Published: September 12, 2008 09:16 pm         

Flashpoint: Despite what McCain declares, there is no victory in Iraq

God bless Gary Daily for one of his best pieces on Aug. 17 — one of the best I have read on the Iraq war — titled “America has been shielded from horrors of current wars.”

Sen. John McCain’s early mantra was that he will bring victory in Iraq. Future tense, note. Comes now his new and improved mantra that we HAVE BEEN victorious in Iraq, thanks to “the surge” and Gen. Petraeus.

Excuse me while I shout through my fingers to my keyboard: That’s a lie! A damn lie! A damn BIG lie! BIG like the Bush lie that got us into an ungodly quagmire in Iraq based on mendacities.

There was no victory in Iraq, there is no victory in Iraq and there will never be a victory in Iraq because the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Neocon blunder, one of the most execrable in U.S. history, is rooted in dishonesty and deception.

Dear God, where is the moral high ground in bellowing “victory” when our hawks see oil as thicker than blood and worth far more? And when our geopolitical presence and power in the region are far more important than the charade of democracy and freedom, far more important than all the war dead, all the injured, all the “collateral” dead and injured among the civilians, and all of the Iraqis exiled, 2 million of them, doctors, teachers, scientists and other much-needed among the educated and the skilled.

What price victory amid so much devastation, so many homes and lives destroyed, so much unemployment, 40 percent, so much civil, religious, and ethnic strife in a tripartite state, so much suicide bombing that won’t quit, plus all the animosities that will linger long into the future?

What price victory when we had to bribe 110,000 Baathist insurgents to stop the killing and when the Iranian-backed al-Maliki Shiite government then attacked and killed some of those Sunni Baathists? Old enmities die hard.

What price victory when generations of our children will be taxed to pay for a $2 trillion war and a $10 trillion national debt that costs us $200 billion a year in interest alone?

What price victory when the merchants of death, the morbidly overfed arms industry, and the parasites of war, the private contractors, have ravenously fattened on obscene profits? Much of those profits coming out of the $10 billion a month war even as Iraq banked $80 billion in oil income.

What price victory when the war has devastated our economy in so many insidious ways, an economy desperately hurting for jobs, for energy reform, for health care reform, for affordable college, for infrastructure disasters waiting to happen?

Two “Stealth” bombers recently crashed. The cost: $1 billion for each. We shall build more and more. Those billions could assuage a lot of misery for millions.

The Pentagon budget of about $500 billion equals the military budget of the rest of the world combined. A fraction of that bloated and largely wasteful budget could alleviate a lot suffering in America. Money to pay for the madness is borrowed from China, Japan, Europe, and elsewhere.

Meantime, we send $700 billion a year to the oil-rich countries, and they, in turn, use our largesse to buy our real estate, buildings, and corporations. Not to mention to fund a thousand madrassas worldwide.

Senator, the flagship of your and your campaigners’ crusade is to lower taxes. “To grow the economy.” What kind of an economy when major manufacturers and millions of good jobs have fled overseas? Don’t make me laugh! Tax relief is for the corporate giants with their offshore immunities and their hundred-thousand-a-year attorneys who finagle enough loopholes to make the tax code a joke.

What price victory for democracy when, after five years of a bloody and costly war, Iraq’s constitution is stuck with Sharia?

What price victory when the government of al-Maliki, the leading Shiite imams, such as al-Sistani and al-Sadr, and a majority of the Iraqi citizens, just want us to get out of their country?

What price victory when (as columnist Diana West writes) a 2008 BBC poll showed 42 percent of Iraqis believe attacks on U.S. troops are acceptable; when U.S. soldiers who protect their country pay OPEC prices at the pump; and when the government “expresses solidarity” with Hezbollah and supports the Arab boycott of Israel?

No, senator, there never was, is, nor ever will be a victory despite your bellicose braggadocio, unless, of course, you can raise the war dead and make whole the amputees and others permanently injured in body, mind, and spirit.

Anyone who has read Gary Daily’s letters on the cost of an ill-conceived and ill-begotten war is not likely to be suckered by Sen. McCain’s political grandiosities.

— Saul Rosenthal

Terre Haute