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Bush, endless war, Bucca prison and shouldering the blame

Discussing the Quran at Camp Bucca prison, Iraq (AP Photo/Dusan Vranic)

Today, in a lengthy article—especially for this day and age—the Washington Post outlined the effects of a prison the U.S. ran in southern Iraq, Bucca. That prison, and the way it was run under the regime of George W. Bush, has turned innocent men into committed insurgents, and insurgents into committed terrorists. This has made the aspect of withdrawing from Iraq a thing of very terrible beauty, to borrow a phrase from William Butler Yeats. (Yeats was writing of the Irish attempts to win independence from Britain with the Easter Rising of 1916.)

 

And yet, it must be done.

 

Before we actually went to war in Iraq, when Dubya and Dick and Condi were all ginning out their bogus reasons for doing so, I recall an interview on the Today show with a group of pre-teen schoolchildren in Iraq. One or more of them literally asked that we please not destroy their country.

 

We ignored the children.

 

I recall driving through blue-collar Baltimore, and seeing the “Wage Peace” signs on lawns.

 

And our government ignored those.

 

We ignored the expertise of UN weapons inspectors, current and previous, who said they had no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I say “we” because apparently, “we” did not call our elected officials day and night and attempt to get them to see reason. (Granted, even if we had, given their yen for testosterone-crazed, fundamentalist-approved Bush regime anti-terror tactics, our calls might not have worked.)

 

Our fearful leader wanted to go to war, and he was surrounded by enough fearful and ethically challenged toadies—and I include most of Congress in this description—to make it happen.

Iraqis victimized twice
We did have some evidence that Saddam Hussein and his murderous sons were evil people. But what we did regarding the innocent people being held powerless by the evil Husseins was just as evil. By failing to stand up to our own fascist leader, we made the victims of Saddam Hussein into victims a second time. Worse, we made them into our victims and now—with a destroyed national identity, wrecked infrastructure, and a six-year history of occupation by ill-meaning westerners—we have made a good many of them into implacable enemies. It is almost certain their hatred will touch us in some way, sometime. And it is not lost on me that the best president of modern times, Barack Obama, will be tarred by Republican amnesiacs with the George W. Bush brush, and blamed if anything goes amiss in winding down Bucca, or thereafter.

 

And yet, we must withdraw.

 

For our national soul, no matter how deeply we must dig into our Bush-desecrated pocketbooks, we must help the Iraqis regain their society, a society our national fundamentalist Christian ethos seems unable to accept, never mind honor. We are as dismissive of the Arabs as they are of Jews. And make no mistake, in America, if you do not know at least one person who despises Jews simply because they are not Christian, you have been hiding under the porch. I know one such; she told me one day in the back of a church—a liberal church—that of course Jews could not go to heaven.

 

If you’ve never seen a racially hateful bumper sticker in America, you haven’t driven on any rural road, ever. If you don’t know at least one restaurant that advertised “Freedom fries” when the French had the good sense not to follow George W. Bush into world-class folly, you don’t go out much.

 

Despite our reprehensible insularity in the world, and the fundamentalist narrow-mindedness that allowed us to elect and re-elect George W. Bush, we must find a way to rebuild what we have destroyed, from the streets of once-elegant Baghdad, to our own souls, blotted with thoughtless malevolence born of intransigent ignorance wrapped in bowdlerized religion.

 

It will be hard, because Arabic culture is as degraded as our own. Arabic culture in general was much more vibrant and sensible in antiquity, when it gave us the concept of the zero, among other highly useful things. There’s no doubt, though, that ignorance wrapped in the Koran is as prevalent there as ignorance wrapped in the Bible is here.

 

At its best, before its recent descent into fundamentalist platitudes, Christianity, like the Arab scholars of old, gave us some highly useful things, among them the idea of charity. Not the charity that says to drop a dime in the collection box; the charity that encompasses the needs of all others and acknowledges their right to peacefully coexist.

 

As the Arabs have seemingly lost their intellectual curiosity, we have lost our spiritual peacefulness. In the U.S. today, the message of Jesus has been degraded so much that, if you put a bunch of U.S. fundamentalists in a room with guns and masks, I doubt you’d find much difference between their rhetoric—and willingness to kill to advance it—and that of a group of Arab men getting out of Bucca prison after being indoctrinated by imprisoned modern Muslim clerics.

 

Fundamentalism breeds fundamentalism; it can do nothing else. If the diet offered is one of separation and hatred, then that is what will be consumed and later expressed. If a diet of disrespect is the only one offered, then that, too, is what will be consumed and later expressed. There are reasons for certain truths in world thought, among them that one must turn swords into plowshares and put away guns in favor of butter. We must ethically do the latter of each of these to regain ourselves and restore what we have taken.

 

Even if we begin now—and we have begun, just barely—there are no guarantees. For example, the Iranian government didn’t immediately grasp the olive branch held out by Barack Obama. But they didn’t totally reject it, either.

 

Perhaps the very best thing to be said about Barack Obama is this: he is not George Bush. I think he’s a lot more, a total 180, in fact. But at the very least, he’s not George Bush. Indeed, if I were to write a prayer of thanksgiving for myself, I would write:

On a comment board at Newsweek online—for which, disgustingly, Karl Rove writes—a reader wrote:

 

“I am so relieved to see that (sic) the Bush/Cheney administration finally held to accountability. They have redefined what a democracy is which has hurt this country’s reputation around the world. Despite the current disastrous economic woes we are facing, which they are also largely due to Bush and Cheney, it is nice to be able to not have the fear-mongering that we have had to live through with them for 8 years. These are incredibly amoral, evil people.”

 

Since we are not a nation of evil, amoral people like George W. Bush—and thank goodness we don’t have him as president any longer—we must do all in our power to behave as an ethical nation once again. That means no thumping Bibles in other people’s faces, no thumping Qurans in other people’s faces either…or Torahs…or I Chings…or anything. Rather, we need to follow our own ethical and spiritual paths and let others follow theirs. In fact, we must—if we are ever to see this nation as author of peace instead of war—help others to follow their own spiritual paths, whatever those paths might be.

 

Letting uncharged detainees out of Bucca prison—even though by now some who were peaceful are less so, and those who were less so are more so—is the only right thing to do.

Photo, above: A sheikh interpreting Quran for inmates at Camp Bucca. At its peak it held 26,000 detainees. So far, the U.S. has released 18,000, with release of 1,300 more detainees each month planned, according the Associated Press.