The American Refugee Crisis

Refugees, as defined by a nearly half a century old United Nations treaty, are given certain rights when officially recognized as such by nations where they go to for asylum, and those countries have certain responsibilities when it comes to dealing with those people. That specific convention in question, the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees defines a refugee as "A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.."

I think that it may be time to amend the criteria that we use to define refugees, or at least officially create a new international legal category for some people. People flee their own countries for a number of reasons, and political, religious, or ethnic persecution is probably as a whole a relatively small proportion of that. People who flee for other reasons, ones that make it so they don’t legally qualify as refugees, still face the same problems that “official” refugees do; they make it to another country, where they might not know the language, or have any idea of the laws and how they relate to their legal rights and responsibilities, they can find it hard to get access to healthcare and jobs, and their kids often start out without even having a basic chance at getting anywhere else in the world. The biggest bloc among these unofficial yet nonetheless very real refugees is economic ones. These heretofore unrecognized econo-refugees leave their homelands not because they face repression and persecution meted out by their governments, but because capitalism as a global economic system cannot help but to be exploitive in a way, and it’s left them economically impoverished, repressed, with no hope for advancement if they choose to stay, just an unrelenting life of long, brutal hours in unregulated, miserable conditions for very little pay that leaves them struggling to find a way to provide basic necessities, like food and shelter, let alone any type of healthcare if they should happen to get sick while living in squalid conditions. They have lived hard lives devoid of very much hope, and they know if they choose to stay, the lives of their children promise to be just the same.

So, as people have throughout history, they up and move to places that hold the promise of more opportunity, a better life, if not necessarily for them, at least it will be for their kids. They often do so at very great expense, especially for people who have so little, and it is far from unusual for them to put their lives at great risk. It is this phenomenon that we’re experiencing in this country right now, though to a confusion of terms, instead of refugees, we’ve been labeling these people “illegal aliens.” Language is a very powerful thing, it’s probably the one thing that has the most influence when it comes to shaping how we see the world, and that way that you frame an issue can really affect how exactly people view something, and the way that they feel about. (Parenthetical aside: I was thinking of the illegal immigration controversy when the term “economic refugee.” I’m pretty sure that I hadn’t heard it anywhere before, but I do a lot of reading so I guess that I may have come across it somewhere before. I googled it and came up with a page from the Rockridge Institute using it in the exact way I was thinking of it. I saw it after the idea first popped up, but credit where credit might possibly be due.)

Compare the two terms: refugee, a refugee is somebody that deserves compassion, respect, charity. They’re people who, through no fault of their own, have been placed in a situation where they feel it’s more worth it to leave their homes for another country, one that may be absolutely foreign to them, because even that is so much better than staying in the situation that they’ve been placed. Then take a gander at Illegal Alien. The first word, illegal, brings up all sorts of nasty, underworld connotations, they’re criminal lawbreakers with no respect for the institutions of this country, they’re abusing and exploiting our natural generosity as Americans. Alien, what a wonderful way of dehumanizing, being able to look down at them, they aren’t people deserving of dignity and respect, they’re foreign others, it must be perfectly alright to do our best to round them up to where they came form, Mexico maybe, Colombia, Guatemala, or perhaps Venus.

When it comes to this immigration crisis, or as how many people have referred to it, an “alien invasion,” it should be remembered that this isn’t just a matter of Mexicans laving Mexico and coming to the United States. Though they do form a vast majority of the people coming over, a good deal also hail from other Latin American countries, and a small number come from countries all over the world, particularly a quite a few Asian ones. Wherever they come from, the forces that are forcing them to make the decision to leave their homes are generally similar. It should also be kept in mind that, particularly when it comes to Mexico, it isn’t just economic forces pushing people out. The recent violence in Mexico relating to the narco trade, with carnage on a scale not dissimilar to Iraq, which has left thousands dead and dozens headless, would most likely qualify some people as refugees as we now see them, though since they do come from Mexico, and most often come via the unofficial route, they’ll be treated just the same as other Mexican immigrants.

This violence has been concentrated around the border with the United States, where the drug pipelines run through. In a city a mere thirty five miles from where I’ve lived all my life, Ciudad Juarez, there’ve been more than fourteen hundred murders there so far this year. The cartels have made it a habit of assassinating ranking police officers and officials, and Federal Attorneys. They’ve dumped heads and headless corpses in every section of the city, hanging a decapitated man from an overpass, dumping bodies in a soccer field right next a school, walking into a seafood restaurant and murdering eight people eating dinner with a barrage of hundreds of AK47 bullets. We worry about terrorism in India more than we do it on our doorstep. A number of towns have had their entire police force abandon their posts due to death threats, more than a few police chiefs have showed up at border crossings demanding asylum. There is a very real war going on, and it’s being fueled by profits from Americans’ insatiable appetites for drugs, and our insanely easy access to guns.

Particularly in Southern Mexico, in the mainly indigenous areas, such as Chiapas, people face governmental repression, as well as repression by groups given the tacit support of the government. The most notable aspect of this involves the EZLN, the Zapatista National Liberation Army. The EZLN, a group that I admire more than most other armed revolutionary groups, has been engaged in a “war” against the Mexican government since 1994, though apart from a few armed clashes following the start of their campaign, which purposefully coincided with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, they’ve been fairly ardent in their embrace of non-violent tactics. They aim not to have complete independence, but merely autonomy. Many members of the group and their supporters have faced repression and persecution that would qualify them as refugees in the sense that it’s now used. But all of this is a whole other topic from what my main point started out being.

I do truly believe that it isn’t inappropriate to call most, if not all of the people in this country that are considered illegal immigrants, refugees. If you look at it from this viewpoint, the United States comes off as a completely appalling, sick, racist, xenophobic country. If you think of immigrants refugees as victims, people deserving of compassion, respect, and dignity, and compare it to the way we treat them, we come off as almost Nazoid.

Take a look at the politically, and most likely racially, fuelled anti-immigrant hysteria that has swept across this country in the past few years. There are people in the media like Lou Dobbs that devote hours of airtime every single week railing against immigrants. Dobbs himself has hyped sensationalistic stories claiming that immigrants are bringing new epidemics of leprosy and scabies into this country. People have been manipulated into believing that these people are intentionally coming over to steal their jobs, and force their children to learn Spanish. (Until I see one of you guys out in a field picking chilis and onion, please shut the fuck up.) There’s a particularly insidious belief among some extremist strains in the right that there is a concerted Latin American conspiracy to take back the Southwest United States by sneaking over, out breeding the Gringos already living there, and reclaiming it as Aztlan. They call this particular lunacy “Reconquista.” People go on and on about how much they cost the system, they don’t pay income taxes, but their “anchor babies” are overcrowding our schools, and them trying to get medical treatment is bankrupting our healthcare system. They’ve become scapegoats, demonized and dehumanized in ways that to me don’t seem unlike the caricatures of Blacks that you can see in cartoons from the thirties and forties, and German propaganda from the thirties.

This politico media campaign against immigrants has gotten people so worked up, that there is now an organization devoted to sending volunteers down to the southern border, armed with binoculars, and some are also strapped, so that if they spot any brown person out there in the desert, they can call it in to the Border Patrol so that they can swoop in and take them off to disappear into the bowels of America’s immigration detention system. Leave it to them to purloin the name of revered American Heroes, revolutionaries themselves, who’d most likely be appalled that they were being used as a label for an extremist conservative vigilante group. Back in the revolution, those people sitting at the border would be the people saying, “Awww, come on guys, the Brits aren’t so bad.”

All of those examples are just things that have been happening in the zeitgeist, they aren’t officially government sanctioned or promoted. The actual governmental policy is much worse. We have the Border Patrol patrolling our border, who in the past has been assisted by members of the National Guard, which is all well and good, as any sovereign country has the right to protect its borders. The immigrants/refugees who make it across the border, evading the Border Patrol, and the Minutemen vigilantes, and surviving the heat (about 500 people die trying to make it across the border every year, thousands over the past twenty years)(a Clinton-era immigration enforcement measure called Operation Gatekeeper intentionally upped security in safe areas to cross the border, forcing people to try to make it through far harsher, more dangerous and desolate areas, leading to a huge upsurge in border crossing deaths), face a life of living in the shadows. Due to a fear of being rounded up by “La Migra,” they’re vulnerable to exploitation by employers and criminals, who know that they’re too worried about their immigration status to report crimes committed against them.

If they do get picked up by the authorities, they get tossed into the Kafkaesque system of immigration detention facilities. Over thirty thousand people find themselves in such a situation every day, including entire families with young children. They may spend months in jail, until they can get around to having a deportation order issued, if they don’t agree to get sent back willingly. One of the most infamous of these facilities is the privately operated (gotta love that privatization) prison called the T. Don Hutton Residential Center of Taylor, Texas. Recently opened, it has the capacity to hold slightly over five hundred individuals, but currently holds around three hundred. Half of those three hundred detainees are children.

While living in this country, the refugees are often forced to live together in what’s considered the “ghetto” part of town. They’re looked down upon by the broadest part of society, maligned in the press, and used by conniving politicians pandering to the basest part of their base in the search from votes appealing to some of the uglier parts of the human psyche. Since they live in fear of apprehension, and often are fairly uneducated, they don’t know about, and or are to afraid to exercise the rights that they have as human beings within the confines of our borders, and don’t take refuge in the protections that they may be able to find, even in such a climate as there is. Another refugee crisis that has American fingerprints over it, one that’s considered by many metrics to be among the worst, if not the worst, in the world is that of Iraq. There are about two million Iraqis who have sought refuge outside of their own country, mainly in neighboring states like Jordan and Syria, as well as another two million who have been displaced in country. There are about twelve million refugees who have come to the United States, most of them belonging to the as of yet unrecognized category of econo-refugees, but also many who are fleeing violence and political repression. They come to this country not knowing much about the way our government functions, the rights that they may have, the language that we speak, and they still come here, to this place that degrades them, demonizes them, treats them like shit, because in spite of all that, it’s still better, with more chances of hope, than staying where they are, and even if their lives don’t become very much better, they still have to toil away in the shadows doing brutal work for long hours and minimal pay, they know that it’ll at least give their kids a fighting chance to have something they never did. That is why I admire many of the people we call illegal aliens, and one of the reasons I find it hard to say things like the pledge of allegiance.

Cost Benefits

To hear John McCain, and others of that leaning, talk about how we’re finally winning the war in Iraq, it’s frustrating. That was a point that he made at the rally that I went to, and I’ve heard it from several different places. It comes down to what is an irreconcilable difference in the way that I view the world, compared to how the people across the aisle are thinking. I’m still trying to figure out whether this is merely a difference of opinion, that there are many different equally valid interpretations of the world. I don’t think that every point of view is equally valid, but I’m wary about drawing any line in the sand, saying that the beliefs that lie on this side of the line are reasonable, and those ones over there are completely absurd, because whenever I look at things this way, I do not share my side with the larger part of humanity. So, getting back to what I find frustrating when people talk about winning the war in Iraq. The war could have ended years ago, with Iraq rebuilding and well on its way to recovery, and I still wouldn’t be able to call it anything but a failure. Some people say that we must win that war, but when it comes down to it, winning seems to only be about some shallow notion of pride. Let’s view winning as meaning something akin to success. The goal of the war was to neutralize the threat that Saddam Hussein posed, either through his ties with terrorist groups, or his stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons. Since those weapons turned out to not actually exist, and Mr. Hussein’s contacts with terrorist organizations was fairly minimal, it’s hard to talk about success or winning. We went in with errant assumptions, which turned success or failure, victory or defeat, into a false dichotomy. The situation we were hoping to bring about would have existed whether we went to war or not. So it becomes a matter of cost. There are two paths we could have taken, one is what we actually chose, and the other would’ve been continuing on with the status quo, which wouldn’t have cost a penny extra. We have brought about on ourselves enormous costs, in reputation, honor, money, and lives, with no benefits that wouldn’t have been gained if we hadn’t gone about what we did. In this war, we gained nothing. You have to weigh the costs against that simple reality. Forty two hundred American soldiers, maybe a million people who used to call their home Iraq, when the cost is those people’s lives, and the gain is absolutely nothing at all, to talk about winning is shameful. I often let my emotions show through in my writing, I’ll throw in expletives, and sarcasm and I think that sometimes that creates an appearance that might be considered rash or impulsive. When I do that it’s because there are only so many ways to shout using text. Some people probably find that off putting, especially people who just randomly come across it. I’ve enjoyed reading some of the comments that have been left; some of the more critical ones were unexpected. I didn’t anticipate that type of reaction. Perhaps the vitriol overshadows the other parts, makes some miss the ideas behind the words. I think it’s been useful, constructive; I’ve got some new ideas on how to change my writings a little, change them around, find some improvements.

Thank You

This is almost ubelievable, after so many years of nothing ever going right, disaster after unmitigated disaster, I can't find the right words for this right now. Thank you, Mr. Bush, I think this will turn out to be your true legacy. We couldn't have made it without you.

ENOUGH!

New rule: the next person who spews the words “Joe the Plumber” at me gets a guest role in the remake of “The Best of Al Zarqawi’s Home Videos”! I am tired of hearing those three words, and I am tired of hearing Obama called a socialist. Do any of the people who are talking this rubbish have any idea what they’re saying? If you actually listen to what Obama and Sammy Joe talked about, you’d blow a gasket too after hearing that encounter brought up again, and again, and again over the past weeks. I’ve finally had it with this election, and all of the absurd inanities that are being constantly brought up. ENOUGH!!!! Shut the fuck up about Caribou Barbie and her hundred fifty grand in new clothes! Shut the fuck up about McCain possibly killing someone in a car wreck forty fucking four years ago! Just shut up already!!! When Obama says that his tax plan includes cutting taxes for people making under a quarter of a million dollars a year, and raising taxes on the money above the quarter of a million dollars a year that rich fucks are making, when the first quarter of a million dollars those rich fucks are making every year is getting taxed at the same low rate other people are getting, DO NOT CALL IT SOCIALISM JUST BECAUSE OBAMA SAID IT WAS GOOD TO SPREAD THE WEALTH AROUND IN AN IMPROMPTU INTERACTION!!! Okay? Do you get what I’m saying? It’s not accurate to call that “redistribution of wealth,” because, if you follow me here for a second, the people getting a tax cut are still paying some taxes, the people who don’t pay any taxes at all aren’t getting extra welfare checks or anything like a handout, and the rich people are paying the taxes that they used to be paying before Bush made their load a little easier to carry! Can you follow that? I am barely eighteen years old without a very lengthy formal education, and that shit seems damn obvious to me. I am making a pledge, and I am absolutely serious about this, that if somehow McCain pulls this thing out of the gutter and squeaks in on the thinnest of margins, or if they somehow steal like they did eight years ago, I will do my best to get out of this country. Fuck you very much America! I might even do that if Obama wins, just because I’m pretty sure that whatever happens, this country’s a ship that’s already hit the iceberg, and nothing can stop it from going down. Excuse my language, I didn’t get much sleep last night, and I’m a little cranky.

The Big Issue

I know that I am not looking at this thing objectively. I know that my viewpoint is skewed, that I’m looking at things through blue tinted glasses, but there seems to be one big feature of this race that stands out. There seems to be on the republican side an ugliness, a negativity, a certain vile strain of thought that just doesn’t show up on the other side. Am I crazy, am I seeing things that aren’t there? The progressive platform that Obama’s been running on seems to be so much more hopeful, and optimistic, and inclusive, and forward thinking. What’s going on? Could I be seeing this wrong? Is there something wrong with my model of the world? I don’t understand how these vast differences can exist, are we really living in such an inconsistent world? I have no idea. I don’t think I could be so terribly wrong, but it seems arrogant to think that other people might be as abysmally wrong as they seem to be. How the fuck is someone supposed to make heads or tails of this world?

In My Defense

I’m not used to people actually reading these things that I write; it was interesting to get comments from people who’ve probably stumbled across my little plot of land. I usually write thinking that my audience will only be people that I have connections with. I know that I exist on the interweb as a node that connects to different networks, like family, friends that I have, classmates, and all that. I haven’t been writing with the idea of people being introduced to it for the first time. Some of the comments were critical of what I did. What I want to do is explain myself, why I did what I did and said what I said. I don’t have very much sympathy for hecklers at performances. I saw George Carlin perform about a month before he died. Carlin was a very intellectual person, and he prided himself on trying to be logically consistent. I saw him perform at the plaza theatre in El Paso. He got to a point in his routine where he was talking about how much importance we place on symbols, and said that cemeteries around the world are filled with dead brain washed soldiers. A gentleman who was also attending took offense at that. He might have been drunk, which is just an extra detail, and he started out yelling from the balcony. He would shout things like “shut the fuck up!” and “fuck you!” and he continued on with that with several different variations on that theme. I thought that man was out of line. You pay money to go see an entertainer, a performer, you should know what to expect, and you shouldn’t have to deal with people who don’t like it. I see a difference between things like heckling performers when people are out to have a good time, and heckling politicians whose actions have real world impacts. You shouldn't try to shut entertainers up, because that's all they are. Entertainers. Fluff. What they say doesn't really matter, only as much as it influences the people who hear it. But with politicians, the issues that they talk about, they actually matter, they have consequences. These are the people that will be making life or death decisions. When he goes out and gives a speech talking about how we will only let our troops return with victory, he is the man who will be pushing those troops into continuing that war, and it would lead to people being killed who otherwise wouldn’t have been. When they speak, it’s not just entertainment. Interrupting them, correcting them, offering counterpoints in that public environment of a rally, I think it should be considered fair game. There are actual implications and consequences when a candidate campaigns, it’s not entertainment, where you could take it or leave it as you like. This isn’t just a matter of disagreeing about politics, many, many lives are hanging in the balance in a very real way. What they say matters in a way that is horrifyingly real.

Heckling McCain

One of the lone benefits of living in the state of melancholia known as the Land of Enchantment is that every four years it gains a small, brief flash of prominence. It is, thanks to the absurdities of our electoral system, one of a handful of “battleground” states that are considered up for grabs. While that liberal bastion of depravity called California is the juiciest prize with fifty five electoral votes, its outcome is reliably anti-American. Similarly with Texas, the land of inflated egos, its thirty four votes ought to be much more enticing than the paltry five of neighboring New Mexico, but it’s bound to go for whoever the Republican is. Unless the Republican is Alan Keyes, then it’s a toss-up. But since New Mexico can teeter-totter either way, and has done that quite a bit, its five votes can go either way, it’s a slightly bi-curious state. That means that we’ve been blessed with campaign stops by all of the major candidates, and their surrogates, and we’ve been subjected to an unrelenting stream of torturous campaign ads, and robocalls.
Due to my fortuitous residence, I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to see men from both tickets up close, and managed to miss the single woman from the main candidates by a matter of mere hours and ninety or so miles. Both men appeared weeks apart in the exact same venue.
I showed up to see Joe Biden on a Friday. Tickets were required, I showed up a little before the announced time for distributing the tickets the day before. There was already a line of a dozen or so people who had showed up even earlier than I had. The group was diverse, an assortment of the elderly, college age young adults, middle aged fogies, with several different ethnicities.
The rally was in the Mesilla Plaza, gates opened at eleven thirty, which is right when I arrived. Joe was scheduled to show up at one thirty. My associate commonly known as Waffle Bob, and my very lovely Mexican friend decided to humor me and come along. I was gladdened to see that security had improved markedly in the four years since I’d last seen a vice-presidential candidate in the same spot. When John Edwards showed up to speak in his failed attempt to unseat Dick Cheney, the security was abysmally poor. There wasn’t a metal detector in sight, and the short staffed managers of the event picked a few large looking high school students out of the attendees to do crowd control. The school to which I went, an alternative school peopled mainly by gangsters and delinquents, was just across the street, and students were allowed to attend as a lesson in civic responsibility. So when they needed bouncers to stand at a gate, and only allow people with the right ticket to pass, they picked out some the more imposing students to do that job. I happened to know the ones they picked, and luckily they took that responsibility seriously.
The Biden rally and speech was mostly unremarkable. Our own Governator Billy Richardson dropped in, his beard in tow, Senator Jeff Bingaman also put in some face time, and Mr. Udall, the democratic candidate for senate, was unable to attend, but his lovely wife Jill attended in his stead. The most lasting thing I took away from that event was a nasty sunburn. I do love Biden though, and think he’s a great guy, always one that’s good for a laugh.
I really wanted to go see Sarah Palin. She was going to be in Roswell the Sunday after the Friday that I saw Joe, and that weekend I was with my mom, sort of in the area, about an hour and a half drive’s a way. Alas, I was unable to convince her to put in the gas and the time to make it to it. That one might’ve been fun.
McCain’s the big guy; he’s at the top, not a mere number two. When I heard that he was coming to town, my first thought was I need to get tickets to go to this thing, and my second thought was, I should make a big “VOTE MULATTO! 08” sign to smuggle into the rally. Unfortunately people weren’t very accommodating, so I didn’t manage to make that sign. I did get tickets. They were being handed out at the McCain campaign’s Victory office. Showing up there, I made a point to not park too close to their office, lest they see my Obama bumper sticker and realize that I’m an impostor. Every time that I’ve been to an Obama office, the people there, workers, volunteers, tourists, whatever, were very diverse, they were from every age group and every ethnicity. Walking into that McCain office, I was greeted with a uniform collection of white, wrinkled faces. Everybody else there must’ve had at least thirty two years on me. Every single person other than myself was old and white, which I guess should be expected, the supporters mirror their candidates.
The rally opened at two, which is right around the time I got there. I had to be a little early to pay parking scalpers two bucks to park in a dirt field. Amid dozens of trucks and SUV’s adorned with McCain-Palin stickers and various other obscenities, mine was the lone car sporting a sticker saying “Obama 08- Si se puede!”
I didn’t have backup this time, the one time that I probably needed it most. I got there early enough to get an advantageous spot to stand, probably about forty feet away from the microphone, almost as close as I had been when Biden was there. A crane had raised a giant American flag, at just the right angle, so that minutes into it, the sun snuck behind it, eclipsed by the flag as America’s eclipsed the hope of the world. That was roughly what I said in a photo-text-message that I sent from the rally. I think I got a pretty good shot of it dipping behind the flag. That flag was the best, if only for the shade that it gave me. I may have escaped with only a minor sunburn this time.
People started filling in around me, and I let a few people g closer, because I assumed that they legitimately wanted to see the guy. Workers began assembling the podium, and the crowd roared as the “Straight Talk Express” drove past. The McCain campaign is in such dire financial shape that they were handing out hand painted signs, at least that’s the spin I’m putting on it. There were a handful of professionally printed signs, but most were of the elementary school chic type. They may have been going for a folksy feel.
I saw one black guy there, he was wearing a McCain shirt, I tried getting a photo of him, to have the caption, “The uncoolest black dude ever.”
I was standing alone, in a sea of enemies, wondering if they knew that I was not one of them. It was definitely whiter than Biden’s crowd, and older, but there was some variety, and a few young people, parents had brought their young children, presumably to warn them about what types of men may make it in politics. A republican candidate for the New Mexico state legislature gave the opening, prayerful invocation, a whole bunch of religious mumbo jumbo; for the most part I stayed respectfully silent, shouting at the tail end of it something along the lines of “Atheists for Obama!”
Vikki Carr was there, I don’t really know who she is, apparently some Grammy winning singer from El Paso who supports McCain, she didn’t say anything that I felt required a response, she did bring up Vietnam, going to visit the boys. She sang some songs, America the Beautiful, and went into a thing where she was singing “let it be him,” god willing, let it be John McCain.
Tinsley showed up to speak. I don’t like him very much. He is the republican running for congress, and he was quite an annoying windbag. He got to a point where he all but accused his opponent of being a child pornographer, a statement I felt did warrant a response, so I so eloquently shouted back “BULLSHIT!” And a few people turned around to stare at me for a second or two.
Next up to the plate was Steve Pearce, a truly vile republican, gap toothed scumbag who snubbed my sister’s college wine class. He is the current congressman, and he’s running for a seat in the senate that’s being vacated by Pete Domenici. I don’t have any unkind words for Domenici, who was also there, but I don’t really know if he deserves any or not. But Pearce, when he started talking about Joe the Plumber, whose name is not Joe, and who’s not really a plumber, and who can’t afford the business that was the point of him talking to Obama, I couldn’t stand it. Enough with Joe the Plumber! I’m tired of even hearing his name (I must admit, in the interest of fairness, that Lindsey Graham talking about Joe “the Biden”, I let out a little laugh). Pearce said that we needed to elect McCain, so that Joe the plumber would be able to afford his business, and create new jobs, while Obama just wanted to spread the wealth around. Since Joe the not actually “Joe” and not actually a “plumber” actually makes forty grand a year, I yelled at Pearce “Under Obama’s plan, Joe the Plumber would get a tax cut!”
Steve went on to say that McCain needs to be president, so that we’ll get good republican economic policies, tax cuts to create jobs and grow the economy. Naturally, a shout of “It’s worked great the past eight years!” was in order. And all of my heckles were timed, almost perfectly, because I cannot hope to claim perfection, so that they were said in that little window of opportunity after the speaker has finished his sentence, and after the crowd has died down, right in that moment of silence as the speaker draws his next breath, so that they would have maximum impact.
By the time the elderly war hero finally came around, I had picked what I wanted to say, and was waiting for a good silent moment to shout it in. So after he talked about how we’re winning the war in Iraq, “Surge, baby, Surge!” I found an opportune time to ask, “How many more soldiers are you going to send to die, is forty two hundred not enough for ya?!” It was at this one when I most feared for my safety.
A rotund, middle aged white gentleman with thinning hair started pushing against me. His wife said something, and I’m paraphrasing here “you better watch out buddy, he’s a soldier.” Big scary soldier feels like he needs to shove around a thin, gangly white boy, why? I have no idea. I wanted to say to him, “if you’re a soldier, you should be more upset, I’m not happy about dead soldiers, this fucking guy wants to make more of them, why do you have a problem with me? You should care about dead soldiers more than I do.” But not wanting to provoke anyone anymore than necessary, I said that I’d appreciate it if he stopped assaulting me.
By this point I was definitely found out, I was no longer undercover. People knew that I was not one of them. Through the various shouts people were turning around and looking at me, some said “you can leave if you want to.” “Why would I want to leave, I’ve waited an hour and a half out here in the sun for my chance to shout invectives at these politicians. It’s my right to be here.” And I think that most of what I was saying were legitimate things to say, not just taunts and jeers, but things that were for the most part grounded in reality. Which has a well known liberal bias.
I stuck it out there, feeling fairly unwelcome, clapping politely at the applause lines. Some people were shouting Socialist as Obama’s name came up in discussions about economic policies. The one time I pulled my punch was when McCain started talking about how the government needed to buy up all the bad mortgages across the country, because that’s where the problem started. I so dearly wanted to yell “SOCIALIST!” because that’s as socialistic as anything the other guy’s put up, but I was tempered by not wanting to provoke the man who might be a veteran who was still eying me. I stayed till the end, trying to strike up polite banter with the people next to me. As I walked out, I heard someone whisper to somebody else “there’s the demonstrator.”

Baghdad in My Backyard

Any day of the week, you can read, if you want to, about countless heartbreaking things going on across the globe, but usually, they seem distant, it’s possible to keep yourself separated from them. I could go on and on about what’s happening and happened in Iraq, and I have, many times, but on that, I feel like there’s not much left to say, that there’s nothing to be added by throwing in more words to the discourse.

After more than five years, and hundreds of thousands dead (though I’d suspect that most Americans are moved more by the hundreds of billions of dollars that it’s cost), there are precious few minds left to be changed, if you haven’t seen it for the massive crime against humanity that it is by now, you must be totally deranged, with no sense of scale or perspective or morality.

I could talk about how the people that envisioned this war and led my vengeful nation into it, should and deserve to be impeached, indicted, and punished in ways that would only be appropriate for a crime on the scale of destroying a country, tearing millions of lives apart, and snuffing out thousands upon thousands upon thousands. But I know in my heart that they won’t be, they will never be held to account for all that they’ve unleashed. The ones that still hold onto their jobs soon will leave them, though not soon enough. Some may retire; others will go on to be commentators on twenty four hour news channels, columnists, professors, lobbyists, or paid speakers. Those who haven’t done so already will probably get six-figure offers by major publishing houses to have their stories ghostwritten for them, and a few will end up on the bestseller list. There won’t be any justice, there’s not anyone with the power or the will to hand it out.

I can see how this war will end, without actually ever ending. Soldiers will still be fighting and dying in that country for many years to come, but as time progresses, things will began to wind down. Instead of dying every day, they’ll start to get killed only every other day, and that will be seen as a huge success, so some of them will get to come home. After another couple of years, fatalities will only be a weekly occurrence, and that too will be held up as a huge success, so the numbers will wind down a little bit more. Eventually probably twenty thousand Americans will be left on the ground there, but they’ll spend their time on permanent bases, and in the green-zone, there to serve to keep the Iraqi government on our thumb. Somewhere along this timeline, whoever happens to be President will declare the were to be over, probably when the frequency of mass bombings drops to just about every month or so, and at a time when they need a boost in the polls. The story of it’s already been written; all that’s left is for it to be acted out.

And that brings me back to what’s been closer to home than usual. Shootings, executions, bombings, beheadings, roving street to street gun battles, such are key words that are ubiquitous in news stories about Iraq, which is why it’s distressing to me that now they not only describe the situation in a country where the nearest border is seven thousand miles from me, but one with a border only thirty miles distant. It’s almost like a war in my own backyard. Mexico has always been a violent place, any developing country that serves as a smuggling conduit right into the belly of the United States is bound to be, but in the last year it’s jumped up to another level.

Several thousand people have been killed in internecine battles between rival drug cartels and the Mexican government. The cartels are fighting each other over control of territory used to smuggle illegal drugs, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine, into the US, and they’re also fighting the Mexican police and military. One of the worst hit cities is just forty miles from my house, the city of Juarez.

Almost every day, policemen are ambushed, being killed in their cars by machine gun fire, officials have been assassinated in their own homes, and bodies are often found dumped in the desert. Right now I’m reading a news story from today, it says that just in the last day ten people have been found shot dead execution style, three of them were beheaded. Less then a week ago, six severed heads were left in and around Juarez, some in coolers on the side of the road. The violence has gotten so bad that the government sent over 2,500 armed soldiers to patrol the city of 1.3 million.

A couple months ago I remember reading about the police digging in a backyard of a house there; they found thirty six bodies in one backyard, that’s a veritable mass grave, and it struck me how people reacted to it. It made the newspaper, but buried in the back page, with only a few paragraphs of print. If that house was just a mile to the northeast, across that river that marks the border, it would have been a massive story. Mass Grave Found in El Paso Backyard! Massacre in the Borderland! But since it wasn’t in El Paso, but Juarez, people’s lives are valued differently. I’ll never understand that, why the worth of someone’s life depends on which side of which border they happen to be on.

There’s another town that’s been brutally affected by the violence. The town of Palomas is just across the border from Columbus, New Mexico, about an hour’s drive from here. It’s a fairly small town, with about ten thousand people. A month or so ago the police chief for the town, fearing for his life, came to the border demanding asylum in the United States. The entire police force for the town had quit for fear of their lives.

Where I live, even though it is in the United States, is intimately connected with Mexico. A majority of the people are of Mexican heritage, it’s very common to hear Spanish spoken every day, the culture has more in common with Mexico than most places in the United States, but you still have to go out of your way to find out information about what’s going on, literally just down the road. My best friend is Mexican, she lived in Juarez until she moved here a few years ago, her family still owns houses there; all of this makes what’s going on there have that much more of an impact on me.

The tragic thing is all of this comes down to business, albeit an illegal one. People here love using drugs, people everywhere do, and anywhere there’s a demand for something, there will be people right there to provide it for a fee. The violence is a direct result of the product they’re trying to move into the United States being illegal. Anytime something is made illegal, it puts it into the hands of criminals, who often have no recourse to conduct their business through other than violence. The violence is the result of market forces at work in an underground economy.

A guaranteed solution would be to remove the criminal penalties surrounding drugs, that makes sense from a moral view, a security view, and a health view, but sadly not from a political point of view, because people have an irrational fear of drugs, and the people who set the policy know that if they stand against that fear, they won't have their jobs for very long. It’s drug prohibition that keeps these criminal gangs in business, flush with cash, the only way to not only fight them, but eliminate them in one fell swoop, kick their legs out from under the cut-throat bastards is to remove their product from their domain. The historical precedent is clear; today beer, wine, and liquor companies are an all-American part of public life, a far cry from the criminal syndicates that popped up when the eighteenth-amendment and the Volstead Act was made the law of the land. Prohibition doesn’t work, it punishes people for engaging in something that’s not immoral, puts their safety at risk from unregulated products, wastes money and effort, and funnels billions of dollars into a criminal underworld where the only way to get people to follow through is through violence.

And it's made worse by the easy access to guns here in the US. In Mexico, it's illegal to own a gun, but just come across the border and you can buy almost anything you want, even assault rifles, and it's a simple matter for them to smuggle it back over the border.

And on it goes.

Us V. Them

In any type of fight, conflict, or struggle, let alone a War, an Us vs. Them mentality always infects and pervades the mindset of those involved. Us, we are righteous, good, just, blessed, the epitome of virtue. Them, they are scum, animals, barbaric savages; they’re absolutely fucking worthless evil sub-human pigs. So it goes in the GWOT (Global War on Terror, because it’s always a good idea to bomb an emotion). It’s good versus evil. It isn’t only America that’s on the side of good, as it’s assaulted by no less than what very well could be an army of the minions of Satan, it’s all of Western-Christian civilization, set upon by the swarthy, scheming Islamofascistic hordes of the third world. They are unequivocally evil, not one shred of doubt about, and we must lock them up, possibly torture them, and kill them, for the good of the world.

Sometimes, even to a terrorist sympathizer such as myself, it can seem like there is something that really is different about them, that Al Qaeda and their ilk are not only an especially vicious assortment of sadists and thugs, but that compared to us, they must be pathologically ghoulish in their love of killing as many people as possible. Take for example one of the worst things anyone could ever hope to not see, it’s definitely the worst I’ve ever come across, the video of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi beheading Eugene Armstrong. Anyone who has the misfortune to watch that cannot come away from it without knowing that what they saw is as pure evil that you can get, it stands shoulder to shoulder with any other acts of depravity visited upon man by his fellow man.

The site of a man being held down while someone in a balaclava saws through their neck doesn’t leave you, and the sound, the sound of it is even worse. I can’t imagine anything that could ever sound any worse than that, a man screaming as a knife blade cuts into his throat, turning into a high pitched squeal as it gurgles through so much blood. Words don’t match it, and they shouldn’t be able to. And you can find dozens more like that, hundreds even; beheadings, shootings, bombings, a lot of them accompanied by these awful chanting Islamic songs devoid of instrumentations, nasheeds. A group of men lined up and laying down in front of a wall, unloaded on with a Kalashnikov. An injured man helped to his feet after surviving a helicopter crash, then promptly murdered by his “rescuers.” Countless videos of a convoy of hummers, people in the background whispering “allahu akbar!”, then they highlight a particular car… BOOM! it disappears in a sudden grey explosion, and now they’re shouting, “ALLAHU AKBAR!!!”

This is a group, or rather, a grassroots movement, that methodically documents the most violent, evil actions imaginable, that glorifies them, lays them out before the world, “this is us, this is what we believe, what we stand for.”; there has to be something wrong with them, something different about them, something that we wouldn’t be capable of, doesn’t there? But then, we do the exact same thing. Of course, we clean things up a little, at least from the view on our end. We don’t go out and use knives that we very well might have just finished using to make a sandwich, we don’t use Improvised Explosive Devices set up by roadsides and set off by garage door openers, or suicide bombers. We don’t have to, we spend too much money to have to do something as unsophisticated and messy as all that. That would be embarrassing. We have F-16’s, Tomahawk cruise missiles, precision GPS guided JDAM’s, apache gunships, predator and global hawk UAV’s (a pet peeve, I’m with Bill Maher on this one, think whatever you want of a young man who will drive a car packed with explosives into a military convoy, or who can pilot a plane right into a building, but do not call them cowards when there are soldiers flying remote control combat missions, blowing up some car in Mosul with a hellfire missile while they’re sitting in an air conditioned building in Nevada sipping lattes), and al sorts of other flashy, high tech instruments of death.

And people have uploaded snuff films made from our side, you know, the good one, all over the web; you can find dozens, hundreds of them. Many of them are from the IR camera of a gun sight, devoid of color, so when you see a man torn from limb to limb, leaving a glowing white stain on an empty grey field, it somehow seems more sanitized, less gory. Our sides preferred style of battle is from a distance. That’s what we like to do, distance ourselves from the killing and danger; the people we’re trying to kill can’t help but get in close and dirty, their shoestring budgets necessitate it.

So while the videos they post up there might be more gruesome, our’s are just as brutal and violent, even more so perhaps, if the idea of institutionalized killing turns you off more than young guys taking up the initiative on their own. There are a plethora of buildings viewed from the sights of bombers seen disappearing in a silent blast of dust and debris, of eyes in the sky tracking convoys of cars and trucks, then those being shredded by gunfire and missiles, of men being dismembered and decapitated by bullets shot from apaches, and there’s also footage shot by soldiers from the ground with their own personal camcorders, mostly of air strikes taking out whole buildings, and everyone inside them, also of firefights, and the aftermath of such engagements. Often, you can hear people in the background shouting things like “Hell Yeah!” and “Jesus!”

So we upload those videos for all the world to see, glorifying our way of mechanized killing, some of them are even spliced together to form montages, which can be set to music, most of the time something like heavy metal. Are we really different from them at all? On anything other than a technological level? On one website where you can find tons of these videos, anybody can post comments about them, and most of those comments come from people on our side, or who at least sympathize with us. Those comments contain some of the most ultra-nationalistic, racist, hateful, and violent sentiments I’ve read. On the enemies’ websites and message boards, most of the comments that they leave on their videos don’t go much beyond “praise god” and “thank you brother.”

Their hate doesn’t come through quite as rabidly on the islamofascist forums. The people on the good side have things like this to say about videos of us brutally killing people in as many ways as our grand technology allows:

"mmm think i saw some mooj parts flying there...dogs will eat fried meat tonight."

“1 less Arab terrorist wasting the Earth's precious oxygen.”

“Beautiful,just beautiful...some more brownies we need not worry about GOT BLESS THOSE BRAVE PILOTS”

"thx dude, and sure those dirty Sunni Wahabi Salafi pigs will go to hell all of them cuz they infidels. cheers :D"

"Die f***ing scum!!!"

"They are Muji Pork with salad now. LMFAO LOLZzzzzzzzzz"

"Quoted comment by lasrever: murder is nothing to gloat about, even if it's an enemy Murder??? If someone broke into your house while you and you lovely wife were in bed. Would murder him or just kill him? I'm not talking about gloating. I'm talking about the difference between "murder" or ridding your cat of fleas."

"Excellent Vid,outstanding! I laughed and laughed."

"Nice day for shooting daiperheads..."

"There are still some hadjis in there alright... Sliding down the sides of the back of the walls.. Hahahha ******* LIT UP!! Get some scumbags!!"

"the rats will have a virtual mooj buffet over this."

"Man i love that last clip. No Muja can escape! Can you imagine the fear and horror the Mujas felt in their last minutes? Just as they deserve."

"LMAO at the terrorists. Lets see, we offer a chance to have a happy life, raise children, enjoy all life has to offer. The terrorist way of life includes beheading videos, randomly blowing up civilians and chanting while cutting your body with a knife. Which future would you 'accept'"

"ohhh glorious Allah... thank you for putting the dummies that take your religion too far into our gun sites so that we may blow them too bits and send them straight to hell!! ALLLLAAAHHHHHHH BOMBCAR!"

"the dirty Sunni Wahabi Insurgent who survived at first is engaged again by Apache @1:23 and killed with his friend and u can see his dirty dead body @1:44. Allah Akbar :)"

"HELL YEAH, THATS WHAT I NEED TO SEE, OWNED OWNED!!! WE NEED MORE POSTS OF MOOJS GETTING ****ED UP."

"HA HA HA HA HA HA looks like those dumb arse iraqis never learn . stay home you will live longer but thousands of years of inbreeding gives the world whole nations of dumb dumb dumb people like iraq iran ect ect"

"God I love when we slaughter these primitive little Muslims. It's so easy -- like stepping on ants! I guess they shouldn't have tried to f.uck with us."

"If they keeping this killing pace the UN is gonna put these Mother F@#$&$ on the Endangered species list.....ahahaahahahahahha"

"why run? you can't hide EVER!! all you mooji brother will die and you can't hide!! you guys picked the wrong side! ALLAH is not with you. HAHAHAHA!! islam scum."

"ahahahaha death from above. Didn't even know it was coming. Mooj bits all over the place."

"More dead rag heads!! i love it when the dogs get away and moojs get owned bigtime!! voted!! keep up the good work killing those scum bag cowards..."

"as easy as squishing bugs"

"so true... but what do you expect from guys worshipping a rock and hoping for virgins fron their pedophile prophet."

"hahahah the dirty Sunni Wahabi Pigs get OWNED as usual by the heroic US Troops (God Bless Them)."

"sexy fukin vid it feels so good to watch those dirty sunnis get fukin owned...how do these e-hajis root for these jobless uneducated pieces of shit...welll they must be like them too"

"You killed another Iraqi. The world is safe now."

"Oh man, those Haji's got OWNED! Those muslim terrorists are such MORONS. Sounds like they need to pray to a real God instead."

To me, it seems pretty clear, we hold no monopoly on good and virtue, and they certainly don’t have the market cornered on brutality and evil and hatred. Whichever side they happen to be on, people are going to be people, for badder or for worse.

Why write, right?

Why do I write? Why should I write? I’m not all that sure why I do, or whether doing so does any good or not. Perhaps it’s some type of a neurological defect, a compulsion to put my thoughts to paper, which usually do, even when where they end up doesn’t have the slightest bit of paper, just bits and bytes.

Most of what I write, I write for me. I think it might be because most of the time I’m thinking, about all sorts of things, some random, and in wanting to make sense, or a reasonable facsimile of sense, of everything that’s going on around everywhere, and if I can collect all those disparate things floating around in my consciousness, if I can structure it into something that’s coherent, something that can make sense to other people, I can be just that little bit more sure that the way I have things worked out in this skull of mine is more or less kind of close to the way things actually are, or the way things actually could be.

But since that might be why I write, it sure as hell sounds as good as any other explanation, I don’t see what good to anyone else it would do to read it.

It seems to be as clear as day that that I’m right about most of the things I think about, my positions on all the issues seem to be well thought out, but there are people who would vehemently, venomously disagree with pretty much anything I could possibly say, and I’m sure more than a few of them feel that they have things worked out just as well as I do. But both of us can’t both be right.

If I was going to pigeon hole myself, I’d label myself politically very firm liberal-leftist with libertarian tendencies. Abortion doesn’t bother me at all, I think drugs should be legalized, I don’t get apoplectic if a see a tit during the Super Bowl, guys should be able to marry guys and gals ought to be able to marry gals, if I wanted to pay someone for a quick hummer I should be able to, pressing 1 for English doesn’t annoy me, people should feel free to gamble away their house, and I think something as absurd as religion should be a very, very private affair. But how can I be so sure?

I haven’t got any special qualifications to be taken seriously about anything. My resume is embarrassingly thin. I’ve got a High School diploma, I was the valedictorian, but that’s out of a class of two dozen from a school packed with criminals. The only other thing I could think of to put on there is that I’m an ordained reverend, thank you Universal Life Church. However, when it comes right down to it, I’m just a seventeen year old kid from a city in a state that most other Americans think is a foreign country. I truly have zero qualifications. I’m just another guy, lost in this world without a map. I have no special insights, no unique fountain of truth. I feel that I’m right, that even if the broad sense of things doesn’t make an iota of sense, at least the reasons I feel the way I do about specific issues do.

In reality, I see no reason to assume I’m anymore right than anyone else. Bill Kristol, Pat Robertson, Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore, Michael Behe, George W. Bush, there’s no reason I should be any more right about any possible thing than these people are. Anything I write that by chance someone happens to read should be read with as much skepticism as can be mustered. All of it’s the product of an imperfect mind trying to make sense of an incomprehensible world. I may get a few things right, but I have to be getting a few wrong, but hopefully, as time goes on, and I grow nearer the precipice, I can get closer to what is.

That question, “why the fuck do I bother writing?” seems slightly more interesting, given that that shining jewel of a newspaper, Las Cruces’ own Sun-News, saw fit to publish my letter. I write them. Earlier they published a letter from what I would assume to have to be a fascist Christian zealot, not a very bright one at that, with the thesis of “we don’t deserve Bush,” that was the actual title, and going by that alone, any reasonable person could think to themselves, “well shit, of course Bush isn’t a president we deserve.” But what the zealot actually meant, the point of the letter, was that “we don’t deserve Bush” he’s much too good for us. What the fuck dude?! Someone can be that masochistic? He sounds like a battered wife who keeps crawling back to her husband.

He went on to say that Mr. Bush never gets the credit he deserves for how great the economy’s been doing, you know, the one with that whole recession thing looming over it and all. His third point is that people are always railing against the poor guy for not wanting to kill unborn children. Even though I’m all for baby killing, we should be tossing the little larval people off of bridges two at a time, I can’t remember the last time somebody jumped all over him on account of the abortion issue. After seven years of his regime occupying the White House, there are so many screw ups, nobody need bother bringing up abortion, You could pick from the war, water-boarding, torture, signing statements, Guantanamo Bay, habeas corpus, extraordinary rendition, domestic spying, nepotism, cronyism, corruption, hurricane Katrina, FEMA, Valerie Plame, or even the trigger happy Dick. Who needs to bring up abortion anymore? I don’t.

It was the guy’s middle and main point that really pissed me off, enough to jot off a letter to that paper. His argument goes something like this: since the War in Iraq started, more people have been killed in murders and highway accidents here in the states than the 4,000 or so soldiers that have died “over there,” so it must be safer to send our young people to Iraq, because of course the streets of Camden and Oakland are so much rougher than Baghdad and Fallujah. The problem with that is that it’s like comparing a crate of apples to boxcars of apples, a whole freight train load.

Sure, more people meet their maker violently here at home than have in those desert sands, but we’re dealing with 300,000,000 people here. Only around 800,000 people have served tours of duty in Iraq during the last five years. When you work out the numbers, it comes to being at least eight times more dangerous to be stationed in Iraq than it is to live in any of America’s most dangerous cities.

To claim that we’re saving the lives of our young people by shipping them to an overseas war is absolutely fucking absurd on its face. Much of the time I know it’s entirely possible for me to be wrong about something, but this is one that I know I am not. The least the dumb guy could’ve done is quoted the right figures; it would even have made his case all that much stronger. He understated his highway fatality figures by almost 400%, and the number of murders was twice and a half what he said.

That’s one of the reasons I write, because I don’t want all the bullshit I hear to go unanswered. A letter to the editor does do that much better than when I fire something off into the void of the internet. The only people reading this version of what I have to say are phantoms. But as it goes, I’d much rather write for phantoms than I would newspaper editors. All I can do is try to be me, whoever that is. But I can’t be me in a letter to the editor. I have to be the type of person they would want to print a letter from, I have to change my tone, to be more formal, reverent. I don’t like that tone, And this particular letter limits you to three hundred words; it can be hard to package things down that small, especially if it’s a response to something that requires a little vitriol. But sometimes you’ve got to sacrifice things that you prefer for a greater good. So, hopefully, at least a few thousand people were able to hear some semblance of my voice, and that dumb zealot didn’t go unanswered.

The Tide is Turning

The surge is working! Vive le guerre! It may’ve taken four and a half years, half a trillion dollars, forty two hundred coalition soldiers, and up to twelve hundred thousand Iraqis, but at last, the tide of this glorious war to disarm Mr. Hussein of his weapons of mass terror, topple a benefactor of Osama Bin Laden (and liberate those Iraqis) is turning! Hallelujah, George W. was right; the neo-cons are vindicated!

Some of the reactions to the really quite dramatic downturn in the levels of violence going on in Iraq lead one to wonder at how much partisanship and ideology color people’s views of things, from all sides of the political spectrum, right, left, liberal, neo-conservative, paleo-conservative, secular progressive, log cabin republican, etc. etc. Some on the left, or maybe just those that oppose the war, whether or not they’re politically leftist or not, have been trying to deny in some ways that there has been a turn for the better. On the other side, those that favor the war have latched on to it with a ferocious mendacity, trumpeting it as their own personal vindication, that all was true and good.

It’s undeniable, the truly, insanely massive levels of violence that followed the bombing in February Oh-Six of the Al-Askari mosque haven’t tapered off, they’ve plummeted precipitously. That’s cause for joy, I don’t care if it makes the wackos, George W. among them, feel vindicated, that that full scale ethnic war that had been going for over a year has cooled down, and that fewer people are dying, is fantastic news.

The most complete statistics for any group in the war, foreign soldiers, show something very remarkable, even though Oh-Seven still turned out to be the best year for manufacturers of American body bags. From January through March, the monthly toll was consistently in the mid eighties, April through June saw the numbers jump up into the triple digits, the toll for both July and August was back down to the high eighties, it went down even more in September to 69, October and November both had a monthly toll of 40, which was almost cut in half to 24 in December. After August, the numbers really started to drop off, after staying consistently high throughout the year.

From August to October, the numbers were more than halved. That type of change seems like it might require an explanation other than the gradual improvements in security that could be expected from an influx of twenty or so thousand extra soldiers. If there was something else, what might it be, what could create such a massive down shift?

After a bloody fight with a rival Shia militia left fifty people dead, Moqtada Al-Sadr, the leader of the 60,000 strong Mahdi Army, declared a six month ceasefire at the very end of August; they would lay down their weapons and agree to not challenge either the occupation soldiers, or other militias.

Sixty thousand armed, relatively organized men would pose a formidable obstacle to even the most advanced of armies. The removal of that part of the equation definitely would have some effect, and the timing of it coincides with the precipice on the graphs. By no means can I say that that’s absolutely what happened, or was the only factor, as it almost absolutely wasn’t, but the timing of it seems to agree pretty well with the conclusion that it had a great deal to do with it. If that turns out to be the case, then the improvements have less to do with any changes in the Americans’ strategy, and more to do with domestic decisions made among the Iraqis, independent of foreign influences.

There have been restive periods in the war before, so there’s no real reason to expect the current lull to last, though the respite is a more than welcome one. George W. has made it clear that the war will keep on keeping on as long as he’s president, so the only thing I can hope for is that the killing doesn’t pick up its pace again, and that he takes advantage of the very relative quiet to shore up national reconciliation, and some type of a political solution. Knowing him, my pessimism wins out.

There have been so many turned corners before, optimism seems to be misplaced. That’s why so many on the anti war left are so quick to point out the caveats. The people who started this war have been so incredibly dishonest, from since before their nightmarish vision was actualized, through the past, at this point, nearly five full years, it’s to be expected for people to assume that even now, they’re cooking the books and misrepresenting reality.

To me, and it will look differently to people on the sides of all the other fences, it looks like the strategy of “The Surge” isn’t having as much of a positive impact as the political changes that are being brought about from within Iraq. The “successful” ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods also seems like it probably shares some of the responsibility. The less Sunnis are around Shias, the fewer the chances for religiously motivated acts of murder.

If peace, or even relative security, is all it will take for the belligerent to feel justified, that doesn’t seem like it’s as far away as it was a year ago. But for those who think that a price of five hundred billion dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives, and a confirmation of our enemies’ darkest beliefs about us is to steep a price for a war that never should’ve been, that outcome seems bittersweet.