Failure is an f-word obscenity that we need to stop using when it comes to the USA-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. How can something be a failure when it has no purpose to begin with? In fact, the Iraq war is endless, because it seeks a purpose still.
Incredible is the claim that the USA made some “mistake about “weapons of mass destruction. That so-called purpose for going to war was a deliberate lie, cooked up and spoon fed from the kitchens of Washington, DC.
Astonishing is the claim that the USA sought to restore sovereignty to the Iraqi people, because immediately upon arrival the USA-led administration not only toppled a dictator, but also abolished the rights of the Iraqi people to sovereign ownership of their land.
Atrocious is the justification that connects the invasion of Iraq to a war on terrorism, because this is only a way of admitting that the war on terrorism is a race war.
So if not for self defense or Iraqi sovereignty, what is the purpose of the war? To re-make the Middle East? This seems to be the most honest answer to date. But if this is the purpose that the USA occupation is trying to win, then how dare we speak about victory or defeat, success or failure? How dare we?
Morally, one cannot pose the problem of “remaking the Middle East and then ask if the USA is “winning such a thing through war.
If the so-called purpose of the occupation is to remake a region, then the question is, who are the war criminals responsible for launching this occupation and how do we bring them to justice?
At some deep level, where language is too conflicted to say, the American people have come to understand the wrong they,ve done, and no f-words will help them figure things out.
Wrong is not an f-word. A wrong war cannot be made right by winning.
GREG MOSES is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence. His chapter on civil rights under Clinton and Bush appears in Dime’s Worth of Difference, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. He can be reached at: gmosesx@prodigy.net.