a twenty-three long iraq war

andy pink, vale, co —

lost in space post haste —

i saw several reels of year in review on msnbc early this afternoon as i recovered from the gym; this is one of my favorite parts of the collapse of the year at hand. i thought it was inspired that msnbc ran a series of disaster videos on christmas, those of us who were celebrating-otherwise could no doubt relate (i especially cathect to disasters involving helicopters). the iraq war has been going on for 23 years. it started under g.h.w bush in 1990, continued throughout the 90s as clinton sporadically bombed the country, and then was quickly reinstated in full in 2003, then wound down, then wound up because a couple of journalists were murdered. the iraq war — however the offense department wants to slice it up — has been in force for 23 years.

the iraq war is 3x longer than the official longest american war — which is vietnam. afghan is in fact our longest war — but i think of it less as a war and more as a bad med trial. i always tell my students about the story i read in the wall street journal about the first opening of a citibank (“citigroup”) branch in baghdad — a couple of years ago. it is estimated that between 130,000-900,000 iraqis died in the bush-led occupation from 2003. (this compares with the 5,000 or so americans who died in the war effort.) no one who would use such empty words as “democracy” or “liberty” or “freedom” could possibly have any clue what such words might actually mean, but the cost of the 23 year long effort to get citibank into iraq can probably be reasonably calculated by the citibank percentage rate on loans multiplied by the value of the infrastructure burned. then take that dollar amount plus the hardware cost of the war (over a trillion dollars said some blond on cnn) and then divide the sum by 500,000 (for iraqi life) and 5,000 (for american life) and you get the rough estimate of the value of human life (“democracy,” “freedom,” “liberty”) in war times. i imagine that if such calculations were made the dollar amount of a human life (both iraqi and american) would strike us as shockingly high. most of us would possibly even agree that the costs of capitalism are not high enough!

such are the times in which we are forced to find our exasperated breaths. “democracy” will always be code for capitalism. at this point, i’m surprised that “democracy” doesn’t have a more debilitating marketing problem than communism. if war were in fact fought for democracy, could its costs and benefits even be summarized on a calculator without simultaneously revealing its code? the calculations for the types of estimates i’m looking for are obviously far more complicated than this — but it’s hard to care about such a caveat given the obscene violence of even the possibility of such a calculation. does it not strike as profoundly grotesque that our system invites such a calculation?

i watched some dickhead white guy talk about immigrants on the news this afternoon. it will forever fascinate me that america insists on picking on those who have too little rather than on pursuing those who have too much. i would call it mean-spirited but i tend to think of people as generally good, even the bad ones.

when they look back on our times, what will they most indict? — 1. the hysterical persecution of cross-generational relationships 2. the strange blindness to the illegality of capitalism (violates due process) 3. the epidemic of personal insecurity 4. zyprexa. when beer and wine come to the starbucks in nyc, do remind me to hail a cab.

pinkster

and are we supposed to believe that north korea (!) took down sony pictures? — and then for some unknown reason refused to take responsibility for the hack when their anti-american rhetoric has been off the rails for years? but the real question: will the wisest hacker in the world be working for justice or the CIA? when is your day, bank of america? and when will you make your move, lady?