From Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya, the first decade of the 21st century has solidified the U.S. reputation as the energizer bunny of war. While these conflicts continue to rage on, there are a growing number of signs that even the United States has a limit to how much war it is willing to wage.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff, says its chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, has a “physics problem.”
Canada offered to “discreetly” assist the United States as it prepared to invade Iraq even as the ruling Liberal party trumpeted its foreign policy independence from Washington.
Even before the Bush administration, there were those who believed — or pretended to — that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons.
By April 2004, just a little over a year after the U.S. invasion of Iraq and before the sectarian violence began, the Iraqi Association of University Teachers (AUT) reported that 250 academics had been killed. Award-winning British journalist Robert Fisk had warned early that year of the assassinations of Iraqi academics, but few U.S. newspapers picked up on the story. By the end of 2006, according to The Independent, over 470 academics had been killed. Another British paper, The Guardian, reported that about 500 academics were killed just from the Universities of Baghdad and Basra alone.
For three weeks in 2009, Jeremy Deller and a handful of collaborators hauled a burned-up hunk of steel across the United States. This rusted carcass – a car destroyed in a Baghdad marketplace bombing in 2007 – transformed a vast swath of Middle America into a space for discussion about a war in which Washington long ago lost interest. It Is What It Is showcases transcripts of the group’s discussions, photographs from the obscure or eccentric locales where they occurred, and any number of other mementos from the group’s travels.
The plight of Arab Christians, for which the U.S. is partly responsible, is often used by the right to rationalize our policies which contributed to their oppression.
It has the potential to add to tensions — not to mention an arms race — in the Middle East.
No matter how kind we are to our families, friends, and communities, ignoring what we did to Iraq leaves our ethical spreadsheets hopelessly unbalanced.
Were Rev. Terry Jones’s threats to burn the Koran enough to inspire the carnage that Islamic State of Iraq inflicted on the church in Baghdad?