Our deathtrap

Yesterday James Carroll wrote an article in The Boston Globe that included this snapshot of us:

 "Iraq, above all, is our prison, the place where America has taken its own self hostage. Thousands and thousands of men, women, and children who meant us no harm are now dead because of our striking out so blindly. And many more are living on the edge of disaster. But we Americans, too, are victims of our mistake. It is not only that options in Iraq seem so limited (How, exactly, do we get out? Well, by getting out), but also that the deathtrap of that war has come to define a vast shrinking of possibility, as the shape of our new century begins to actually show itself."

Indifferent America

(The) percentage of United States income going to poor countries remains near rock bottom: 0.14 percent. Britain is at 0.34 percent, and France at 0.41 percent. (Norway and Sweden, to no one's surprise, are already exceeding the goal, at 0.92 percent and 0.79 percent.)...

in the last two months, the Bush administration has reduced its contributions to global food aid programs aimed at helping hungry nations become self-sufficient...

(The) United States, which gave 2 percent of its national income to rebuild Europe after World War II, now engages with the rest of the world only when it perceives that its own immediate interests are at stake...

The government spends $450 billion annually on the military, and $15 billion on development help for poor countries, a 30-to-1 ratio.

(From a NY Times editorial on December 23, 2004)

A grieving mother to TIME

TIME magazine does not "get it." Half of this country apparently does not get it. Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq in April gets it. And says so to TIME. Here is an excerpt from her letter:

"Oh yes. George W. Bush awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom to three more architects of the quagmire that is Iraq. Thousands of people are dead and Bremer, Tenet and Franks are given our country's highest civilian award. What's next?

"To top everything off—after it has been proven that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, there were no ties between Saddam and 9/11 and over 1,300 brave young people in this country are dead and Iraq lies in ruins— what does Time Magazine do? Names George W. Bush as its "Man of the Year." The person who betrayed this country into a needless war and whom I hold ultimately responsible for my son's death and who was questionably elected, again, to a second term, is honored this way by your magazine."

Excerpt from a BBC report on the border

Next door, there were five Latin American men grappling with long ladders. They had come to clear our neighbour's gutters, still clogged with autumn leaves.
They were wearing blue jackets emblazoned with the company logo, The Gutter Gang - and were trying to understand what their employer was saying in broken Spanish.
On the other side of the road, two Mexicans - or were they from Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala or El Salvador, it is hard to tell - were using a machine to blow leaves into a large heap.
Antonio the tree man was due to turn up at our house at ten o'clock, to cut some dead branches. He is from Colombia. His partner Jose comes from Chile. Our plumber Francisco is from Bolivia. His wife Rosa works at a McDonalds in Maryland.
There is a film out this year called A Day Without Mexicans. Based in California, it imagines how the Golden State wakes up one day to find that all of its Mexican migrants have disappeared. There is no one left to flip the burgers, clean the loos, blow the leaves or nanny the children.
For 24 hours, life in California grinds to a halt. Mass hysteria breaks out.

--Matt Frei, BBC Washington correspondent, 12/18/04

An Athenian re-run?

We might recall what happened to ancient Athens, perhaps the greatest flowering of civilization. In just three generations, one small city - by today's standards, anyway - nurtured democracy, became a superpower and produced some of the greatest artists, writers, philosophers and historians the world has ever known.

Yet Athens became too full of itself. It forgot to apply its humanity beyond its own borders, it bullied its neighbors, and it scoffed at the rising anti-Athenianism. To outsiders, it came to epitomize not democracy, but arrogance. The great humanists of the ancient world could be bafflingly inhumane abroad, as at Melos, the My Lai of its day.

Athens's overweening military intervention abroad antagonized and alarmed its neighbors, eventually leading to its defeat in the Peloponnesian War. It's not so much that Athens was defeated - it betrayed its own wonderful values, alienated its neighbors and destroyed itself.

-- Nicholas Kristof, in New York Times, Dec. 11, 2004

The Abyss

From "Afraid To Look in the Moral Abyss" by James Carroll In the Boston Globe, 12/7/04:

"Whole cities are destroyed, populations displaced. The hope of Iraqi elections is mortally compromised. "Coalition" members are dropping out. The mission of American force is to secure the country, but it can't secure itself. The performance of US intelligence has been consistent: Its strategic failures caused the war, and its tactical ignorance of the enemy is losing the war... The war itself is the American war crime. But that is lost in the 'normalcy' of the news."

From fringe to the seat of power

"One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the
fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the oval office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is Frthe danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts."

--Billl Moyers, Dec 4, 2004, at Harvard Medical School

Ancient insight, today's statistics

"They made a wasteland and called it peace,"
Tacitus (c. 56-120 A.D.)

As of 11/30/04 3:52 pm EDT:

American Deaths in Iraq:
 
Since war began (3/19/03): Total, 1255; in combat, 986
Since "Mission Accomplished" (5/1/03): Total, 1118; in combat, 876
Since Capture of Saddam (12/13/03): Total, 793, in combat, 682
Since Handover (6/29/04): Total, 394; in combat, 354

American Wounded in Iraq:

Total Wounded: Recorded, 9326; estimated, 15000-17000

Iraqi deaths officially reported, minimum, 14571, maximum, 16750
Real total, according to the Lancet report: over 100,000.