:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 1.05.2005 ::

:: 100,000 dead ... ::

Not from a tsunami, but from U.S. invasion
A reader commentary
From The Cumberland Times-News
By Mary Spalding, Frostburg

A huge swath of destruction levels homes and places of work, wipes out whole towns, destroys infrastructure needs such as water and electricity, and, in its wake, leaves people vulnerable to hunger, disease, and despair. Over 100,000 men, women, and children are indiscriminately killed, many more injured and left homeless, orphaned, or worse. The giant tsunami in Asia? No, the U.S. military in Iraq. Looks like the weapon of mass destruction was found in Iraq, and it is us.

The media has latched onto the tsunami as its latest tragedy of the day, regaling us Americans who sit comfortably in our armchairs with panoramas of death, devastation, and human suffering. While channel surfing (not a particularly savory choice of words, under the circumstances) last night, I couldn't seem to find a news or pseudo-news station that wasn't showing these images. The disaster, of course, is horrific; yet, isn't there something disturbing about our consumption of these voyeuristic photos? Why are they so wildly popular? Do these images simply reinforce the idea in the minds of so many of us that we are somehow God's chosen, our soil somehow to be miraculously spared the ravages of war, famine and natural disaster? Hubris!

What is perhaps even more disturbing to me, however, is how little the media has made of the Johns Hopkins Center for International Emergency, Disaster and Refugee Studies' "conservative" estimate of over 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths since our invasion of Iraq. The European press ran this story, but where is the media outcry in this country over this astronomical number? According to the study, more than half of those civilians were women and children, and most of them died from our bombs falling on their homes. Where is our compassion for those casualties? Where is our sympathy for those motherless children, those hungry orphans, those fathers no longer capable of supporting their families, those families whose homes have been obliterated?

I can only scratch my head and wonder how anyone could think unleashing such destruction could possibly win the hearts and minds of Iraqis. We have liberated them, all right: Liberated them from their homes, their health, their families, their lives. Think about it. Iraqis are not that familiar with democracy. Would democracy sound good to you if this were what you witnessed of it? How can we hope to gain the confidence of this nation when we have treated its noncombatant citizens this way? What, from these actions, will have helped convince our enemies that we are not, in fact, the "Great Satan?"

And where is the public outcry demanding that such human carnage be stopped? Of course, it's bad enough that our own sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, and friends are coming home with lost limbs or in coffins. But let this number sink in: One hundred thousand; 100,000 civilians. Civilians are people like you and me, going to work, raising a family, paying the bills. Civilians are old grandmothers and grandfathers, newborn babies, toddlers. Civilians are moms and dads and teenagers and 10-year-old girls. One hundred thousand of them. Dead. Because of us. Collateral damage? Puh-leeze. None of this needed to happen.
We're horrified that a big earthquake-generated wave killed this many people. But we should be more horrified that we have done so, and done so willingly. The U.S. military is not a tsunami. It is not a natural force; it is a force born of choices made by human beings. Christian-right beliefs to the contrary, our actions are not acts of God. This destruction has one cause: The Bush administration's poorly conceived and feebly planned "liberation" of Iraq and the blind support behind this fiasco. A tsunami has no will; it has no conscience. How can we live with ours?

posted by me

:: 1:31:00 PM [+] ::
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