"Pictures From Iraq And Afghanistan - Gory
Pictures in this forum are submitted by U.S. Soldiers from over in Iraq and Afghanistan and will probably be a little gory. So if you get sick easy or have a problem with dead terrorists please don't look here.",
by American soldiers, are revolting. I felt sick and immediately clicked off. The pictures are so much worse than the Abu Ghraib pictures that were released. What are we doing there? How does so much carnage change anything?
Heart of Darkness
But something happened on my way to a confession: I came across the Nation article on nowthatsfuckedup.com, which meant I had to take a good, hard look at the psychopathic side of the American spirit, and consider its implications not just for the war on terrorism and the occupation of Iraq, but its role in the emergence of an authentically fascist movement in American politics, one which feeds on violence and the glorification of violence, and which has found an audience not just in the U.S. military (where I think -- or at least hope -- it's still a relatively small fringe) but in the culture as a whole.
I don't have time at the moment to explain fully why and how this peek at the banality of evil changed my thinking, although I'll try to cover it in a future post. Suffice it to say that my visit to nowthatsfuckedup.com was a reminder of the genocidal skeletons hanging in the American closet. It left me with the conviction -- or at least an intuitive suspicion -- that an open-ended war in Iraq (or in the broader Islamic world) will bring nothing but misery and death to them, and creeping (or galloping) authoritarianism to us.
We have to get out -- not because withdrawal will head off civil war in Iraq or keep the country from fallling under Iran's control (it won't) but because the only way we can stop those things from happening is by killing people on a massive scale, probably even more massive than the tragedy we supposedly would be trying to prevent.
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