Remember why we went to war in Iraq?
No, not the weapons of mass destruction reason. Or the weapons of mass destruction programs reason. Or the weapons of mass destruction program-related activities reason. No, the reason they came up with after that. You know, how they were getting rid of the torture chambers, and giving the Iraqi people freedom from fear, and all that?
Iraq’s government said Tuesday that it had ordered an urgent investigation of allegations that many of the 173 detainees American troops discovered over the weekend in the basement of an Interior Ministry building had been tortured by their Iraqi captors. A senior Iraqi official who visited the detainees said two appeared paralyzed and others had some of the skin peeled off their bodies by their abusers.
Those detainees included teenaged boys. Do you have a young son? Can you imagine him in that situation, with some of the skin peeled off his body? Is this right? Is this what we went to war for?
I remember listening to Bob Dylan’s Blowing in the Wind when I was a kid, rolling my eyes and thinking how corny it all was. But in extreme times, stark songs speak to us again. The lyrics come back to my mind tonight:
How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky
How many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry
How many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind
The answer is blowing in the wind
This incident is part of a much wider pattern of abuse and torture by Iraq’s new govt.
The rest of the world spotted the irony of having the Bush Administration set up a democracy.
Admittedly, I heard of more extreme torture happening around China recently, but that has nothing to do with this. If a boyfriend of mine so much as punched me it would be a serious issue, why is it somehow different with two strangers in a foreign country?
Yes, I think rather than establishing a democracy, what Bush did was to set up a democracy… as in, the democracy was a setup.