Cosmopolite

The mighty sword of retribution has felled the evil Saddam. Dragged from a hole in the earth he stands before the almighty bar of justice. Elsewhere justice weeps upon the shattered remains of twenty thousand dead, casualties of Operation Iraqi Freedom’s liberating bombs.

Saddam’s dread Mukhabarat is gone. Now, American soldiers smash into Iraqi homes in predawn raids terrifying families in their beds. Now, Americans hold the keys to the feared and hated Abu Ghraib where humiliation, torture and death is now Intelligence gathering.

The warmongers cry peace peace but deliver death. They tout their mighty precision bombs but rely on depravity to win the peace. There refrain has now become, “Isn’t the world better off with Saddam gone?” I say no.

No, it is not better for those who are dead. No, it is not better for those maimed in body and mind. No, it is not better for the thousands of children who now limp limbless through life. No, it is not better for those in fear of night’s eternal rerun of the flaming horror that destroyed all that was dear, leaving them half alive and forever deformed. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, loved ones gone, blown to dust in one searing moment of murderous death. No theirs is not a better world.

Peace and Freedom cannot come through death and destruction. Who is so godly to say who should live and who should die? Who is to select the ones to be deformed by the flames of war?

The warmongers cry, intelligence makes the choice not I. Nameless, faceless intelligence has become the god of war. Amorphous intelligence now guides the hand that launches the deadly bombs of death. To bomb Saddam to dust, fifty intelligence directed attempts produced fifty intelligence failures and 500 innocent died. To kill al-Zarqawi, seven bombing raids upon Fallujah homes chosen by “reliable intelligence” produced seven failures and 70 innocent dead.

The morality of war lets the bombs decide who dies. Those cold and lifeless monsters of death are now the arbiters of life. Thoughtless, random, wanton killing for peace is the new morality of war. And we condemn suicide bombers?

The warmongers’ say there is no moral equivalency between terrorist bombs and the righteous dealers in death that wave the banners of liberty and justice for all. They say the terrorist aims to kill the innocent but the righteous aim to kill the evil. But, I say, a bomb is the end to all that is good when it rips innocent life asunder regardless from whose hand it came. To kill the child to kill the father is wrong. There is no bomb smart enough to do that. There is no precision to warfare. To send flaming death upon a city, a town, a village, a home to end one evil man is madness bred in the ignorant hubris of a debauched commander.

The warmongers proudly boast of their modern hi-tech strategy of “Shock and Awe.” They want us to think it is the military equivalent of a hospital’s surgical operation. But, these doctors of death dismiss the innocent people they kill and mane as mere “collateral damage” unworthy of even a body count. And when the smoke and dust has cleared form the gaping blood soaked crater that once was a home, with real living human beings that had hopes and joys and tears and life, the warmongers say, we’re sorry, that’s the costs of war, the price we all must pay to rid the world of evil. Now Allawi has come to town to reconstitute Saddam’s tyranny in the name of democracy. American’s can now sleep in peace knowing their righteous weapons of war have done their job.