COME CRASHING!

He who controls the present controls the past,
and he who controls the past controls the future. George Orwell, 1984

Orwellian Overture

By any rational reckoning, we have lost the war in Iraq, unless there is some plan to escalate it to World War Three, mobilizing the US economy and returning to the draft. How could we be at such a low point without there having been a vigorous national debate about our deeply flawed war goals, war plans and war results?

In April of 2003, we saw Saddam Hussein's statue fall in Baghdad. On Mayday, 2003 we read "Mission Accomplished" as Bush praised his Shock-and-Awe war from the USS Abraham Lincoln. By the summer of 2003, though, we heard the word insurgency for the first time, and within a year we were hearing words like Sunni Triangle, militias and civil war -- and we've been hearing them ever since.

In 1984, Orwell pointed out that Big Brother, through its Ministry of Truth (Minitrue), never admitted failure in reporting war, and neither have those who were supposed to be reporting our Iraq fiasco. We haven't had any Congressional oversight, media scrutiny or military correction for the worst war results in American history. In Orwellian terms, the Bush League is a Big Brother imitation, and our current corporate-run US media is a rental Minitrue.

If journalistic ethics -- or regard for truth -- could influence them, the media wouldn't continue to tell us, through pages, cameras and microphones, that there is any kind of success -- or prospect of success -- in the disastrous Quicksand War. They swore to be an embedded asset for the Bush League, though, and they've kept their devil's pact by finding new ways to shade, hedge and omit the facts. They have told us every lie necessary to bring us to the Middle East in the first place, and now telling us every lie necessary to keep us there.

O! Put this war away! Put it away!
Stash it in the annals of Vietnam,
Put the hideous, blood-spattered mongrel down!
Plant it beneath the loudly muted ground!

Lay our best and worst under, wrapped in flags,
Let the encircling earth hold it there, unspoken.
How many lives must we waste in shock and awe;
Scores of murder and rape to slither past?

Put this war away! O! God, end it if we will not!
Our hearts have wings for more than this!
Our souls more light than darkness here!
Lift light our spirit in freedom! Crush our tyranny!

Innocents shall not be raped for sport in awkward rage!
Bullets to head in terror’s Goddamned surrender!
Children slaughtered for oil! Families shattered of days!
A country devoured in empire’s repulsive teeth!

O! Put this war away! Put it away!
Snuff its proud lion beneath the plummeting shells
And send it prowling downward…
Let it lie, sprawled with the phosphorous bones.

Put this war away! Put it away!
We’ve had enough of blood; its use drained...
Bring our murder home. Ravage its molten metal frame
`til it cries out in its own reluctant wretched death!

If it is to be, let it come crashing!