Things I've Seen

Kerry on Iraq

Kerry on Iraq War is a pretty good concise rebuttal of the standard Bush talking points about John Kerry and the Iraq war.

The truth about John Kerry's consistent position on the Iraq war.

Pauline Hanson's basic failing

Andrew Denton did a pretty good job of showing the basic problem with Pauline Hanson on enough rope

Kerry's speech on Terrorism

Read it.

Rhetoric

Here's a great resource I've never seen before: American Rhetoric. mp3s of major speeches, political, historical, movies and so on...

Collateral damage

From the list of names of civilian dead in Iraq:

Rkea Hmza Mnshad Alhgebe; eleven months; F[emale]; bullets; [at] Hy Alshrta; [on] 26-Mar-03

Scrolling down the list, my gaze stuttered when I reached this point; I have an eleven-month-old daughter, though she was only five months old - to the day - when Rkea Hmza Mnshad Alhgebe died from her bullet wounds.

Ivan Karamazov understood something that we appear to have forgotten. Nothing justifies this. There is no sense, must be no sense, can never be any sense, in which this child's death is okay. The death of this child is a crime, and we're answerable.

Maybe the only alterantives to putting her in harm's way were also crimes. Maybe we were forced down this route by impossible choices, tragic choices. Maybe there was nothing else we could do. (I mean that: maybe this is true - though I personally do not think so.)

That does not make it okay. It does not make it right. It does not make it justifiable. It does not make it good. Even if we could not guiltlessly avoid her death, that baby girl's blood still cries out - and we're guilty all the same.

We've been drinking down utilitarian ethics since the day we were born, told on every side that the ends justify the means, and that if we have to do something nasty to serve a greater good in the end - well, then we have to do it and everything's fine and dandy. We may know that it's not nice; we may know it's not in itself good, but we shouldn't beat ourselves up about it. It's just one of those things, you know?

But there are things we simply should not do. Things we simply should not allow for. Things which are never 'just one of those things'. Things which we must never find acceptable, even if we find them unavoidable.

We he have done what is abhorrent - and even if we could do nothing else, it is still abhorrent. And to have drugged ourselves into such a torpor that we feel no need to abhor what we have done, no dent in our sense of the righteousness of our cause - where we let the camera pan away, and think no more of it - is to dance on this girl's grave, and eleven thousand others.

May God have mercy on our souls.

Body count

http://www.iraqbodycount.net/names.htm

'Collateral damage'?

No.

People.

Hearts and Minds part N+1

Tom Tomorrow

Civilians.

Being killed by a U.S. airstrike.

Non-combatants. Celebrating on a disabled U.S. vehicle, granted. But civilians nonetheless. Certainly not in combat against any U.S. troops.

In the foreground, a reporter just doing his job, frowning over some little technical glitch, maybe something he forgot to do...

Bang, boom. No warning. Just an incoming U.S. aerial attack. "To prevent looters from stripping the vehicle," the Pentagon later says, classifying everyone within thirty feet as "looters" and sentencing them to summary execution.

Blood splashes on the lens. The camera spins. Tiny glimpses of terrible carnage.

Without a beat, without reflection, without even a moment of minimal thought, Wolf Blitzer moves on. As do we, collectively.

And that's that. America kills innocent civilians. Lots of them. And it's no big deal now. Not controversial. No reason to ask questions or rationalize or even pretend to soul-search like the national media once did. America kills civilians. Lots of them. Just part of the fabric of things now.

Happens every day.

Losing Iraq

The war in Iraq may have moved off the headlines, but things seem to just be getting worse and worse:
CBS

The number of Americans killed and wounded has grown rapidly amid an intensifying and increasingly effective insurgency. There were more wounded over the past five months - about 4,000 - than in the first 13 months of the war, when there were about 3,300, according to Pentagon reports.

An increasingly bold and organized insurgency seized the offensive again on Tuesday as a suicide car bomb packed with artillery shells exploded outside police headquarters here, ripping into a crowd of hundreds of young men seeking to join the Iraqi police force and killing at least 47 people and wounding 114 others, police and health officials said.

But it reveals a grim truth about the nature of Iraq's evolving insurgency: Iraqis are killing Iraqis.

...It is beginning to look like, and feel like, civil war.

Sixteen months after the war's supposed end, Iraq's insurgency is spreading.

...It's not only that U.S. casualty figures keep climbing. American counterinsurgency experts are noticing some disturbing trends in those statistics. The Defense Department counted 87 attacks per day on U.S. forces in August—the worst monthly average since Bush's flight-suited visit to the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003. Preliminary analysis of the July and August numbers also suggests that U.S. troops are being attacked across a wider area of Iraq than ever before. And the number of gunshot casualties apparently took a huge jump in August. Until then, explosive devices and shrapnel were the primary cause of combat injuries, typical of a "phase two" insurgency, where sudden ambushes are the rule. (Phase one is the recruitment phase, with most actions confined to sabotage. That's how things started in Iraq.) Bullet wounds would mean the insurgents are standing and fighting—a step up to phase three.