The Rag Blog

Welcome to the Show, kid.

The Democrats have “surrendered” on Iraq. Liberals are “shocked.” And all the innocents who didn’t know any better, didn’t see it coming, feel “betrayed.”

Poor Duncan Black, better known as “Atrios,” is nearly at a loss for words: “People hate Bush, hate Republicans, and hate this war,” he protests, and yet the Democrats caved!

“I don’t understand these people,” he wails.

Precisely.

Keith Olbermann, using the same tone of humorless, near-postal anger he uses in every commentary, no matter the topic, calls the Democratic rollover a “Neville Chamberlain moment.”

I prefer to think of it as a teachable moment.

At a time when even conservatives have come to loathe Bush, when people who thought he was going to round up all the “illegal aliens” and deport them are so upset, they think impeachment’s too good for him, the Democrats labor to craft legislation “acceptable” to him.

Liberals have already spent six and a half years loathing Bush — longer if they live in Texas, a state whose statutes are said to recognize two classes of persons: Fuckors and Fuckees.

(Republicans and Democrats, the big shots, belong to the former class. You and I belong to the latter.)

There is nothing particularly wrong with loathing Bush. It only becomes a problem when it prevents progressives from finally figuring out that the people they’re really going to end up having to fight are the Democrats.

As Big Walter the Thunderbird used to say, “Sho’ is tough.”

Right now, both major parties are playing dodge ball with the planet, trying to avoid “ownership” of Iraq. The only way at this point to “own” the war is to stop it, and there is no serious move afoot to make that happen.

There is a race currently underway between different flanks of the administration to determine the future course of US-Iran policy.

On one flank are the diplomats, and on the other is Vice President Cheney’s team and acolytes — who populate quite a wide swath throughout the American national security bureaucracy.

The Pentagon and the intelligence establishment are providing support to add muscle and nuance to the diplomatic effort led by Condi Rice, her deputy John Negroponte, Under Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, and Legal Adviser John Bellinger. The support that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and CIA Director Michael Hayden are providing Rice’s efforts are a complete, 180 degree contrast to the dysfunction that characterized relations between these institutions before the recent reshuffle of top personnel.

However, the Department of Defense and national intelligence sector are also preparing for hot conflict. They believe that they need to in order to convince Iran’s various power centers that the military option does exist.

But this is worrisome. The person in the Bush administration who most wants a hot conflict with Iran is Vice President Cheney. The person in Iran who most wants a conflict is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Quds Force would be big winners in a conflict as well — as the political support that both have inside Iran has been flagging.

Multiple sources have reported that a senior aide on Vice President Cheney’s national security team has been meeting with policy hands of the American Enterprise Institute, one other think tank, and more than one national security consulting house and explicitly stating that Vice President Cheney does not support President Bush’s tack towards Condoleezza Rice’s diplomatic efforts and fears that the President is taking diplomacy with Iran too seriously.

This White House official has stated to several Washington insiders that Cheney is planning to deploy an “end run strategy” around the President if he and his team lose the policy argument.

The thinking on Cheney’s team is to collude with Israel, nudging Israel at some key moment in the ongoing standoff between Iran’s nuclear activities and international frustration over this to mount a small-scale conventional strike against Natanz using cruise missiles (i.e., not ballistic missiles).

For once in my career as a medical student, I have absolute faith that my patients will be taken care of regardless of how much money they have in their pocket. Entering the Misión Barrio Adentro clinic in San Rafael de Tabay, a town in Merida, Venezuela amazes even the most jaded visitor. The local community hospital, Centro de Diagnostico Integral (CDI) brings alive Venezuela’s social revolution in health care.

The premise of Misión Barrio Adentro is simple: doctors live and work in communities providing health services free of charge to anyone.(1) In the span of four years, Barrio Adentro added 1612 modules (with 4618 under construction) to the 4,800 existing public ambulatory clinics.(2) The national goal is to have one primary care doctor for every 1250 to 2500 habitants. While Cuban doctors currently cover a large portion of this health need, new medical schools are training over 17,000 Venezuelan youth to become doctors. A corollary training program has around 3,000 Venezuelan doctors in a postgraduate residency community medicine. It’s one thing to look at the numbers, but does this massive expansion of primary health through Misión Barrio Adentro actually work? To gain perspective, I have been studying as a medical student under Venezuelan and Cuban physicians in both the traditional and revolutionary Barrio Adentro public health clinics. Beyond the reports and statistics, I carry back with me the experience of participating in egalitarian medicine, a goal I can keep in my mind’s eye.

Many who view the new health care programs as a radical departure, may not know that even before the Chavez government, all people had a right to health care, education, social protection provided free from the state. However, access was limited. A report of the Panamerican Health Organization and World Health Organization, “Barrio Adentro: the right to health and social inclusion in Venezuela” documents the history of health care in Venezuela. Before Chavez, there was an underinvestment in social programs, increased orientation to the private sector. When Chavez was first elected president in 1998, over 35 percent of the poorest 20 percent of the population indicated that they didn’t go to see a medical for their health problem because they didn’t have the money to pay for a consult, medicine, or exam.(3)

Since the 1970s until Chavez’s Administration, investment in public health did not match the expanding population’s needs. During the 80s and 90s, only 50 new public clinics were built. Meanwhile, 400 new private clinics were constructed. From the 70s to Chavez’s election, there was only one public hospital built. A 1985 study revealed that Venezuelans had trouble getting care in Caracas, even in spite of the fact that the capital had disproportionately more physicians than the rest of the country. This is for many reasons. Clinics were too far away and badly organized for the communities needs. They also lacked appropriate referral systems, and were focused on curing instead of preventing disease. In poor and rural communities, care was provided by recently graduated inexperienced physicians.(4) These results match the stories I am told by my patients.

Misión Barrio Adentro was founded in 2003 as a part of 17 Misións, or comprehensive national social service programs, that together have similar explicit objectives to overturn decades of growing social inequalities. By recognizing the social rights of health, education, nutrition, housing, and employment, the Misións create sustainable new power relations based on democratic and participative ideals.

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is quietly on track to nearly double the number of combat troops in Iraq this year, an analysis of Pentagon deployment orders showed Monday.

This “second surge” of troops in Iraq, which is being executed by extending tours for brigades already there and by deploying more units, could boost the number of combat troops to as many as 98,000 by the end of this year. When support troops are included, the total number of U.S. troops in Iraq could increase from 162,000 now to more than 200,000 — the most ever — by the end of the year.

The efforts to reinforce U.S. troops in Iraq are being carried out without the fanfare that accompanied President Bush’s initial troop surge in January.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. William Nash, the U.S. commander who led NATO troops into Bosnia in late 1995, when asked to comment on the analysis of deployment orders, said: “It doesn’t surprise me that they’re not talking about it. I think they would be very happy not to have any more attention paid to this.”

The first surge was prominently proclaimed by Bush in a nationally televised address Jan. 10, when he ordered five additional combat brigades to join 15 brigades already in Iraq.

The buildup was designed to give commanders the 20 combat brigades that Pentagon planners said were needed to provide security in Baghdad and in western Anbar province.

BAGHDAD (AFP) – Iraq’s defence ministry will buy new weapons worth more than 1.5 billion dollars (1.11 billion euros), including helicopters and US rifles, the minister announced on Monday.

The purchases will be made possible by a 26 percent increase in the country’s defence budget, to 4.1 billion dollars (three billion euros) for the current fiscal year.

“The Iraqi government has signed a contract with the American government to set up a foreign weapons sales office to buy weapons that Iraq needs,” Defence Minister Abdel Qader Jassim Mohammed said at a Baghdad press conference.

“This programme will help Iraq to buy modern weapons and to ensure arrival of these weapons when the ministry asks for them,” he added.

Iraq has started importing American-made M-16 and M-4 rifles, which are slowly replacing the ubiquitous Soviet-designed AK-47 Kalashnikov among the Iraqi forces struggling to bring order to the country.

Mohammed is also looking to beef up the country’s air force and navy with the purchase of 29 Soviet-designed M-17 helicopters, six reconnaissance planes, 10 patrol boats from Italy and 26 from the United States.

The gradual switchover from the AK-47 to the M-16 began earlier this month, when a graduating class of Iraqi military recruits became the first of 1,600 rookie soldiers to start receiving the weapons.

The M-16 fires a 5.56mm round, standard among most modern armies and lighter than the 7.62mm used in the rugged Kalashnikov.

Iraq is awash with Kalashnikovs looted from ousted dictator Saddam Hussein’s defunct armed forces, smuggled from around the region by militants and imported by the United States to arm new Iraqi security units.

ARBIL (IPS) – The working environment for Iraq’s journalists is becoming increasingly dangerous and difficult, with 31 killed just since the start of this year, according to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ).

The dire situation has prompted both international and local media groups to design a new “safety strategy” involving the creation of special offices charged with protecting journalists in the face of “kidnappings, targeted killings and other threats to media”. These offices will be set up in Baghdad and Arbil, and government and well as media outlets will have representatives there.

Hasado also criticized the lack of a modern press law in Iraq almost four years after the official end of the war, noting that the same law used to deal with journalists during Saddam Hussein’s regime remains in place.

“That old law has severely restricted the freedom of press… and as a result, every institution gives itself the right to bring charges against journalists based on their own conclusions,” Hasado told IPS.

Several journalists have been sued by officials for stories they published, yet none has been sentenced so far and the cases have been settled behind closed doors, Hasado said.

On Jan. 26, for example, the security forces of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan arrested freelance journalist Muhammad Siyasi Ashkanayi, accusing him of spying for Parastin, the intelligence agency of the Kurdistan Democratic Party.

At the end of March, he had not been charged with an offence nor referred to an investigative judge, and remained in detention, the U.N. reported.

A new press law drafted by the KJS to be discussed in the regional parliament would decriminalize media work and prevent journalists from being put behind bars for their reporting.

BAGHDAD, May 21 (IPS) – Killings, crime, lack of medical care, collapse of educationàthe list goes on. But with the occupation by U.S.-led forces now into a fifth year, and a supposedly democratic government in place, no one knows who to hold accountable for all that is going wrong.

It is the occupation forces, particularly the United States and Britain, that must be held accountable, many Iraqis say.

“It is good of these people to discuss accountability for theft, but the most important thing to account for is Iraqi blood,” Numan Ahmed, a human rights activist from the Adhamiya neighbourhood in Baghdad told IPS.

The British medical journal Lancet has reported that by July 2006, 655,000 people had died as “a consequence of the war.” It has reported that the risk of death among civilians is now 58 times higher than before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

“By now a million Iraqis have been killed for no reason, and many millions disabled or badly injured just because of some thieves in Baghdad and Washington,” Ahmed said. “We are prepared to reveal the documents to condemn them even if takes us a lifetime.”

But Iraqis have no means to take action against occupiers.

The United States has not accepted jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, which has the power to investigate complaints of genocide. The United States took the view that the court could conduct “politically motivated investigations and prosecutions of U.S. military and political officials and personnel.”

U.S. opposition to the ICC is in stark contrast to the strong support for the Court by most of its closest allies. But Iraqis have found no way to proceed against these either.

With no doors of justice open to them, many Iraqis are now taking to unlawful ways to hit back at occupation forces and government targets.

“The only way to do it is at gunpoint,” 32-year-old Ali Aziz from Ramadi, 100 km west of Baghdad, told IPS. “They invaded us at gunpoint and we find it ridiculous to talk about any other way of getting back what belongs to us.”

Aziz said he had lost several friends in attacks by U.S. soldiers. “The whole world is dealing with this in a hypocritical way, and there is only us to claim our rights the way we find proper.”

The human rights group al-Raya filed a case in a local court in Fallujah against U.S. forces in 2004, following a massive military crackdown. About three-quarters of all buildings in the city were destroyed or heavily damaged during the U.S. assault in November 2004.

But U.S.-backed Iraqi security forces have hit out at the human rights group. “The secretary-general for the organisation has now been arrested by Fallujah police for reasons that we are not aware of, and the organisation is not functioning any more,” a member of the board, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS in Baghdad.

“It is not the right time to talk about accountability when daily killings by U.S. and Iraqi soldiers are still ongoing. God knows if it will ever be possible.”

A case for accountability could well be made. A judge from the United States wrote at the time of the trial of Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg in Germany in 1946: “To initiate a war of aggressionàis not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was judged by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan Sep. 16, 2004 as “an illegal act that contravened the UN charter.”

The lack of accountability appears now to be leading to greater support for armed resistance against occupation forces.

“What accountability are you talking about, sir,” said Abu Jassim from Fallujah, who lost four members of his family when a U.S. bomb destroyed his home during the first U.S. offensive in the city in April 2004. “Americans are criminals, and the whole world is covering up for their crimes.” They will be held accountable, he said, by “Allah” and by “the heroes of the Iraqi resistance.”

Iraqis are also angry over destruction of their civilian infrastructure, for which no one has been held responsible.

“The U.S. crime of deliberately crushing Iraqi infrastructure must be looked at as a crime against humanity,” chief engineer Jalal Abdulla at Baghdad’s Ministry of Electricity told IPS. “They did not have to do this to support their military effort, but they did it just to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths for no reason but cruelty.”

CANBERRA, Australia: Former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s handling of the Iraq war verged on criminal negligence, a former Australian army lawyer turned political candidate said Tuesday.

Col. Mike Kelly, who ended a 20-year military career last week to run as an opposition candidate at federal elections later this year, gave his first television interview about his experiences in Iraq to Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Kelly, who was among the most senior Australian officers in Iraq during 2003 and 2004, was scathing of Rumsfeld’s role.

“If I look at people like Donald Rumsfeld, all I can say is, that verges on criminal negligence,” Kelly told the ABC of Rumsfeld’s failure to acknowledge problems in Iraq.

Kelly — an expert on the law of occupation and peacemaking operations with experience in Somalia, Bosnia and East Timor — said he offered a plan to stop looting and protect infrastructure soon after former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was toppled.

“We knew exactly what needed to be done,” Kelly told the ABC.

“Then Rumsfeld came in and overruled that concept and basically threw it out the window and that was where things really started to go wrong,” he said.

A full year after Hurricane Katrina, 73,000 New Orleans residents remained encamped in FEMA trailer parks, an aluminum gulag spread all the way to Texas. They were waiting for a chance to reconstruct their homes. They’re still waiting. There’s little or no insurance money, and no one is even allowed to rebuild, nearly two years after the flood, in some of the poorer areas like the Lower Ninth Ward.

But waiting on compensation from Washington, waiting for a hand-out, waiting for anyone to help save the city is simply not in the constitution of Malik Rahim. The water was still high when Rahim helped create a guerrilla reconstruction corps of local residents. They call themselves Common Ground. When you see progress in the poor sections of New Orleans, you’re often seeing the group’s work crews.

The organization started out distributing food and water to hurricane victims and running a free, volunteer-staffed medical clinic (See, YES! Issue 39). It was an insurgent action, neither financed nor sanctioned by state or federal government. Since then, they have organized thousands of volunteers to gut water-damaged homes, removing deadly mold, and in the process trained residents in construction skills.

When we were filming in New Orleans, I visited The Woodlands, where Common Ground was doing a gut rehab on 350 apartment units. The residents themselves did most of the work. With sweat equity and small-scratch donations, Common Ground built hurricane-proof homes, a health clinic, even a restaurant for employment of residents once construction was complete.

Then, a week before Christmas, the owners of The Woodlands, who’d agreed to sell the property, rendered nearly worthless by the hurricane, to Common Ground, sent every resident an eviction notice. Now that the place was spiffed-up and rebuilt, it was worth a fortune in the tight New Orleans market. In January, marshals removed every Woodlands family, including a paraplegic who’d been a resident for decades. Following a too-familiar pattern, there was no compensation.

Something is wrong with the United States. I think most of us have noticed it. There is a mortal rot in the country, made manifest by many little rots that are hard to integrate mentally yet are, I think, somehow related. The change is grave, accelerating, probably irreversible, and fascinating. Things are not as they were.

The United States is the most hated country on the planet, followed by, to the extent that there is a distinction, Israel. So far as I know, there are no other contenders. You can say “Who cares?” as many will say, or “Screw’em if they can’t take a joke,” or “I’d rather be feared than loved.” All very droll. Still, it is an interesting datum. No country ever lives up to its own PR, but there was a time when America was widely admired. Now, almost universally, it is seen as a rogue state. And is.

This carries a price. The US consulate in Guadalajara is part fortress, part prison, with barriers and cameras and bars and rentacops, and they take away a woman’s lipstick if she is going to enter. Maybe a country that fears lipstick needs to think. The French consulate around the corner is wide open, like all others that I know of. The French, Chinese, Japanese and so on aren’t hated.

The US government now lives in its own, strange, insulated world.

(2) The United States is the most militarily aggressive country on the planet, followed closely by Israel. I am aware of no other contenders.

Some of this combativeness is obvious—attacking Iraq for no good reason, occupying Afghanistan, threatening Syria and Iran, attacking Lebanon by proxy, bombing Somalia, putting troops in the Philippines to hunt Moslems. The US is also looking for trouble with Venezuela, threatening North Korea, moving to “contain” China (Doesn’t a container need to be bigger than its scontents?), embargoing Cuba, pushing into Central Asia, increasing the military budget, and pushing NATO ever closer to Russia. (How stupid can you get? Very. Stay tuned.), And the Pentagon now has Africom, African Command. Africa is now America’s business.

(3) Powerful domestic hostilities grip the United States. Maybe you have to be outside of it really to see it. I live in Mexico. You can go for…well, five years and counting, without hearing angry talk about this or that group. In America, women hate men and men are getting sick of American women. Blacks hate whites hate Hispanics. “Affirmative action” engenders intense hastily that doesn’t go away. It isn’t the normal friction found in any country. It is serious antagonism quashed by federal force.

And the black-white-brown thing has very real potential for getting nasty. This we don’t talk about.

(4) A curious state fear prevails in America, but it is a governmental creation, a calculated manipulative Disneyland. Perhaps soon we will have Terror Mouse.

In Germany, at the age of nine, I saw something on television that horrified me. It was a table lamp with a shade that looked like parchment. It had been made from the skin of a Jewish person. Disturbed by the sight of the lamp I began to wonder: what is it that makes people rob human beings of their skin? Where were the others that could have prevented this? In later years I learned that the German government had done countless other despicable things, and like many members of my age cohort I asked myself what the Nazi experience had to do with my grandparents and what it meant for me. The conclusion I reached was this: A democratic government draws its power from the population it governs, and even a tyrannical government acts in the name of that population. For this reason citizens have a moral obligation to watch their government at all times and ensure that its power remains checked. If they fail to do so, they become tainted by its deeds. To avoid becoming implicated, citizens must inform themselves. There is no right not to know.

Years passed, and I moved to the United States. On September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were hit, I was a doctoral student at American University in Washington, DC. I was there when the university’s population of Arab students realized that they were unwelcome and decided to continue their studies in their home countries or in Europe. I shared their fear when my Arabic name led to the shut-down of ticketing computers at Ronald Reagan Airport. When the Afghanistan war began I reminded students that many civilians would die. Some responded with hate mail. This silenced me, and when the Iraq war started, I decided to ignore it.

Four years later I teach college students the politics of the Middle East. By now most Americans are convinced that the idea to invade Iraq was a bad one. Analysts point to strategic miscalculations that have taken place: the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was exaggerated, because he did not have weapons of mass destruction. Usama Bin Laden, who had long been banned from Iraq by a jealous tyrant, is now establishing a foothold in Mesopotamia. The plan of establishing a model democracy in the heart of the Middle East is doomed, because the country’s religious and ethnic groups are sliding into civil war. As Iraq disintegrates, Iran is turning into a regional hegemon, threatening U.S. interests in the region.

Washington’s pundits, politicians, and bureaucrats, point fingers at each other, deflecting responsibility for the invasion from themselves towards their counterparts. As they do so, the various mistakes that were committed prior to the war are coming to light. The government and its neoconservative allies were war hungry. The CIA did poor research. Journalists that supplied the Washington, DC, “beltway bubble” with news swallowed information that came from the White House without checking alternative sources. Members of Congress forgot the lessons of the Gulf of Tonkin and yielded decisions over war and peace to the president. Citizens failed to demand of their leaders and their media that they provide good analysis.

Despite the fact that the Iraq debate brings mistakes to light, it leaves me with the impression that I am stuck in a bad movie, one that never gets at the real storyline. This impression is based on two observations. First, even though Americans debate the negative consequences of the war, their overriding concerns are largely self-serving. While average Americans are troubled by the cost of war, professional analysts are worried what this war will do to America’s status as the world’s superpower. The burden which the invasion has imposed on Iraqi civilians is a non-issue. Second, public discussion is marked by the latent claim that Iraqis are to blame for the failure of America’s military ambitions. It appears that this nation is mocking Iraqis twice ­ by failing to see the misery which it has inflicted on them and by attributing guilt for this misery to them.

Let me elaborate on these two points, starting with the idea, at home in numerous Internet blogs, that Iraqis are to blame for their fate. The logic of the argument goes as follows: The U.S. launched Operation Iraqi Freedom in a well-intentioned effort to liberate the country from a tyrannical oppressor, enabling the people to take charge of their own fate and create a democracy. But Iraqis are refusing to do so. Instead of shaking the hands of those who came to save them, they are slapping their wrists. Thus, the liberation of the country “went wrong” because Iraqis do not want freedom.

When I discuss this claim with students, I bring up the following counterfactual. Assume that some benign power had concluded that Los Angeles was sitting on a large oilfield and that the L.A. municipal government was crudely suppressing its residents. The benign power invades, obliterates the government, the police force, the domestic infrastructure, and then waits for people to lead a better life. Only, that does not happen, because L.A.’s street gangs realize that amidst the institutional breakdown power can be grabbed by those who are willing to fight for it long enough. Chaos engulfs the city, and residents are murdered on a regular basis. What is the problem here? Is it that the citizens of Los Angeles don’t like freedom? Most who hear this example would answer in the negative. But if we concede that desire for freedom has nothing to do with what is happening in L.A., then why do we believe that Iraqis are to blame if their society goes up in flames?

Since 2003 inhabitants of Baghdad have been facing daily explosions and the killing of relatives. Gradually they are developing a historical record of injuries their families have suffered at the hands of their religious others. This record creates anger at Sunnis, Shiites, and perhaps even the foreign country that came and brought pandemonium. As the murders continue, even those who are usually quite apolitical will be drawn into the vortex of civil war. This, however, does not change a simple fact. Iraqis did not choose to have their government institutions overthrown. It was America that made this choice for them, and if anybody is to be blamed for the failure of this invasion it is America.

Let me now move to my claim that in their evaluation of the invasion, analysts and politicians fail to acknowledge the cost this war is imposing on Iraqis. For that I would like to look at the statements of those politicians who openly express the view that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. One such individual is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who voted against the 2002 Iraq war resolution. On March 19, 2007, she spoke in support of a bill that would tie spending increases for the war effort to a time table for troop withdrawal. According to her, what are the constituencies to whom this nation is indebted? For starters, Pelosi points to the high cost of the war, recognizing the burden that has been imposed on the country’s tax payers. Indeed, the burden is high. According to the National Priorities Project, the cost of war amounts to over $420 billion thus far. This is money which will not be spent on education or health care.

Pelosi also acknowledges the country’s debt to the troops. She recognizes that the armed forces have borne the brunt of the military campaign, and that 3,400 troops have lost their lives. And Pelosi is right. The women and men who are stationed in Iraq are paying a high price for the government’s poor decisions. They are left to sort out a mess that is hard to bring under control. Many of those who survive the war will not do so intact, suffering either physical injuries or emotional trauma. To these individuals Pelosi expresses her gratitude. She salutes them for their courage, their patriotism, and their sacrifice. Then she goes on to say: “The debt which can never be repaid is to those whose lives have been lost in the war, and as a nation, we mourn them.”

Well, the number of those whose lives have been lost is far greater than 3,200. It includes more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians who were either killed by coalition military action or by local insurgents. To put this tragedy in perspective, imagine two thousand shootings of the kind Virginia Tech experienced. But even though Iraqis bear an enormous burden, Pelosi does not refer to them when she says that the nation mourns those whose lives have been lost. Why is this? I believe the reason lies in the fact that Iraqis cannot vote in federal elections.

It is hard to accept that Americans mourn only Americans. All those who die deserve recognition, because they are human beings and have the right to live. A nation that views itself as a role model for the rest of the world must do better than inflicting suffering on others and then either blaming them for their misfortune or ignoring it entirely. It is time that members of this nation become aware of their moral obligations and take responsibility for what their government does in their name. As a first step in that direction we should stop viewing the war as a costly experiment that has gone wrong. Let’s treat it as the catastrophe that it really is.