billmon on Riverbend

i just had to link to this post because i think he does an amazingly accurate description of our national shame where Iraq is concerned. i know i feel deeply and bitterly ashamed of myself. i have referred to myself as a lazy-ass chicken-shit in the past. that being said, i do hope i will rise to the occasion more and more. my life has already changed soooo much in the last 4-5 years. everyday i ask myself what i should be doing. life will never be the same. and still, i say that from the comfort of a peaceful, abundant lifestyle. will i stand up and be counted???

........Riverbend's topic is the Lancet study on war deaths in Iraq, and she curtly
eviscerates the conservative Holocaust deniers:

......We literally do not know a single Iraqi family that has not seen the violent death of a first or second-degree relative these last three years. Abductions, militias, sectarian violence, revenge killings, assassinations,
car-bombs, suicide bombers, American military strikes, Iraqi military raids, death squads, extremists, armed robberies, executions, detentions, secret prisons, torture, mysterious weapons -- with so many different ways to die, is the number so far fetched?

Nor does she have any kind words for any of the rest of us here in God Bless America, whether on the left or the right, who posture and bloviate while her country dies a slow, agonizing death:

.......They write about and discuss Iraq as I might write about the Ivory Coast or Cambodia -- with a detachment and lack of sentiment that, I suppose, is meant to be impartial. Hearing American politicians is even worse: They fall between idiots like Bush -- constantly and totally in denial, and opportunists who want to use the war and ensuing chaos to promote themselves.

That last one hits too close to home. A bulls eye, in fact. I've probably been as guilty as anyone of thinking of the war as some sort of strategy game, or a domestic political issue or a fascinating, if bloody, story -- a news junkie's next fix. When you're 8,000 miles and an existential light year away from the war, it's easy to distance yourself, intellectually and emotionally, from the stench of blood and the bloated corpses.There's also a natural tendency, which I touched on yesterday, to make it all about us -- to consciously or unconsciously treat the Iraqis like extras
(or worse, bloody mannequins) in a Mad Max remake produced and directed by
Americans.

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