The Banality of Evil
Posted by
Kevin
Richard Cohen, alleged liberal, alleged expert:
The manifold blunders of America in Iraq have made it unfashionable to recall such truths.
Fashion is a poor compass. The next time a car bomb goes off, remember Saddon al-Saiedi, a 36-year-old Shiite army colonel, father of two, abducted by Saddam’s goons on May 2, 1993, and never seen again.
As he went, so went numberless others, without a bang. Totalitarian hell - malign stability - holds no hope. Violent instability is unacceptable but not hopeless. Baghdad is closer to Sarajevo than we have allowed.”
Thomas Friedman, alleged internationalist, alleged expert:
There were three great bubbles in the 1990s: the Nasdaq bubble, the Enron bubble…and the terrorism bubble.”
… “We need to go into the heart of their world and beat their brains out, in order to burst this bubble.”
What happens when you take the word of American experts:
He lies flat, unseeing eyes fixed on the ceiling, tubes and machines feeding him, breathing for him, keeping him alive. He cannot walk or talk, but he can grimace and cry. And he is fully aware of what has happened to him.
Four years ago almost to this day, Joseph Briseno Jr. was shot in the back of the head at point-blank range in a Baghdad marketplace. His spinal cord was shattered, and cardiac arrests stole his vision and damaged his brain.
…
But he survived. From Germany, he went to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, then to McGuire VA Medical Center in Richmond, Virginia. In December 2003, he went home, to Manassas Park, Virginia, where his parents, Joseph Sr. and Eva, quit their jobs to care for him.
“All our savings, all our money, was just emptied … the 401(k)s, everything,” said Joseph Briseno, who took a new job a year and a half ago to make ends meet.
…
At the Tampa VA, a nurse taught Jay Briseno to swallow his saliva — a big step that allowed him to have some pureed foods instead of just tube-feeding. He has not been able to handle any solid food, though — his injuries are too profound.
More recently, the Tampa staff tried to wean him from the respirator. This involved painstaking therapy to strengthen his diaphragm by placing weights on his belly and gradually increasing the air pressure on the machine to try to create resistance and muscle strength. So far, it hasn’t worked.
He has had other trials: surgeries, procedures and medications for bladder problems, high blood pressure, the opening for his breathing tube, dead tissue on his tongue — even an ingrown toenail. The latest is the bone disease, osteoporosis.
He can respond to questions by grunting or grimacing, and occasionally can say “mom” or “go,” but not consistently. He often opens his mouth.
God damn them all. Wars aren’t games and soldiers and civilians aren’t game pieces to be sacrificed without a moments thought. Wars are horrible, horrible things that cut lives short and mark even the survivors for life. Wars break things: countries, people, minds. No sane person, no person with an ounce of hummanity actively tries to starts a war. Decent people fight the coming of war right until the first bullet flies and fight to end the war as soon as possible. Unfortunately, decency is not a requirement for punditry stardom.
We have a sick, sick political culture. Bush is a symptom of this reckless, soulless, militaristic, fetid political discourse, not its cause. After Bush leaves we will still be cursed with men who think there is no problem an armored division cannot solve and count the seriousness of a thinker by the number of children he or she is willing to condemn to bloody death.
What total drivel! Only the clueless that have never studied history run around saying that “war never solves anything”, “anything is better than war!” and the other lack of fortitude that this mentality is based upon. War settles most things. I do agree that –
“Wars aren’t games and soldiers and civilians aren’t game pieces to be sacrificed without a moments thought. Wars are horrible, horrible things that cut lives short and mark even the survivors for life. Wars break things: countries, people, minds. No sane person, no person with an ounce of humanity actively tries to starts a war. “
However, some times war is the only answer. The problem with America is that we have lost the fortitude to accept that war breaks things and people die. I listen to the whining of the “liberals” about 1000 dead in Iraq, 2000 dead in Iraq, and think, if this mind set was around sixty years ago, we would never have won WWII. You don’t hear this from the soldiers, sailors, marines, or airmen – they know that they are putting there life on the line but they expect their lives to be spent wisely.
Don’t expect me to feel sorry for the civilians of a country during a war. Their government got them into the war and it is up to their government to protect them. If their government cannot protect them, then they should replace the government with one that will.
Speaking on the Iraq War, unlike many, I can actually remember the 1990s when Democrats and Republicans, Europeans and Asians, all agreed with the North American (notice I do not say just American) assessment that Iraqi had WMD and was working to develop more WMDs. That France, Russia, and the United Nations were actively working with Saddam to violate the agreed upon UN response to Iraq. The French, Russians, and the UN itself had an interest in supporting Saddam making almost all the effort though the UN ineffective.
The problem is not whether the war is right or wrong, because once you’re in a war that does not matter. It is do we have the will to do what is necessary to win the war. Muslim’s have looked at our history and decided that we do not have the stomach to win and the peace activists are working to prove them right. We either want to fight Muslim extremist in the Middle East or we want to fight them here.
Comment 6/26/2007
“We either want to fight Muslim extremist in the Middle East or we want to fight them here.”
In other words, I am afraid of you so I will preemptively attack the general geographic area where you live so you can’t attack me. I don’t want to incur collateral damage on my soil, so I will wage war on your soil. That way, only your innocents are killed; mine are spared. And I will overlook the fact that you are not a government and not a well-identified enemy (although I will use WWII as justification for my actions). Bottom line: my life and the lives of those like me are just plain worth more than the lives of people unlike me.
Comment 6/26/2007
“In other words…”
That’s for sure. Your “other words” bear no resemblence to anything Vernon said. Why do you feel it necessary to make up stuff?
Comment 6/26/2007
Fred, why do you feel it necessary to willfully ignore the plain meaning for Ted’s words.
On the off chance that you’re actually too stupid to have understood this, Ted was speaking non-literally. His “In other words” meant (and this should have been completely obvious to any adult reader) “The above tirade necessarily entails understanding the situation to be as follows.”.
Are you actually too stupid to understand this or do you just ignore it because you don’t like Ted’s claim?
Comment 6/26/2007
“No sane person, no person with an ounce of humanity actively tries to starts a war. Decent people fight the coming of war right until the first bullet flies and fight to end the war as soon as possible.”
While I’m against war in general and particularly the Iraqi frass, I’m not sure this extreme is necessarily true. War is to be avoided… it is an ultimate failure of any system. But if the system really is reaching a failure-mode, war might be the mode with the best salvage-values in some cases.
Maybe the problem is I’m thinking of the Revolutionary War in the US, which was a civil war. Maybe the rules are different for those. If Iraq were in a civil war, and we only played France’s part from the Rev War, maybe that would be a “just war”. Eh?
Comment 6/27/2007