Powerful stuff Debra, in Digest 196. What war we wage (and I use "we" here as a general word before the "count me outs" get worried) continues long after the battle guns have ceased their hymn to destruction. The memory outlasts the kant and rhetoric of the temporary gods elected to think and act for our countries. The USA's madman and his UK puppet will be tomorrows heroes or villains depending on what side you take. The feelings voiced by parents over this war will trail down through history into the children of both sides of this dreadful crime....The argument for and against this war will not cease with the final result. If I may make an analogy you only have to see the post-mortems of large sporting fixtures where the losing side claim the referee was blind or was in the pay of the winning team.... to realise that people take to heart the performance of "their side" and the result that ensues. There are events that are still talked about where only sporting prowess was at stake, not the lives of thousands of people whether military or civilian.
The resistance does not surprise me one iota. The Iraqis are a proud nation whose people, by report, are warm and friendly. AS we love our countries so they and will resist the desecration of their homeland. The various militias are going to remain loyal to Saddam for now.. they dare not do otherwise ... but if they do surrender it has to be remembered that they will remain in Iraq after the war is over and will aspire to the positions they held before their leader, and provider of status, was deposed! This is NOT going to ever end..... the civil war that will ensue and the in-fighting that will take place will leave Iraq as an unstable brick in the wall of the gulf. DUBYA and BLAIR are not thinking this through.... They believe their own hubris. They listen to strategists who give the best possible scenario.. This war was going to happen as they have both been told it was going to be easy to win. If you have a chance to go to the Independent website and read the leader and see an account by Robert Fisk it makes very clear the terror that is meted to those who have no choice but to be there and suffer.... this is not a video game where the victims get to live again..... http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=391165 This morning I did watch the broadcast on SKY news... I watched a Paladin missile launcher explode as a shell had stuck in the breach.... BANG!... luckily the 4 guys got out as the fumes from the shell gave them prior warning.... I just wish our leaders were there to experience the fear and the horror of all of this... The treatment of the bodies of our two soldiers was terrible but then in war these things happen. IN the Viet Nam war Vietnamese women had handgrenades inserted into them and then the pins were pulled, in the second world war all sides committed atrocities in varying degrees of depravity and distress. Each of our nations is guilty of these acts and we cannot expect other nations to behave any differently. It is beyond our comprehension, but we are here in our homes with the remote control we are not stretched beyond our spheres of experience. WE can judge we can pontificate, we can crow and whoop for every mangled Iraqi soldier, woman and child or we can bleed and plead for an end to it...as I do so deeply in my heart's core... This is a nasty, dirty, war with no real reason for us to be there. I don't know what the answer to the despot Saddam Hussein is? but I have a horrible feeling this is not going to change things.... I hope it will change things for the oppressed, the tortured, the raped, the maimed, the abused and now bombed..... that is the Iraqi civilian and military personnel personal experience of this "Just" war." It is a catastrophe on all fronts........ I am sure that my view is shared by some, derided by others and of no consequence to the people in power, but it is my view and I am peaceful with that. I have to avoid thinking about the songs that haunt me about this war but "come Away Melinda" by Tim Hardin (I think) is the one song from about 1967 that I remember as being about the aftermath of war. "come away Melinda, come in and close the door, that was just a picture book we had before the war" How many picture books will there be, after this war, that show a previous world now altered by the desecration of humanity on the alter of hegemony and hubris? Lucy
