The War in Iraq is Illegal

Friend and fellow blogger (as well as a lot of other things) Warren Kinsella has given us permission to reprint this timely and on the money article, so here you go:

What does a nation at war look like? Looking at the American media, it's hard to say.

Precisely three years after the commencement of the war in Iraq, on a cloudy, cool day threatening rain, the Fox Network affiliate in Atlanta offers up three fools to dissect the meaning of the conflict that has killed more than 2,300 Americans and more than 30,000 Iraqis. The blonde one in the middle says: "Some would say things are better, some would say things are worse. But one thing is for sure - a lot has happened in the past three years!"

Her co-hosts sombrely nod at this profound assessment. Fox producers then cut away to recent night time footage of Baghdad being bombed. They superimpose the greenish images of destruction with the headline: "REBUILDING IRAQ." To call any of it Orwellian is a cliché, but apt.

Three years later, though, it is actually true: a lot has happened. Along with the thousands dead on all sides - along with the many more thousands grievously wounded, the $6 billion (U.S.) spent monthly by the Pentagon, and an Iraq sliding inexorably towards the abyss of civil war - George W. Bush's pre-emptive action against Saddam Hussein's fictional weapons of mass destruction has profoundly altered the configuration of many lives, in Iraq and the United States. But what has it done to the spirit of Americans? What do they feel about it, three years on?

Pollsters sometimes suggest they have the best insights into these things, and there certainly were no shortage of polls to dissect this past weekend, as America grimly contemplated the third anniversary of the war, and as puny crowds gathered in cities around the globe to protest it. One Gallup survey, headlined on the front page of a copy of USA Today picked up on a Saturday at a convenience store in south-western Florida, finds that - by a margin of nearly three-to-one - Americans say the impact of Bush's war on their lives has been negative. Sixty per cent, Gallup noted, said the war wasn't "worth it." Half admitted that they had even cried because of it.

Fox Network bimbos notwithstanding, some further insight into America's zeitgeist is found, perhaps, in the newspapers one can pick up along Interstate 75 - the highway that many Canadians, seeking Spring Break sun or Snowbird getaways, know well. Unscientific a survey as it may be, a reading of these U.S. newspapers tells the tale of a nation wrestling with despair, doubt and denial - and, here and there, no small amount of defiance, too. The breezy rightist jingoism that characterized much of the early coverage of the Iraq war is gone, however.

What is left in its place, even in Republican-red Southern states, is a lot like what one sees in the lead editorial of USA Today, strenuously condemning Bush's pre-emptive strike: "[Iraq] was a blunder of historic proportions that has made Americans less, not more, safe...[the cost] in U.S. lives, money and credibility has been incalculable." In all, seven outstanding pieces of journalism about Iraq are found in the newspaper. Wartime boosterism is conspicuously absent. There is anger for George W. Bush and his defence chief, Donald Rumsfeld. But for the troops themselves, limitless pride.

Reading some newspapers, it almost seems as if the war is a Hollywood construct. In the Tampa Tribune and the Fort Myers News-Press, plenty of front page stories about golf or abortion pills, but about the war? Little or nothing. In a modest obituary in the latter, there is a dry recounting of the tragic death of a 27-year-old local man killed in an attack near Ar Ramadi earlier in the week - and an equally sterile Associated Press wire story about an anti-insurgent drive near Samarra. The coverage seems routine and disinterested, even when a local boy dies. It is almost as if the newspaper's editors do not want to remind their readers about it. That seems likely.

The fabled New York Times, picked up further along the I-75 on the same day, is not much better. A man who falsely claimed to be the victim of brutality at Abu Ghraib prison - the one seen in the infamous photograph, standing on a box, hooded and electrical wires dangling from his arms - merits front-page coverage, and a tortuous, self-flagellating Editor's Note on page two (the post-Jayson Blair Times remains jittery, it seems, about its journalistic credibility). But inside the newspaper of record? Not much about Iraq on this day.

In the pages of the St. Petersburg Times, further up the road, there can be found an unsettling profile of a 48-year-old man who actually enlisted to avenge the death of his 22-year-old son, killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad two years ago. "I don't really have love for the Muslim people," says the man, who says he is a Christian missionary. "It's hard to love people who hate you." In the local section, a sad story about a local 29-year-old killed in a related conflict that Canadians know increasingly well, in Afghanistan.

Further north, on Sunday morning in Atlanta, the Journal-Constitution fills page after page with exemplary stories about Iraq - including one that describes, in detail, how the war has shattered the lives of five Iraqis. The U.S. has stayed too long, concludes one Iraqi father, whose wife, daughter and father-in-law were killed in a mortar attack. "We had great expectations but all those expectations have been destroyed," he says.

On the same day, in the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the front page carries a moving tale about a small-town Georgia Marine, Lance Cpl. Josh Scott, whose death left behind a 21-year-old widow and a six-month-old daughter. Says the young mother, recalling that her husband knew his daughter for only a few short weeks: "There's never going to be a day that goes by that I'm not going to remind her and tell her how much he loved her."

Reading it all, it would be manifestly unfair of any Canadian to suggest that Americans are remotely gung-ho about the war in Iraq. If their journalism is any indication, and it usually is, the people of the United States no longer approve of it. Even for the editorial boards with a Republican tilt, you can observe the growing sense of dread. But, as with Vietnam, Americans are hesitant to say so out loud - because too many young Americans have lost their lives to now dismiss it all as just a waste. It is a dilemma Canadians will increasingly face, as Afghanistan unfolds in the weeks and months ahead.

The last word goes, as it often does, to the Sunday New York Times, picked up at a coffee shop along the Interstate in Ohio. In it, someone has written a fiery editorial about what the newspaper calls "the Iraq debacle." The newspaper proclaims: "The last three years have shown how little our national leaders understood Iraq, and have reminded us how badly attempts at liberation from the outside have gone in the past.

"While we are distracted by picking up the pieces, there is no time to imagine what the world might be like if George Bush had chosen to see things as they were, instead of how he wanted them to be three years ago. History will have more time to consider the question."

The same goes for the despairing American people, and the journalists who serve them; the same goes for the United States, the country that does not seem to be at war, but surely is. They will also consider the question, and pick up the pieces.

There will be more stories to be written, up and down the Interstate, and far too many obituaries written about young men and women. And there will be plenty of time to consider the question, and the quagmire, which now bears the name Iraq.