Why Americans back the War By James Carroll, Globe Columnist
"THE WAR IN IRAQ goes from worse to catastrophic. Hundreds of Iraqis were killed last week, as were two dozen US soldiers. Planned elections in January point less to democracy than civil war. Kidnapping has become a weapon of terror on the ground, matching the terror of US air attacks. An American "take-back" offensive threatens to escalate the violence immeasurably. The secretary general of the United Nations pronounced the American war illegal.
In the United States, an uneasy electorate keeps its distance from all of this. Polls show that most Americans maintain faith in the Bush administration's handling of the war, while others greet reports of the disasters more with resignation than passionate opposition. To the mounting horror of the world, the United States of America is relentlessly bringing about the systematic destruction of a small, unthreatening nation for no good reason. Why has this not gripped the conscience of this country?"
Why Not?
When the "Civilized World" cheapens life on such a massive scale will it not create a cascading global effect of self righteous preemptive terror wars by credibility challenged regimes (similar to the Bush/Cheney Military Industrial Cartel) with an otherwise unthinkable agenda to apply?
Is the United States so psychologically damaged by the Orwellian onslaught of malleable media regurgitation and jingoistic groupthink that they would endorse another four years of pre-emptive terrorism wars and the ransacking of the American middle class?
Cannot these exhausted minds step back and perceive the psychological operation that has been the American government through these last four years of manufactured global horror?
Have media, god, government and Playstation created a generation of youth who are willing to serve a tour of duty suppressing a nation by force whilst all the rationale for them being there boils down to American corporate interests and trillions of dollars worth of oil therein.
The invasion of Iraq created a new war far and apart from the so eloquently named War on a Tactic.
The shadowy Islamic radicals who executed 9/11/01 slipped into the ether of America's new perpetual nightmare reality mass mind construct only to have become anyone and everyone whenever the script demands.
Are the young American people so disenfranchised or replete that they feel ready for a tour in Vietraq? Are they aware of their remaining constitutional rights?
The sloppy and arrogantly brutal dispensation of the corporate oil invasion has left the country of occupied subjects livid toward the chaos and its benefactors. The imperial subjugation of a people with brute force for whatever reason must involve a societal sacrifice on the part of the occupier. As the last working social welfare system in the U.S., will the military serve up the indoctrinated starry-eyed believers who feel it is somehow their Earthly right to dictate with death how other nations might live?
Will another generation of middle and lower class tax bracket Americans give their children to the state to help perpetuate a murderous profit scheme wrapped in the flag of "national pride"?
There are so many Iraqi civilians dying in the occupation that many say the number of dead has since surpassed thirty thousand.
America should mend its own fences before rampaging for more fuel and the elevation of its already gilded class of Oil Barons and Military Industrial Profiteers.
