Did any of you see Frontline on PBS this week? The story was called “Endgame” and highlighted the Bush Administration’s slide into chaos in Iraq after the capture of Bagdad and the fall of Saddam. Three pieces from the story stick out for me. One was the documentarian’s interpretation of the Administration’s actions as sheer stupidity-they entered and really thought they could leave relatively quickly. They didn’t mess up the war effort. They simply didn’t think it through. I had more respect for Bush when I was comforted by my left-wing conspiracy theory which claimed the war was about oil and raising Dick Cheney’s stock in Halliburton. The second shock was the endless number of graphic, violent scenes that should but don’t get shown on the 11 o’clock news, let alone on CNN. If you walked away from your TV without a gut ravished by disgust and a reminder that urban war is hell, you are probably a sociopath who frantically masturbates to underground, kiddy snuff porno.
That gets me to the third feeling, which is deep regret. It wasn’t just soldiers getting blown up in those pictures. You actually saw civilians, like you and me, getting shot by a sniper or their car blown into millions of shattered glass simply because you decided to go to work that morning. When we went into Iraq, we unleashed the homicidal fantasizes of a large minority of people who were just looking for a reason for a quick trip to Muslim nirvana. You see the trouble with a faith that promises a better world in the next life is that it makes it easier for you to fuck up this one and not care. Somehow I don’t think the prophet Muhammad meant it this way but who am I, a Jew, to judge?
If the Iraqis want to blow themselves up, that’s their business I guess, but for us to give folks the red carpet entrance to do so is more than my democratic self can handle. As the Frontline story pointed out, the Bush Administration had “the best and brightest” advisers on the ground who were posed to predict the civil war blood shed post-Saddam and who identified (and the Administration fully ignored until the ’06 Congressional elections and only partially embraced afterwards) the best option for a successful conclusion. Now it is a hairline close to too late and although we incessantly wring our hands over 3,000+ dead and endless wounded soldiers, nobody really sees Iraqi pain like Frontline portrayed in that show. Face it reader, we have truly fucked up that country and may not have a way to fix things.
When you make a mistake, your mom told you that you need to apologize. On behave of the American public and even the Bush Administration, let me be the first one, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Iraqi, to say how sorry I am for what my country has done to you and allowed to be done to your country. We really want to fix things but now it is so out of control that maybe the only ones who can truly fix things is you.
I wish you all the best of luck.
Want more information on this show? Check out the www.washingtonpost.com ‘s online discussion with the show’s producer, Michael Kirk, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/06/09/DI2007060900055.html?nav=rss_nation/special
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