strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Apr 12 03: back at the front
Our leaders are trying to downplay the chaos we’re leaving in our wake. The charming Mr. Rumsfeld, for instance, has
…dismissed the chaos as a “transitional” phase, born of “pent-up frustration” after 24 years of oppression. He accused newspapers of exaggerating the unrest and said television stations were showing the same footage over and over again “of some person walking out of a building with a vase.” [article]But we know otherwise, don’t we?
It appears that the micromanaged, less-is-more invasion strategy Rumsfeld and other civilian officials imposed on the Pentagon is going to succeed. Bully for Rumsfeld. But if we’d gone in with the sort of ground troops the military brass desired, we might have had the manpower to prevent the wholesale collapse that seems to be in progress at this point: every hospital reduced to a howling bedlam robbed of drugs, supplies, and equipment; stores looted; government records in flames.
For some reason, though, the thing that has finally sent me into ranting full-throttle disgust is the sacking of the National Museum of Iraq. In which priceless works from the dawn of human civilization were carried off by the wheelbarrowful. The same thing is happening in Mosul, where the university’s famed collection of ancient manuscripts has been picked clean. Maybe it’s because it’s no longer just the local nest that’s being fouled: the loss we’re facing here is the pillaging of our common history. We’re never going to see most of this stuff again, Mr. President.
Do I accuse the American forces of doing the looting? No. I’m furious that so many would choose such mindless, short-sighted violence for the inaugural moments of the future we have thrust upon them. But you cannot convince me that the possibility of this kind of chaos was never considered. Our failure to prepare for it makes us as culpable as the hooligans we’ve allowed to run amok, and don’t think that the Arab world will soon let us forget it.