Neocons and WarBots across the net have apparently decided that the four Blackwater, USA mercenaries killed in Fallujah should be elevated to saint status due to…well, it isn’t clear why. However, failing to show reverence to the new saints of the Iraqi war is to invite that most popular of right-wing and warbot treatments, the character smear.
Currently, liberal blogger Kos is getting The Treatment. In a display of mindless hypocrisy, the attack dogs of the right are castigating Kos and bombarding his advertisers with threats and hate mail for posting on his blog his honest reaction to the hysteria and rage of the Raze Fallujah faction over the mercenaries’ deaths, which was basically “screw them.”
Yesterday, on this blog, I asked the question, why the foaming rage over Fallujah? What about this particular incident has the warfloggers arming their rhetorical nukes and writing columns so inflammatory that they sound like the American version of an Osama bin Laden fatwa? It can’t be because they were American because over 600 Americans deaths up to now haven’t provoked a similar reaction. Many civilians have been killed in Iraq and up to now the Nuke Fallujah crowd hasn’t protested. Four American missionaries were gunned down in Mosul just last month, two of them women, eliciting no warbot retaliation strikes. It can’t be the grisly nature of the deaths, because American corpses have been defiled by crowds in Iraq before, most notably the incident in Mosul last November. No one seemed to think Mosul should be nuked.
So, what is special about these four mercs? I think Keith Halderman nails the warbots’ motives here:
Maybe the reason Tammy Bruce and Bill O’Reilly want to “raze” Fallujah (see David Beito’s post directly below) is because they are having difficulty dealing with their own responsibility for the deaths of those four Americans. Since there are no weapons of mass destruction and no credible proof that Hussein had anything to do with 9-11, there is no real reason that those four should have been there in the first place. Nevertheless they were there, why? I say they died in large part because of the mindless jingoism espoused by the likes of Bruce and O’Reilly. People in this country are constantly advocating that the government take some kind of action, but they never want to take any responsibility for the results of the actions that they advocate.
The warbots see the meltdown of all the justifications for their Excellent Iraqi Adventure, the roach-like scrambling for cover as the “War President” and his courtiers try to stonewall and evade the 9/11 commission, the military deaths mounting, the civilian deaths mounting, the pervasive anti-Americanism growing in intensity world-wide but most notably in Muslim and Arab countries, and their illusions of “democracy-building” shattering as the deadline for “Iraqi sovereignty” rushes toward them like a runaway freight train even as Iraq spirals into chaos and lawlessness. In the midst of this debacle, Fallujah rebels create a scene so horrible that it’s like waving a neon flag in the face of the most tuned-out American and yelling “Look at this disgusting, bloody, violent mess over here! It’s getting worse every day!”
Own it, warbots. We tried to warn you. We protested, we railed and wrote arguments against the war, but you wouldn’t listen. Now, those mercs killed in Fallujah were your responsibility. You put them there, with your cakewalking, rosepetal fantasies and ridiculous misconceptions about Iraq. The blood of all the dead from your illegal, unjustified war in Iraq – both “coalition” and Iraqi – is on your hands.
So, Kos, don’t let the warbots get you down. And for all you warbots out there who think the Blackwater mercs are instant icons of American sainthood who should be worshipped and grieved over by all “patriots”, tell me this. What’s the difference between these American men who died in Fallujah and American peace activist Rachel Corrie? Why was her death at the hands of the IDF a big joke to you, almost as big a joke as all the American soldiers and Iraqis who died in the WMD snipe-hunt, yet these guys are instant heroes, for whose killings over 200,000 Iraqi deaths are being called for in retaliation? The hubris of the War Partiers is limitless as they demand obeisance to their War Gods, and call on everyone to partake in their fake “caring.” If they cared in reality rather than in their pretend Nintendo War World those four Americans they are making such a gaudy show of grief over now wouldn’t have been in Fallujah in the first place.