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My Country, Wrong or Wrong

We were counting down the hours until we go to war. It is not my war, it is not my neighbor's war. It is not the war of anyone I know. In my city, there are signs on every other block reading "No Iraq War" in bright red, white and blue. Graffiti on the wall of a local car dealership reads "No Blood for Oil".

And yet the blood is coming.

There is a saying in my country. For those of you that haven't heard it, it goes "My country, right or wrong", which basically means that whether you agree with your country or not, when it comes to trouble, you stand shoulder to shoulder with your countrymen and defend its soil.

There is another tradition in this country. According to Henry David Thoreau, it is the duty of every American to disobey unjust laws, to the point of ending up in jail, until those laws or civil actions are repealed.

That's what the civil rights movement, the VietNam war movement, the labor movement, and the women's movement were all about. Make some noise until you get arrested, keep getting arrested until the system breaks down.

Except they've got smarter. They don't arrest us anymore. They just ignore us. The police very nicely protect valuable property and the protestors very nicely march on the sidewalks and nobody gets hurt. (The WTO riots, well that got out of hand because a bunch of hoodlums from Oregon came up and crashed our civilized party.)

Is the world aware that 200,000 people in Seattle protested the war on Iraq?

Are they aware that hundreds, perhaps thousands of peace loving Americans have flown to Iraq to act as human shields against the firestorm that is about to come? There is a book by Kim Stanley Robinson (a very good author, I might add) called "The Wild Shore" about a future in which the world collectively decides to bomb America back to the stone ages. Science fiction, right?

France is our friend, I remind people, there wouldn't be a United States without the sacrifice of French soldiers and French officers. That was then, this is now, someone on the bus said. What about the Statue of Liberty?

I am living in the land of the television. My friends and family are real people, but the country is going on somewhere out there - I just don't know where there happens to be. My friends in Chicago don't want this war. My friends in New York don't want this war. The e-mail group I belong to had military wives in it coaching people on how to simultaneously support our troops and protest the war. I mean, everybody in America knows the U.S. army is made up mostly of poor kids who needed a way for the government to pay for their education. Most of them didn't really sign up because they wanted to kill anybody.

And now they are being sent to bomb the hell out of a country that couldn't throw a missile 200 miles, let alone 5,000.

At the beginnings of these war rumblings, I thought, there must be something our government knows that they can't tell us. Something that is so terrible that it warrants this kind of obscene behavior. Nuclear weapons, probably, or a nuclear weapons program so close to completion that we really are afraid of another suicide bomber rather than a sophisticated delivery system.

But, no, more and more has been revealed to us - and it amounts to less and less. What they do have are a few remnants of chemical weapons that we sold them back when we thought they were the good guys and the Iranians were the bad guys. Oh, sigh, things were so much simpler when we could trust our dictators to remain our friends.

So why is this happening? Our president must be an oil sick man from an oil sick family. It is the only thing I can imagine. Once we have invaded Iraq and taken control of their country, we will presumably have control of their oil reserves. It is the only thing that I can imagine which would motivate us to get our underwear up in a bunch over a little anthrax - while ignoring the fact that Korea can lob a nuclear weapon at our west coast, and keeps hundreds of thousands of people in horrific concentration camps. I mean, those people are starving by the millions, and we're not worried that they might sell a nuke to a terrorist organization? Are we nuts?

Poor Tony Blair. I don't know what Bush has on him, but it must be something horrible.

And Colin Powell, he was a decent man the last time we went to war with Iraq, saying going any further would be 'unchivalrous". I may be naïve, but I can't believe that he stands behind the actions he's taking - does he think it would be worse if he stepped down and relinquished his position to someone of a more bloodthirsty disposition? That's all I can think to rationalize his behavior.

My country is in the hands of a man we did not elect, someone who would not even be president if his brother were not the governor of Florida - the pivotal electoral state - with the most corrupt voting record our country had seen since Jim Crow laws. (Oh, they've cleaned up now - wasn't that easy boys and girls, to join the twentieth century after the world was watching your little shell game?)

For those of you who don't know what a Jim Crow law is, it was a prohibitive law that restricted voting rights on the basis of education, land ownership, and pretty much anything they could think of to keep African Americans out of the voting booths once they were legally allowed to vote. Jim Crow laws have since been declared unconstitutional - but the bastards keep thinking up new ways to get around the system. The hand counted Florida voting system just coincidentally happened to declare thousands of minority ballots disqualified from the state's voting record.

I begin to weep, waiting for the bloodstains to appear on my hands. Unlike any other military conflict the US has been involved in during my lifetime - this one I feel oddly responsible for. The Germans should have done something to stop Hitler, shouldn't they - even though a majority didn't vote for him?

This is not World War II. This is not any other moment in history. This is a unique and dangerous precipice, from which no good can come.

I am an American.
I love my country.
I am ashamed.

by

Sarah Byam
20th March, 2003

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