Almost

Via

1.2 Million Dead in Iraq

From AlterNet:

According to a new study, 1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since the 2003 invasion, the highest estimate of war-related fatalities yet. The study was done by the British polling firm ORB, which conducted face-to-face interviews with a sample of over 1,700 Iraqi adults in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces. Two provinces -- al-Anbar and Karbala -- were too dangerous to canvas, and officials in a third, Irbil, didn't give the researchers a permit to do their work. The study's margin of error was plus-minus 2.4 percent. ...

Americans were asked in an AP poll conducted earlier this year how many Iraqi civilians they thought had been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation, and the median answer they gave was 9,890. That's less than a third of the number of civilian deaths confirmed by U.N. monitors in 2006 alone.

Where Are You?

This grim map of U.S. war dead by home town is from Iraq Coalition Casualties. Iraqi deaths are beyond grim.

Memorial Day Class War in Iraq

Be sure to read Limited Inc.'s posts on class and the Iraq war. Recommended Memorial Day reading.

One of the things that is most striking about this war – and striking about post-Cold War kultcha in general – is the lack of any reference to class. When Marx analyzed the civil war in France, after the French defeat in 1870, he naturally turned to class analysis. Somehow, this handy and hardy tool has become obsolete. Googling for some reference to class analysis of the situation in Iraq, I found zip.

So let me take it out of my ass here.

I could make a joke, and say that the sectarianism really is a big problem in the Iraq war – sectarianism in the U.S. of A.., that is. But that would be inexact. More coldly, the class segmented structure of Iraq has been shattered by the war, and that shattering has been the prerequisite to sectarianism. ...

In essence, the U.S. underwrote the expropriation of the upper class in Iraq without even knowing it. Contra those who think that every mistake that the U.S. makes is part of some devilish, conspiratorial plan, this unleashing of forces is precisely the kind of thing that upsets the plutocratic vision of Iraq.

Shoes and Boots

Vincent Van Gogh, "Peasant Shoes," 1886.

Thaier al-Sudani (Reuters), "The boots of a soldier killed in the bomb attack on Baghdad's Sarafiya Bridge on Thursday stand near the entrance to a hospital," April 13, 2007.

Van Gogh's painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth. ... We say "truth" and think little enough in using this word.
– Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art"

The dead soldier's boots are the disclosure of another truth.

No Exit

WARNING: This book contains frontal nudity, profanity & anti-war sentiment

This is the cover of a book my sixteen-year-old daughter checked out from her public high school library the other day. The title of the book is 2/15: The Day the World Said NO to War. It's a collection of photos of the global anti-war protests of February 15, 2003 that happened just before the invasion of Iraq. My daughter marched in one of the large anti-war demonstrations in Washington, D.C. during the run-up to the Iraq war and continues to have a keen interest in the anti-war movement, so she was very happy to find this book in her library.

I think it's wonderful that our public school's library has this book. It's certainly a much rowdier book than I can remember finding in my high school library. It shows pictures ranging from naked protesters in Antarctica to a granny proudly sporting a large "FUCK Your War" button. I think it's admirable our librarian purchased such a book for our very red-state school's library. I want to commend, encourage and support such efforts.

However, there was one thing about this book both my daughter and I found very disturbing.

On the bottom, left-hand corner of the front cover there is this label:

It says, "WARNING: This book contains frontal nudity, profanity & anti-war sentiment."

WTF?! One of these things is really, really not like the others. I'm alternately shocked, appalled, flabbergasted and bemused by this bizarre and jarring warning label. I can't quite believe such a thing really exists and, yet, there it is.

Although as a parent I would be fine with not having any warning labels ever, I'm not overly troubled by warnings about nudity and profanity. If that's the price for having these books available to students, then I would much rather have the books with the warnings attached, than not have the books at all. But anti-war sentiment is different. This is not something that needs a warning label. Ever. It is not something children need to be protected from. And it is not in any way, shape, or form analogous to nudity or profanity. Ideas are not something to protect school children from, and neither is peace.

I'm confident we'll be able to resolve this small, local conflict without any real acrimony. However, I am determined to resolve it. Anti-war sentiments are not going to be one of the things our children will be protected from, certainly not as long as our high school students remain unprotected from Army recruiters in their school.

Masters of War

By way of Professor Zero, here's a link to an excellent anti-recruitment effort organized by Leave My Child Alone that aims at helping to remove school kids' names from the military recruitment list mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act. And just in case you want to remind yourself why this is important, you can watch this:

Love in Iraq

Continuing the speculations on Zizek, Freud, and the evils of love, this photo was taken Mardi Gras day in Iraq.

The most benign formulation I can give for the current horrors in Iraq is that they emerged out of love. Love of country, love of family, love of god, love of freedom, love of peace. If it is true that love is always unjust and does evil by excluding others from the focus of our care and concern, then certainly the outpouring of love by the citizens of the United States in the wake of 9/11 finds no more spectacular expression than in the injustice and evil of the carnage in Iraq. Iraq is the place where love goes to die.

Love of country, love of freedom, love of the troops, and love for the victims of 9/11 becomes transformed into the injustice and evil of shock and awe, of Abu Ghraib, and of the hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq. This seems to fit well with both the experience and rhetoric of the war to date where noble sentiments and endless shit have marched hand in hand.

Evil as the result of a good heart is, of course, what makes for truly magnificent evil. It is much easier to avoid evil when it confronts us naked and undisguised. Evil expressed as love is much harder to resist, and much harder to stop. This is because resistance to expressions of such love may be portrayed as folks who do not love their country, their troops, their commander-in-chief, or their freedom.