of freedom and justice?

It is immediately clear there is little fundamental difference between men with guns and stolen gas (”Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq,” I mean) and men with guns and stolen gas (war-supporting Americans, I mean) except some very circumstantial power vacuums. In situations that destroy men’s ethical judgment there can be no morality. I believe we can assure ourselves that the occupation of Iraq is one of these situations. And if you doubt it, then I am willing to call you deluded or uninformed, as you probably have not been an analyst in Iraq lately.

The effects of this moral shift have been felt by everyone in the world. In our own country, war-supporters have altogether abandoned the arguments they used to drown out initial opposition to the war: deposing dictators, freedom, bringing terrorists to justice. War rhetoric has seen corresponding erosion in the lexicographic and semantics departments, and is now one stale bromide: “win the war!” Compare this to the epic calls for Democracy that led us into this mess. Now, as more and more of the intellectuals both in and out of the service of the Executive branch abandon their now-impotent war rhetoric, all we have is a numbers game which General Petraeus and his subordinates play with the lives of millions of people: statistics of how many attacks a day, how many dead bodies.

In a war that is morally wrong, when we cannot possibly justify the loss we have initiated, there can be no statistical hiatus from our own guilt. The winning of this war is impossible, the same way that multiplying large sums of numbers by a negative function will always make it negative. Those that rally around the numbers, those that manipulate statistics in an attempt to minimize our ethical immorality, they are nothing but cowards who cannot face their own part in the destruction of Iraq and the death of over 1,000,000 Iraqis.

[krispos42]

1. First kick, first rec, and happily. n/t

[Maq]

2. well said......second rec

Read the whole thread.

You have someones attention.
A start