Hell Is A Place On Earth

For those who want to hold onto the belief that what happened in Haditha was just an isolated incident, here is another example of what Iraqis are enduring at the hands of the American occupation.  This is surely just a fraction of what has been committed in our name.  For regular updates on the horror, read Baghdad Burning where Riverbend allows us to see the truth through her eyes, and although her accounts are compelling, they aren’t pretty and we owe it to the world to at least try to understand what we have set in motion.

The price of war is high and it is easy to focus on the cost to us, in billions of dollars diverted from our needs toward a war with seemingly no end, and in American lives lost in a struggle that has been successfully framed as “good” versus “evil”, but the real cost is hidden from view by an administration blinded by a neo-con ideology that demands a win, and a press that is owned by companies that make more money from wartime contracts than they do from us, the viewers.  These are truths we would be well served to grab a hold of.

We don’t take enough time each day to consider what it must be like for the average Iraqi trying to live a life, after all, we’re busy trying to live ours.  But our futures have become inextricably tied together and the sad truth is, they are not the enemy, we are.  The rest of the world knows this, and we better learn it real fast if we ever hope to become the America that we once were long ago.  The America that we, and the world, would like to see rise again.