CONGRATULATIONS!

WE WON! We got rid of Saddam. Yea!
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! I don't know who
won, but I know who lost: the Iraqi people. Four
million lost their homes. Most of those folks will
be permanently displaced. More than a million
lost their lives. We burned the house to kill the
rats. Just like Viet-Nam. That's not just stupid.
It's immoral when it's not even your house!

And we destroyed their infrastructure. Kids
are continuing to die there from drinking dirty
water. The water is laced with feces because we
destroyed their sewage treatment and water
treatment plants. Why did we do that? Because
we went to war against the whole country and
its people, even though it was just Saddam and
and a few cronies who were truly evil. And the
people had no control over him, or ability to re-
sist him. It's what happens when we think of
people as enemies, instead of people.

Destroying their water and electric and all 17
bridges across the Tigris didn't help defeat
Saddam. He was beat from the start, practi-
cally, from day one. What it did was infuriate
the population and start feeding an insurrection
that was unnecessary and avoidable, had we
kept their army, police, institutions and infra-
structure intact. (Why we didn't is explained
fully by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine.)

The insurgency killed a lot of Iraqis and close
to 5,000 of our people. We paid in blood for
depriving their kids of clean drinking water.
It did protect our homeland from attack. Why
would they bother and take the risk to try to
get here to kill Americans when it was easy to
do there? With our guard up, do you think
they could have sneaked enough people in here
to kill 5,000 more of us here at home? Well,
we won though, didn't we?

Let me know what you think!


jgoodwin004@centurytel.net