From the General

Absolutely magnificent writing. The General was at the top of his game when he wrote this. You can read this excerpt or go to his site and read the whole thing. The post below it at his site will bring you to tears if you have a heart.

Jesus' General: "
But as much as I like the essay, it falls far short of adequately expressing the true horrors of this war. The young Americans who lost their limbs, their health, and their sanity are not represented. Neither are the carefree boys we grew to love as they camped out in our living room, vying for the attention of our daughters. Now, they’re returning from war, souless, their psyches destroyed forever.

And what about the Iraqi people? Thousands of innocents have paid the price for W's hubris, families--fathers, mothers, children, infants--torn apart by neocon greed and shrapnel. They are absent from the essay as well.

The American people are also missing. I watched the documentary, Control Room, again last night. One of the scenes featured an Al Jazeera reporter, Hassan Ibrahim, discussing the run-up to the war with a number of Iraqi intellectuals. He told them that he did not believe that the American people would allow the war to happen. He said that we were a rational people and a people who revered justice above all else. I once thought that too. With all of our faults, I believed that we were a people who truly believed in reason, justice, and the principles of democracy, and maybe we did, but it is no longer true.

We became vengeful and bloodthirsty, striking out against the innocent and the weak to ease our groundless fears. We are now Fox News. We are a nation of Malkins, Hewitts, and Charles Johnsons, frightened of everything that is different or alien to us and reacting violently.

My America is dead. Or perhaps more accurately, The America I believed in, and the people Ibrahim thought he knew, never existed. As saddened as I am at this realization, I now understand that I must fight even harder to ensure that we do not lose our way again.

That's why we must do everything in our power to ensure that America understands not only what happened at Hadditha, but why it happened. For those of you unfamiliar with that name, I urge you to read We found the Real Villain,” the Republican Jesus post I did last week or look for an article titled "Details Surface of US ‘atrocity’ in Iraq" in Saturday's Globe and Mail." In short, a squad of Marines, distraught over losing a comrade to an IED, murdered at least 20 people, including a 61 year old, one-legged man and at least four children, the youngest two being 3 and 4 years old.

Although I’m disgusted by the Marine’s actions and believe that they should spend the rest of their lives in prison, I also feel very sorry for them. They were placed in a very bad situation and snapped. They’ll have to live with the knowledge and consequences of what they’ve done for the rest of their lives.

Unfortunately, those who bear the most responsibility for what happened that day, the president, vice president, Rumsfeld and the rest of the administration (including Colin “the ultimate ‘yes man’” Powell) will likely never be made to pay for sending young people like these Marines to be consumed in this shitty fucking war. That’s a terrible injustice. The evil fucks deserve life imprisonment at one of their secret Eastern European prisons. "

Not that he has an opinion on the matter.

Go, General, go!

Tags: memorial day, blogging