For those of us not around in December of 1941, our American History books made sure to include FDR’s famous speech to the Congress and nation in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He called December 7th, 1941 ‘A day of infamy’ … and it sure was. Sadly, today’s American History books have no such remembrance of March 19th, 2003, surely another ‘Day of infamy’ for our people and those in Iraq. Only either a fool or a diehard NeoCon can dismiss that day as the beginning of the end of our republic, and the futility of this Military Industrial Empire. All the whores in the media who cheerlead the illegal and immoral attack and invasion on Iraq revealed that they were either duped or embedded into this dead end empire. The interesting thing is that so many of my activist friends knew almost categorically that what we were doing was just plain wrong! The millions who marched in February, 2003 from around this planet knew that what the Bush/Cheney gang was planning to do was horrific and outright evil! Yet, it happened… with no legal or moral consequences.
This writer can recall, vividly, waking up on the morning of March 19th fifteen years ago and turning on the boob tube. To watch the carpet bombing of Baghdad actually brought tears to my eyes… and then I just wept silently! As I wept, the CNN anchor, much the same as the MSNBC or FOX anchors, was wearing his little flag pin on his lapel as he (almost gleefully) reported the carnage. A day or so later little Katie Curic of NBC walked through the halls of her station shouting “Marines rock!” The thrill of pre-emptive war was contagious. News crews would soon be embedded with our Marines out in the field in Iraq, as the illegal and immoral invasion continued. At the command post in one of the Gulf countries (like who in the hell cares which one?) General Vincent Brooks, Deputy Commander of Operations, was front and center as spokesperson for our invasion. He stood before an audience of reporters from major news outlets (most of them like lemmings) and reported on our advances into Iraq. Sometimes he had to explain what war criminal Rumsfeld referred to as the Collateral Damage from our airstrikes, whereupon thousands of civilians were either killed or maimed for life. Of course, like with all our military personnel there, perhaps hundreds or thousands of miles from any threat or action, Brooks wore the popular camouflage uniform as if he was right in the thick of battle. What hypocrisy!
We who knew better, whether as activists, educated citizens or alternative journalists, predicted that this heinous act by our empire would have the blowback that the late Chalmers Johnson wrote about in his 2000 book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. One need not even have to reiterate the costs of this all, in lives lost, economies (Iraq’s and ours) destroyed and of course the rise of fanatical Islamist terror throughout the region. Surely this March 19th, 2003 ‘Day of infamy’ has become a ‘Generation of infamy’. Will my fellow citizens who love this country as I do finally wake up and demand we pull back this empire. before it destroys all the world?
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