The Joys of the Bush Paradigm in Iraq

What have we wrought?














Outside a morgue in Baquba, Iraq, family members cry near the body of a 17-year-old girl killed during a raid by Iraqi forces. It has been five years since the authorization of US military force in Iraq.
(Photo: Reuters) (source: Truthout.org)

The Buddha said over two thousand years ago that hatred will never vanquish hatred. Only love can vanquish hatred. This is an immutable law of the universe.

America, collectively, went into Iraq with hatred and racism in its heart. Underneath all the fine rhetoric was a deep lust to strike out and punish, if not destroy, a people we have never had any real awareness of, substituting instead decades of Hollywood stereotypes about evil, violent, thieving, lascivious Arabs. These stereotypes, although more subtle than the Nazis' fragrant stereotypes against the Jews, have been every bit as deadly. America has actually transferred this traditional Western and Germanic/Anglo-Saxon anti-Semitism against Jewish peoples, dating back hundreds of years, for a self-righteous anti-Semitism against the Arabs, because, if you even know, Arabs and Jews are both considered Semitic peoples. They were both cut from the same cloth geographically and ethnically. Moslems and Jews even share the same ancestral "grandfather", Abraham.

So if educated Americans have ever wondered how in the world the sophisticated German people could have gone along with the Nazi agenda, with the massive crimes against humanity, with the endless passion for war, violence and torture, all we have to do is look at ourselves for the last six years and how we have leisurely walked down the seductively negative path of fear, violence and loathing. We have now perpetuated a Holocaust in Iraq, with anywhere from half a million to over a million dead, with some two million plus Iraqis in external exile, another two million in internal exile. Hundreds of thousands are sick, wounded, depressed, deranged, unemployed or in prisons, overt or covert, some of which still practice torture beyond prying eyes.

This is America's self-expression in the world today, massive death and suffering, compliments of the traditional Right-wing, the corporate Merchants of Death, and the Trotskyite-style Neocon fanatics. They will inevitably say in their alienated, sophistic ways, "So what, who cares, they're sub-human, and enemies of Christ or Jehovah or the American Century anyway."

But it does matter, because now this is their and our Karma. And what goes around comes around. So how will America work its way out of such terrible crimes? Is this even possible, to offer contrition at this point and try to make amends?

Even worse, America has made itself less and less human by dehumanizing others, so cruelty and inhumanity will follow us home, so to speak. Our social and political interactions within America will coarsen and harden, indeed they already have. The faux Social Darwinism of the 19th Century has returned with a flourish - the survival of the fittest, the richest, best armed and most unscrupulous.

And then we have the walking wounded. For those who have literally shot and killed or tortured Iraqis, particularly women and children, they now have their demons and ghosts inside of them permanently, no matter how they try to repress this black hole through liquor and drugs and self-denial. And we have thousands of GIs or ex-GIs carrying this burden.

This is why I don't go and beat my neighbor and burn his house down in a fit of paranoia or sadism, because I know it will all come back on me, sooner or later, no matter how invincible I think I might be. The human ego, no matter how arrogant it is, is not running the Universe. A God of Truth and Justice is. And it isn't any different for nations.

Pity the nation.