From the sidewalk I could see into the bullet-mottled windshield more clearly. The driver of the car, a man, was penetrated by so many bullets that his skull had collapsed, leaving his body grotesquely disfigured. A woman also lay dead in the front, still covered in her Muslim clothing and harder to see.Meanwhile, the children continued to wail and scream, huddled against a wall, sandwiched between soldiers either binding their wounds or trying to comfort them. The Army’s translator later told me that this was a Turkoman family and that the teenaged girl kept shouting, ‘Why did they shoot us? We have no weapons! We were just going home!’
“Sorry, little girl, we didn’t mean to shoot your mommy and daddy. See, there’s been lots of bad men who have been driving car bombs at us to try to kill us. We just thought your daddy was one of the bad men. Huh? Well, they want to kill us because they’re mad that we invaded and bombed your country. Why? Because we thought Saddam Hussein — you remember him from school, right? — had really bad weapons that he was going to use to bomb our country. It turns out he didn’t have the weapons, but that doesn’t matter, because now we’re here to make sure that you get to grow up and be free and that your mommy and daddy get to vote in elections… oops, er, uh… little girl, just go with the nice doctor man and try not to look at your daddy’s obliterated skull…”
I can just sense the freepers and neo-cons saying “this is a tragic event, but warfare sometimes causes tragic events…” I concur. That’s why you only go to war as a last fucking resort! That’s why you triple-check your intelligence. That’s why you listen to dissenting voices. That’s why you pay attention to the generals who tell you you need more troops, the diplomats who tell you that documents are forged, the intelligence agents who tell you that the WMD claims are bogus, and the terrorism experts who tell you Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. Most of all, you let the weapons inspectors finish the job, so that you know there are no WMDs before you destroy a country. “Whoops, my bad” does not cut it as a foreign policy.
I don’t know who I’m more disgusted with right now: the smirking chimp in office who’s in charge of all this or the fear-dazed, fact-challenged, queer-hating electorate that lets him get away with it. 1370 dead American soldiers, 10,000 seriously wounded soldiers, Allah knows how many dead Iraqi civilians, no WMDs, no ties to al Qaeda, no active nuclear program, Abu Ghraib, and now this. What will it take to make the 51% of our country who voted for this war criminal come to their senses?
