No Mission

This is what happens. When you send armed forces to invade and occupy foreign people for no reason, terrible things are bound to happen. It seems that some Marines killed a bunch of unarmed civilians in Iraq. John Murtha says it's a worse blow to our efforts to pacify the country than the Abu Ghraib pictures. Maybe so.

But really, what did we expect? The soldiers and Marines fighting, killing, and being killed in Iraq every day are bathed in blood for reasons that nobody can articulate.

And I don't just mean my usual Junta-bashing there. Even glib, smiling Georgie Dubya is totally unable to articulate a real reason for what he's done. Even to his increasingly scant mob of worshippers. They just take it on faith. But what about everybody else?

From what I can gather, the current Iraq justifications fall into two categories. First, the "we were all fooled" stuff. That line says: "we all got the bad info from the bad CIA and all agreed on the Iraq threat, so you can't blame us that it was all made-up."

But, of course, they knew it was a lie. The liars were the Cheney-Rummy monsters who really really really wanted to invade Iraq for some reason that probably has to do with flawed potty training. They pushed the lie. They shredded all intel that was truth telling and promoted all intel that supported their lies.

And the stuff that got to the worthless rubber-stamp Congress was what they had cherry-picked. The lies that taint and shame Colin Powell and destroy his legacy were of his own choosing.

Second line: "aren't you glad he's gone?" Isn't it better to have Saddam out of power? What, do you want to put him back? Wasn't it worth a little effort to depose a genocidal dictator?

Of course, that was never the point. The point is, they couldn't have sold the war based on 'let's get rid of Saddam.' It would never have happened. If that's your taste in foreign policy, what's keeping you our of Sudan? Lots of bad guys there. No oil?

Well, that was never a consideration, right? We're just trying to do good in the world, one invasion at a time.

Obviously there's not a shred of truth or believability to anything coming out of the Junta, especially on the subject of Iraq. And that's fine for our nice (or nasty) political debate here in safe North America.

But what about the Marines and soldiers and Guardsmen in Iraq? They have to kill human beings every day. They have to watch their comrades be wounded and killed every day.

With so thin and meaningless a cause, what sense of mission can they possibly have? And once the mission becomes their own survival, we've lost for good.

That was one of the lessons of Vietnam, which the NeoCons didn't learn because they were too cowardly to go there themselves. They're the type of cowards who send brave people in to pointless battles for their own narrow benefit.

Look: we're in Iraq for Halliburton. We're in there for their contracts, we're in there to keep our defense budget increasing and ensure that no 'peace dividend' ever reaches anybody but the corporate elite. We're in there to maintain a war status for an incompetent administration that knows it can't stand the scrutiny that peace would bring.

We're in there to enrich and empower a few treasonously greedy Americans.

Try selling that to the troops.