Recycled Sentiment

Found an old observation I'd made in April of 2003. My willingness to smash antiquities was controversial (and perhaps hyperbolic), but overall it's worth reading again:

Oh, the horror! The Horror!

Let it be said... I think it sucks that the National Museum in Iraq was looted and that the National Library was destroyed.

And I think there's credible evidence that we knew of the threat, we knew it was happening, and we had the resources to stop it. Yet we did not.

And I think that reflects poorly on us, as an occupying power.

But I also think people are getting a tad too histrionic about it.

Suddenly, I'm reading left and right about a museum that most people didn't even realize existed and hearing of "the horror." Everywhere I go, it's described in superlative, melodramatic terms. "A horror." "Terrifying." "Grief-inducing." "Tragic."

The tizzy over the loss of these artifacts, I will concede, is in many ways the evidence of the sad callousness of America's modern left. The artifacts were nice things. The nice things are gone.

I understand it's nice to have things to hate the Bushies over. And hey, it's there, it's convenient. But one's rhetoric speaks volumes about one's world-view. And the histrionics over this museum indicate a sad inability to put things in proper perspective. In the end, the things were things. Antiquities last a long time. But they don't last forever. They're nice to look at, they teach us things... but they're props in the theater of human life. They're less important than we are. They're really not the best source to vent our crocodile tears on.

If I had to choose, I'd obliterate the Great Wall of China, the Parthenon, and the Pyramids at Giza in a second, just to save a single human life. They're just objects. They don't notice their own destruction, and the sands of history which swallowed all their contemporaries haven't stopped in the twenty-first century.

I'll tell you something that's "horrifying, terrifying, grief-inducing, and tragic." That kid, Ali... the one we keep reading about in the press. He's got no arms and no family. In many ways, that's a big tragedy. Sitting back on my shore of the Atlantic Lake, taking a look at the wide picture, I can see that Iraqis have a more promising future ahead of them than they did two months ago. I'm glad for that. The worst might yet transpire, but frankly, they got more to hope for now than they did then. But from Ali's perspective... well, he doesn't have the luxury of the wide-angle. He's got no arms and no family. And that's what he's gonna be, from now to the end of his days. An orphaned double-amputee. After he's out of the news, and after the world's stage has moved on, that kid's gonna' have a hell of a life... the only one he gets. And... well, we did that to him.

I wouldn't take the war back to give Ali his arms and family back. I would take it back in an instant to salvage the norms and precedents of international law... but that's another issue altogether. In the end, the world is trade-offs. The lives of some will be shattered in the interests of others. It's a necessary consequence of action. Would you send hundreds of adults into Saddam's torture chambers, simply to make Ali whole again? No. But, but I'd choose those horrors to have history unfurl again in the course I thought wiser.

We can lie to ourselves, and make contorted efforts to turn the darkness into light... "Ali doesn't know it yet, but life as an orphaned double-amputee will be BETTER in a free Iraq than life with a family AND arms in an Iraqi slave state!" I've also seen sentiments like that expressed, and they're sickening. That kid's been royally fucked over by life. By the decisions WE made... Had I gotten my wishes, and had America not invaded Iraq... well, someone else might be getting anally raped with a poker in a basement of Baghdad for saying the wrong thing to Saddam. And THAT person's suffering would be a direct consequence of OUR choice. Start thinking in those terms, and it all seems pretty hopeless. People are royally fucked no matter what.

Fortunately, nobody sits you down and makes you decide in those terms. No waiter asks: "Before I serve you your ideology, would you like me to electrocute the genitals of a dissident, or chop off the arms of a child?"

But to those of you who supported the war, I hope you do recognize the tragedy of its consequences. To those of you who opposed it, I do hope you recognize the tragedy which would have ensued had the war not unfurled. None of us can point a blameless finger at history.

This war was big, and this war was immense. I'm not interested in hearing the dick-brained "whoopees" and "cakewalks" of the ideological victors... a river of blood will flow from your choice. And from those who didn't like it, I'm not interested in hearing the exaggeration of every little fuck-up into a tragedy of Homeric proportions. There was blood down the path we advocated too. Spilt by different person, for different reasons, at different hands, but blood nonetheless.

And I'm not really interested in the "tragedy" of some broken crockerware, however old it may have been. It was a fuck-up, pure and simple. It's to be deplored, and to the extent it was preventible, those who failed to prevent it should be held accountable. There's no good excuse for it, but it should be kept in perspective.