It is a time of freedom and fear, of Gaia and of borders, of many paths and the widening of a universal toll road, emptying country and swelling cities, of the public bought into privacy and the privacy of the public sold into invisible data banks and knowing algorithms. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.

These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread.

Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.


 
Today, American minds have returned to the Black Hawk Down images of an American soldier's body being dragged through the streets in Mogadishu, Somalia. That was just one American soldier, but it ended an entire military campaign.

In Iraq yesterday, the bodies of four Americans were dragged out of their sport utility vehicle by a mob, pulled through the streets of Fallujah, and hung from a bridge. One American body was torn apart by a group of Iraqi boys, ripping at it with their bare hands.

This comes ten months after George W. Bush declared "Mission Accomplished". Since then, it has become clear that even though America has the strongest military in the world, war can never be easy and clean, even for us. Americans are not untouchable.

With these terrible images of the real violence of war, our tattered denial is finally disintegrated. War is not something to be started casually, for political purpose. We also see quite clearly that the violence in Iraq has nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden and September 11, 2001. These were Iraqis who killed and mutilated Americans, not members of Al Qaeda. They would have had no chance to do so if it were not for the American occupation.

Over a year after he began the war in Iraq, George W. Bush still has no plan for putting it to an end. Bush actually believes that America can just hand power over to an Iraqi puppet regime two months from now, and all the troubles will come to an end.

It's hard to offer any advice now that Iraq has become such a mess. We can say for sure that Bush's decision to start the war at all demonstrates an exceptional lack of foresight. So, the most plausible start of a plan to get America out of Iraq is to change the leadership that caused this problem in the first place. It's time for Bush's reign of violent folly to end. Election Day can't come soon enough.

Posted by J. Clifford Cook at 6:07 AM. # (permalink)  




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