The Human Face of Tragedy

Marla Ruzicka was a Californian, attached to an NGO, attending to the needs of desperate Iraqis. She and her driver were killed when they were caught in a crossfire between a suicidal insurgent and US soldiers. Marla Ruzicka was Jill Carroll’s friend, and her story is infused with grief. But the story also takes careful note of Ruzicka’s driver, who, in Carroll’s account, is no mere anonymous Iraqi functionary, another unnamed fatality. Carroll gives his name, Faiz, hints at his history as an airline pilot, and establishes her own connection with him by noting his work as an interpreter for journalists. To Jill Carroll, the death of this Iraqi man weighed as much as the death of her American friend. If Jill Carroll were filing the report of her own kidnapping two weeks ago, we would know the name of her murdered driver, and his death, too, would have grave importance to us — because it surely did to her.

What to make of the fate of Jill Carroll? Even if the worst outcome follows, this young writer, with a poignant directness that is as rare as it is precious, has already suggested a way to take it in. Equally, in noting what was special about human rights organizer Marla Ruzicka, she makes clear what is special about herself. She wrote about her dead friend: ”The only thing we can say now is at least she died doing what she wanted, doing what she really, really believed in. If she were still here, she’d be most worried now about her driver’s family, and who will take care of all the other Iraqi families she was working with. She would point out, this happens to Iraqis every day, and no one notices or even cares. There are no newspaper articles or investigations into what happens to them. For most of them, there was only Marla.”

And also Jill Carroll. Iraqis and Americans are alike in being in her debt. And we are alike in that heaviness of heart, where we still carry her.

James Carroll | Boston Globe (read more. . .)

January 24th, 2006 || PermaLink

Civil War-Elect

There’s no one left to put Humpty Dumpty together again in Baghdad. Zalmay Khalilzad, America’s feckless ambassador in Iraq, is trying. But, unwilling or unable to reach out to the Iraqi resistance, Khalilzad instead finds himself immersed instead in gooey egg mass. The Iraqi body politic is shattered, with little hope now of avoiding an all-out civil war. That’s the only conclusion that can be reached by looking at the results of the Dec. 15 elections in Iraq, whose official returns were announced on Friday.

Those results gave the Shiite religious bloc 128 seats out of 275. Their junior partners, the two Kurdish warlord parties, got 53. The religious Sunnis got 44, the secular Sunni parties got 11, and Iyad Allawi’s non-ethnic, secular alliance got 25. So the coalition of Shiite fundamentalists and Kurdish warlords controls 181 seats, at least, just a few votes shy of the two-thirds majority needed to form a government. Let’s look at the bad news, item by item.

First, the Arab League’s peace initiative for Iraq is dead. It was, I’ve written, perhaps the last best hope for holding Iraq together and avoiding an ethnic-sectarian war. The effort began last fall, when Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan organized an initiative to hold talks between Iraq’s Shiite-Kurdish government, the Sunni-led opposition, and the resistance. Scheduled for Cairo last November, the first meeting failed when the two fundamentalist Shiite parties, Al Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, said that they would not talk to the insurgents, whom they describe as “terrorists.” (That word, in fact, is increasingly used by SCIRI and Al Dawa to refer to all Sunnis in Iraq, not just to Abu Musab Al Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda or even to the Baathist-military resistance.) In December, I wrote for TomPaine.com that the Arab League effort would collapse if the SCIRI-Dawa forces, augmented by the fanatical Mahdi Army of Muqtada Sadr, won big in the elections. They did, winning nearly half of the seats in the new parliament. So, no surprise: on Saturday, Iraq’s foreign minister, a Kurd, announced that the scheduled Arab League follow up meeting in February, which had been dubbed a National Accord Conference, would not be held.

Robert Dreyfuss | TomPaine.com (read more. . .)

January 24th, 2006 || PermaLink

Matriotism

All though school, we are brainwashed into believing that some how our leaders are always right and certainly have our best interests at heart when they wave the flag and convince us to hate fellow human beings who stand in the way of making immense profits from war. As Samuel Johnson said, patriotism is the “last refuge of a scoundrel.”

Matriotism is the opposite of patriotism…not to destroy it, but to be a yin to its yang, and balance out the militarism of patriotism.

Not everyone is a mother, but there is one universal truth that no one can dispute no matter how hard they try (and believe me, some will try): Everyone has a mother! Mothers give life, and if the child is lucky, mothers nurture life. And if a man has had a nurturing mother he will already have a base of Matriotism.

A Matriot loves his/her country but does not buy into the exploitive phrase of “My country right or wrong.” (As Chesterton said, that’s like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.”) A Matriot knows that her country can do a lot of things right, especially when the government is not involved. For example, I know of no other citizens of any country who are more personally generous than those of America. However, a Matriot also knows that when her country is wrong, it can be responsible for murdering thouands upon thousands of innocent and unsuspecting humans. A true Matriot would never drop an atomic bomb or bombs filled with white phosphorous, carpet bomb cities and villages, or control drones from thousands of miles away to kill innocent men, women and children.

There is one most important thing that matriots would never do, however, and this is the key to stopping killing to solve problems: a matriot would never send her child or another mother’s child to fight nonsense wars…and would march into a war herself that she considered just to protect her child from harm. Aha! Matriots would fight their own battles, but take a dim view of having to do so, and would seldom resort to violence to solve conflict! Patriots cowardly hide behind the flag and eagerly send young people to die to fill their own pocketbooks.

Cindy Sheehan | commondreams (read more. . .)

January 23rd, 2006 || PermaLink

Choose King’s Path by Renouncing War

It was very sad to hear some of our senators defending the latest killing of innocents in Pakistan, among them women and children, in the name of the “war on terror” and killing members of al-Qaida:

“We apologize, but I can’t tell you that we wouldn’t do the same thing again,” said John McCain.

“It’s a regrettable situation, but what are we supposed to do?” said Evan Bayh of Indiana.

“Clearly justified by the intelligence,” said Trent Lott, which is the same thing the Bush administration said about the invasion of Iraq, another war now in the process of killing innocent people.

Such comments by such distinguished men gives one pause: Apparently the “right to life” and human rights in general should only be granted to American infants. If we kill other people and children, as all wars do, it is merely regrettable. We uphold the right to kill anyone we please in the name of peace, and if we accidentally also kill the wrong people, well, at least our intentions were good.

Even a child can see through such a pathetic grasping at moral straws.

John Kaufman | Madison Capital Times (read more. . .)

January 22nd, 2006 || PermaLink

“Our Indian Wars Are Not Over Yet” — Ten Ways to Interpret the War on Terror as a Frontier Conflict

The essential paradigm of the War of Terror — us (the attacked) against them (the attackers) — was no less essential to the mindset of white settlers regarding the Indians, starting at least from the 1622 Indian massacre of 347 people at Jamestown, Virginia. With rare exceptions, newly arrived Europeans and their descendants, as well as their leaders, saw Indians as mortal enemies who started the initial fight against them, savages with whom they could not co-exist. The Declaration of Independence condemned “the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” When governor of Virginia (1780), Thomas Jefferson stated:

“If we are to wage a campaign against these Indians the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes of the Illinois River. The same world would scarcely do for them and us.”
President Andrew Jackson, whose “unapologetic flexing of military might” has been compared to George W. Bush’s modus operandi, noted in his “Case for the Removal [of Indians] Act” (December 8, 1830):

“What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, . . . and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?”
Us vs. them is, of course, a feature of all wars, but the starkness of this dichotomy — seen by GWOT supporters as a struggle between the civilized world and a global jihad — is as strikingly apparent in the War on Terror as it was in the Indian Wars.

John Brown | TomDispatch.com (read more. . .)

January 21st, 2006 || PermaLink

Hiding Behind the Troops

When the CIA tried to hit Ayman Zawahiri, Al Qaida’s No. 2, with a missile fired from a Predator drone and ended up killing more than a dozen civilians as well as four or so people later identified as “foreign terrorists” in a Pakistani village near the border of Afghanistan, that was dumb.

When George W. Bush did not quickly apologize, offer compensation to the victims and announce there would be an immediate investigation, that was also dumb. For with this strike, the Bush administration essentially aided the enemy, who now can point to this episode as proof that Bush does not give a damn about innocent Muslim lives (which is what many people in the Arab world already suspect).

And this botched operation has severely undermined the Pakistani government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, revealing how Bush treats his friends and allies in the war of terrorism. Moreover, actions like this can lead one to wonder if Bush really means it when he says — as he has frequently — “We believe in the dignity of every human life.”

If that were indeed the case, then wouldn’t he be all broken up over the Pakistani civilians blown to pieces by the CIA missile? Hunting mass-murdering terrorists who live among civilians is indeed hard and nasty work, which most people find morally justifiable. (”We have to do what we think is necessary,” John McCain declared on Sunday.) Then let’s be frank.

Those who are willing to target a neighborhood in a far-away village — hoping to kill a terrorist but knowing that innocent human beings may also be smashed to bits — do not really believe in the dignity of every human life. They are willing to trade certain lives (of nameless people who happen to be villagers in a remote spot) for the results they seek.

The cost-benefit analysis may be defensible; in all wars, noncombatants are killed. But please, let’s not kid ourselves. Bush and his commanders in the war on terrorism are willing to waste nonterrorists to kill terrorists. Right or wrong, that is not caring about the dignity of every life.

David Corn | TomPaine.com (read more. . .)

January 20th, 2006 || PermaLink

The New Fascism

The writer Umberto Eco, in a 1995 essay titled “Ur-Fascism,” delineated several core elements that have existed in one form or another in every fascist state in history: “Parliamentary democracy is by definition rotten, because it does not represent the voice of the people, which is that of the sublime leader. Doctrine outstrips reason, and science is always suspect. The national identity is provided by the nation’s enemies. Argument is tantamount to treason. Perpetually at war, the state must govern with the instruments of fear. Citizens do not act; they play the supporting role of ‘the people’ in the grand opera that is the state.”

Take these one at a time.

“Parliamentary democracy is by definition rotten, because it does not represent the voice of the people, which is that of the sublime leader.”

George W. Bush has all but gelded Congress in recent months, attaching so-called “signing statements” to a variety of laws, which state that the president may act beyond the laws whenever he so chooses. The United States, fashioned as a republic, has as its voice the congressional body. This is all but finished. To cement his victory over the parliamentary system, Bush has put forth one Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court, a man who believes in the ultimate power of the one leader over the many. The gelded congress does not appear able to keep this man from the high court, thus rendering the balancing branches of government into a satellite system of the Executive.

“Doctrine outstrips reason, and science is always suspect.”

The supremacy of religious fundamentalism within and without government carries this banner before all others. What is reason in the face of the zealot’s faith? Science has become a watered-down vessel for Intelligent Design, and the incontrovertible truths of empirical data are slapped aside. Spencer Tracy, in the film “Inherit the Wind,” bellows the warning here: “Fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding. And soon, your Honor, with banners flying and with drums beating we’ll be marching backward, backward, through the glorious ages of that sixteenth century, when bigots burned the man who dared to bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind.”

William Rivers Pitt | truthout (read more. . .)

January 19th, 2006 || PermaLink