The Best Laid Plans
What's that old saw? The best laid plans of mice and men do often go astray? What if the plans weren't all that great to begin with? What if monumental collective ego compelled a country to launch an invasion of another one without bothering to put together a real plan of action and an eventual exit strategy? What then? With vagueness in the future, yet a determination in the present to prevail despite any untoward events, is it any wonder that there is a disquieting, disheatening result?Despite the best of intelligence given at every level, the government of George W. Bush invaded Iraq with its made-in-the-U.S.A. "Alliance of the Willing" all willing to impose a culture of democracy upon a people and a nation that has lived since their time began in a culture of tribal animosity, mistrust and war, rather complicated by the addition of irreconcilable religious divisions. The not-too benevolent dictator whom these allied forces sought to remove actually kept these disparate social forces from each other's throats while visiting upon them almost equally a brutal despotism that they deplored but lived under in a semblance of harmony.
With the exception, needless to say, of those who sought to oppose his rule and who, for their pains, suffered painfully excruciating death in large numbers. There were the Kurds who chafed under his rule and said so, and tried to extricate themselves and who were gassed and violated and killed for their troubles. There were the Marsh Arabs whose style of living was disrupted and they uprooted because they were in the wrong place at the right time. There were those countless dissidents who were improvident enough to have a finger of suspicion pointed at them and that was sufficient for their incarceration or torture or death; occasionally all three in rapid succession.
And while no one bemoans the loss of a brutal dictator, everyone detests the ego of a would-be victor whose actions cause unspeakable privation and finally, through sheer incapability, countless deaths. There is no denying the destabilizing effects visited upon this volatile country by the invasion of foreign troops. An insult of massive proportions in a Muslim country, even one governed in pale imitation of a secular one. The mass Muslim population could see it no other way than as an unwelcome foreign intrusion by foreign troops worshipping an altogether different god, following a prohibited way of life.
Now, post-invasion, despite promises of stability and a return for the population to a normally-functioning infrastructure, private militias run amok in the streets of the country's capital, communities are without basic amenities of potable water and sewage disposal, let alone dependable power sources. Sectarian violence of a vicious nature unimaginable in most societies have let loose the bloody urge to kill all those not sharing the religious views of the other.
There are 100 to 200 civilians being murdered daily in the cities and towns of Iraq, with religious leaders often leading their adherents to their deadly acts by invocation of their adherence to the one true god; all others being imposters. Innocent men, women and children have been murdered, their mutilated bodies continually discovered cast off as evidence of the intransigence of murder-lust.
The religion of peace and tolerance - one of them, in any event - has been handily highjacked and transformed into a religion of death and destruction. How's that for a sterling result rising out of the determination to aid and assist one's perceived enemies to rise to the occasion of the democratic ideal?
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, October 22, 2006
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