Welcome to The Cahokian... A thousand years ago Cahokia — across the Mississippi from what is now St. Louis — was one of the biggest cities in the world. Now it's an empty green spot next to the highway. I'm a middle-aged gay man living in New York City, center of the world, future footnote on somebody's future map. Welcome to the new world.
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Iraq: Ten Years Ago the Massacre Began
I have featured this photo, by the late photojournalist Chris Hondros, before on this blog. It is the quintessential image of the Iraq war, which marks its shameful tenth anniversary today.
That's not her blood.
It's the blood of her parents, with whom she had been riding as they drove through nighttime Baghdad. The American soldiers claimed they had ordered the car to stop, as though they had that right in the first place, and the parents failed to do so. So they opened up their automatic weapons.
The child survived, the parents did not. This child survived a horror of light and sound and screams and splashing blood. I cannot imagine what it would be like to be that child. I wish I could not imagine what it was like to live in the country that did that to her. But I do.
Ten years ago the U.S. attacked the sovereign state of Iraq unprovoked, having spent the ten years previous trying to starve the country into submission through blockade. The blood of hundreds of thousands, like this little girl's parents, is on the hands of every rightwinger and neocon who promoted, lied, and cheated to make that war happen. It's also on the hands of every cruise missile liberal who enabled them. Hillary Clinton and the New York Times are as guilty as Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and George W. Bush. I'm not holding my breath waiting for well-deserved war crimes trials.
Some people are trying very hard to forget what they did.
I doubt this girl will ever forget it, and neither will I.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment