This is an effort to encourage analysis of the current occupation of Iraq and administration policies in the Middle East, but especially in Iraq. I moved the blog to its current location on July 11, 2007
Look down fair moon and bathe this scene,
Pour softly down night's nimbus floods on faces ghastly,
swollen, purple,
On the dead on their backs with arms toss'd wide,
Pour down your untainted nimbus sacred moon.
-Walt Whitman
.............................
...................................................
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.
-Alfred, Lord Tennyson
A complex ecosystem created by the annual flooding of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, Iraq's marshes have sustained human civilization for more than 5,000 years. Some of the earliest settlements of Mesopotamia—"the land between the rivers"—were built on floating reed islands in these very wetlands. This was one of the first places where human beings developed agriculture, invented writing and worshiped a pantheon of deities.
The marsh was partially drained by Saddam As much as 90% of the marsh became dry land and as many as 300,000 Ma'dan Shi'a arabs were killed or displaced leaving current efforts to revitalize the area meager at best. Dams built upstream on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq, Iran and Turkey have contributed to this vast wetland ecosystem disaster.
In his 1964 classic, The Marsh Arabs, British travel writer Wilfred Thesiger described a timeless environment of "stars reflected in dark water, the croaking of frogs, canoes coming home at evening, peace and continuity, the stillness of a world that never knew an engine."
FAIR USE NOTICE
This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. This material is distributed without profit.
…The Iraq War was wrong the moment we started bombing Iraq. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein is no excuse, and does not pardon America’s collective sin of brooking and tolerating an illegal war of aggression.
The reality is, had our military prevailed in this struggle, the American people for the most part would not even blink at the moral and legal arguments against this war. This underlying reality is reflected in the fact that despite our ongoing disaster in Iraq, America is propelled down a course of action that leads us toward conflict with Iran. President Bush recently re-affirmed his embrace of the principles of pre-emptive war when he signed off on the 2006 version of the National Security Strategy of the United States, which highlights Iran as a threat worthy of confrontation. This event has gone virtually unmentioned by the American mainstream media, un-remarked by a Congress that remains complicit in the war-mongering policies of the Bush administration, and un-noticed by the majority of Americans. America is pre-programmed for war, and unless the anti-war movement dramatically changes the manner in which it conducts its struggle, America will become a nation of war, for war, and defined by war, and as such a nation that will ultimately be consumed by war.
1 response so far ↓
bibomedia // February 29, 2008 at 5:33 am |