October 13, 2003
The future.
The Iraqi woman who blogs as River Bend tells us about a rape, part of the ongoing rape of Iraq by the United States at the behest of a few men in Washington, D.C. In five, ten, fifteen, years, when Americans die at the hands of Iraqi terrorists, remember these words:
The trees are bulldozed and trampled beneath heavy machinery. We see the residents and keepers of these orchards begging the troops to spare the trees, holding up crushed branches, leaves and fruit — not yet ripe — from the ground littered with a green massacre. The faces of the farmers are crushed and amazed at the atrocity. I remember one wrinkled face holding up 4 oranges from the ground, still green (our citrus fruit ripens in the winter) and screaming at the camera- "Is this freedom? Is this democracy?!" And his son, who was about 10, stood there with tears of rage streaming down his cheeks and quietly said, "We want 5 troops dead for each tree they cut down… five troops." A "terrorist," perhaps? Or a terrorized child who had to watch his family's future hacked down in the name of democracy and freedom?
We are creating another Palestine. We are breeding hatred of Americans among people who were indifferent and who could (easily!) have been our friends. Instead, they are now our enemies.
When people look for someone to blame when they have lost a relative or a friend to a terrorist attack, will they look to the young men and women carrying out that attack? Or will they remember the actions of a handful of old men in Washington, who made certain that those young men and women would be willing to die for the cause of their hatred of the United States?
Of course, we can still avoid that fate. We can oust Bush, Cheney and the rest, we can try them for the crimes that they have committed, we can earnestly apologize to the Iraqi people for the part we have all played in this atrocity. We can, and doing so might even work, to defuse a hatred that will long outlive the Bush presidency. The problem is, though, that we won't.