Letters to the Editor
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Iraq and Virginia
Just want to thank you for this piece. We must face and take responsibility for the horror we have inflicted upon the people of Iraq.
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Gary you should have just come out and said it...
Gary, you are frequently wordy and indirect. You should have just come out and written what needed to be said.
Everyday, or every two days, what happened in Virginia happens in Iraq. Or much worse. People are kidnapped tortured with power tools and then killed. Everyday or every couple of days.
The United States, We the People, are responsible for setting into action the events that have caused this, the Sunni/Shia civil war.
Everyday I open the paper and I read about those killed in Iraq. Our military people, the citizens of Iraq. It has gotten to the point where tens of deaths a day is just par for the course. The only reason that the killing in Virginia is different is that it happened in the United States. But those killed are people like us (something that seems to be forgotten in the US media).
Our media bleats about the horror in Virginia, but we have created this horror in Iraq and it happens at least a couple of times a week.
I don't think that too many Salon readers are G.W. Bush supporters. Most of us did what we could to work for Bush's defeat in 2004. Perhaps there is less blood on our hands. But we should not pretend that Virgina is somehow special. Iraqis are people too and don't forget it. Or if you can't find it your hearts to see Iraqis in this light then notice that every month or less another Virgina of our military people die in this needless war.
That's it, Gary. That's what you seemed to want to write and should have just written clearly. It's not hard and it's not complicated. But it's not popular to clearly point out that all this bleating over Virginia misses the point. You wrote all this, Gary, but I had to extract it from a two page article.
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What Bush really thinks about the Iraqi lives
When I heard GW justified the invasion of Iraq with "we fight them there so that we don't have to fight them here", I think he pretty much summed up his view about how much the Iraqi lives means to him. Let someone else die for the mistakes we made in the past.
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"We" didn't invade Iraq
There's a certain incoherence at the heart of this article. At several points it (rightly) blames Bush and his administration for the war in Iraq, but it also says, "The sadness and sickness in America's soul today is not just that we launched an unjustified war, and betrayed the humanity of the Iraqis we said we wanted to help, but that we betrayed our own humanity -- and the memory of those who died on Sept. 11." (My emphases.)
We did? Then how is it Bush's fault?
The "we" that Gary Kamiya relies on so heavily here is an old rhetorical device. It's tied in with the conceit of a national "soul" that can be "sick" or not. But when you're talking about national policy, these metaphors obscure more than they clarify. And they're also dangerous: If America has a "soul" and acts as a single moral agent in which "we" are all implicated, then the same must be true of other nations as well. Hence the evil that other governments do is imputable to the people of those nations, and the next thing you know, you're terror-bombing Dresden or nuking Hiroshima and rationalizing it on the grounds that the ordinary people you're burning to death were somehow (collectively) guilty of something.
If you want to talk about sickness and health, it's a lot healthier to drop the whole "national soul" metaphor and acknowledge that national policies are not collectively "willed." They are made politically, i.e. with the support of some citizens but over the intense opposition of others -- who are therefore not equally guilty for bringing on the dire results.
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The story is everything
What I admire about Gary Kamiya above almost every other political commentator today is his range and ability to relate events, which are material and "factual", to the greater metaphorical and poetic truths that lay beneath. I wrote in a previous letter on another essay how the story we tell ourselves is often more significant than the event itself, that the story that "wins" is called "history".
Kamiya grasps this truth in a profound way. I have seen few writers address this dilemma of the Amereican soul, especially as it relates to Iraq. And I believe Iraq is a crystalization of this shadow aspect of America that has been moving in the undercurrent of the national consciousness nearly forever, and particularly in the last 50 years.
These words are extremely powerful, especially in the context of my letter on Gary's last column re: "America at a Crossroads"- to which I titled, "Not Ready Yet".
"America is responsible for the Iraq nightmare. But this truth must be repressed. It does not fit our **official narrative.** No state wants to be told that it is the national equivalent of Seung-Hui Cho. And so the Bush administration, which now has the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on its hands as well as that of more than 3,300 Americans, clings to its Big Lie, insisting that the dreadful ongoing slaughter in Iraq proves that we were right to invade in the first place.
This is a profound perversion of logic and morality. Fortunately, fewer and fewer Americans believe it. But the mere fact that it is our official governmental narrative about a great human-rights catastrophe, one we set in motion, brings shame upon our country.
Even though Bill Moyers IS expressing truth and outrage on the media's role as well as the lying that got us into the war (PBS still does great stuff), this realization is not one the nation as a whole seems able to understand.
But writers like Kamiya stand as the national conscience for all of us. I am deeply grateful to Salon that he is a Senior Editor and contributor.