Just in case . . .

you were wondering about getting out of Iraq, why not read this account from someone who just returned? It's Dahr Jamail, the American unimbedded journalist, now back home. One of the true heroes of American journalism. Read it and remember.

Or perhaps you would like to hear some of the voices you won't find in the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times or the Washington Post and certainly not in National Review or The Weekly Standard. So check out Amy Goodman's program from this morning and get some sense of what servicemen can go through to bear witness.
These are the soldiers who have the courage to understand and speak out. These are the kind of fellows that we always hope that we would have enough courage to be.

I support all the troops who are still alive and that's why I want the troops brought home now. They were sent off to fight an unjust, illegal war and as good soldiers do, they followed their orders. But the war has always been illegal, and now, as predicted, it has wrought more damage, terror, and destruction than Saddam Hussein in his worst moments, while being punished by American and British sanctions, could have wrought. It has produced even more terrorists than ever before and put all of us at risk.

The idea that we must fight them "over there" to keep from fighting them "here" is one of the most morally corrupt ideas ever given expression. Even people against the war can utter it with no sense of irony. (On a smaller scale, of course, it's the usual American response to the waste, pollution, and destruction that plutocrats, pathocrats, and oligarchs always fail to include in their corrupt calculations of the price of capitalism: it's known as NIMBY.) The problem is, it's always the people on the short end of the economic stick that get to bear the consequences.

And so even though I did not support the decision to invade and occupy Iraq illegally, I understand that the terrorists will always be gunning for us. But when I hear the glib formula of "We have to fight them in Iraq so we don't fight them in New Jersey" I am revulsed. The arrogance of that thought, and the stupidity, the inanity, with which it is so readily uttered are beyond the bounds of decency. Yet it slithers almost every day from the brain to the lips of that spineless and addle-headed fool in the White House and from his insidious, venal, corrupt and traitorous puppeteer, Dick Cheney, as if it were the most profound insight into the heart of darkness. What corruption. The darkness accumulates within them.

We not only should be preparing to thwart the terrorists that we have created and encouraged, we should be talking about making meaningful reparations to the people of Iraq, and we surely should be figuring out how to take care of the traumatized soldiers once we bring them home.