Reading notes

[That, for many Iraqis, the bloody invasion and occupation were at least as bad as the fallen dictatorship] is unmentionable here in America. The tens of thousands of Iraqi dead and maimed do not exist. When I interviewed Douglas Feith, number three to Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, he shook his head and lectured me on the “precision” of American weapons. His message was that war had become a bloodless science in the service of America’s unique divinity. …

I have heard the “precision of American weapons” argument a thousand times, as if that alone justifies their use. Meanwhile, the direct and indirect effects of our weapons’ imprecision continue to come home in body bags and wheelchairs.

As for the great human catastrophe in Iraq, the bereft hospitals, the children dying from thirst and gastroenteritis at a rate greater than before the invasion, with almost 8 per cent of infants suffering extreme malnutrition, says Unicef; as for a crisis in agriculture which, says the Food and Agriculture Organisation, is on the verge of collapse: these do not exist. Like the American-driven, medieval-type siege that destroyed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives over 12 years, there is no knowledge of this in America: therefore it did not happen.

Of course this knowledge is available to many Americans through other sources despite the failure of most U.S. media. To still not know — worse, to deny this catastrophe — how is that not like public behavior that denied (and denies) the Holocaust? Worse still, to brazenly claim that we’re actually doing God’s will as agents of this human catastrophe in Iraq, as some Christian denominations have, does far-reaching harm to the real Kingdom of God, discrediting it in the eyes of many for years or for life.