political foo: Guantanamo
May. 21st, 2009 09:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alpharaposaPeople are talking about Guantanamo again, and where the prisoners will go when it's gone. What does it matter? I asked. But Guantanamo's a symbol. A symbol of how terrible we are. And they want it gone.
We're such terrible monsters. Our soldiers catch these men. Men who rape women for not wearing enough clothes. Men who destroy homes and mosques because the people there don't pray enough. Men who pretend to surrender, just to get close enough to try to kill our soldiers. Men who take hostages, then cut off their heads and record their screams to broadcast them to the world. And our soldiers don't shoot them. We round them up and put them in a place where those men get meals and prayer rugs and Korans no infidel has touched. Guantanamo is such a terrible symbol of how horrible we are. The men we catch get fat in our prison. Sometimes, we keep them awake or play loud music. If we're really vicious, we might pour water over their faces, but always careful so that they aren't in danger of dying.
Maybe, if we were great men like them, we'd have shot them in the street. Our soldiers could have stopped wearing their uniforms and standing in front of innocents, and took them off and hid behind them.
And surely, we say, we do horrible things in these prisons. Look at Abu Ghraib!
Yes, look at it. Do you know what happened in Abu Ghraib before we were there? Husseins were there, and they raped women in front of their husbands. They killed children in front of their parents. And when they'd had all the fun they could, they took people and fed them feet-first into wood chippers so that they'd feel the most pain before death possible.
We stopped that.
And then, some small, mean people came with us, who did, yes, mean and cruel things. Nothing bloody or painful, but embarassing and stupid and cruel and classless. And we stopped that, too.
Not because the media found out. The military was almost done with its investigation into the matter when the pictures were shown on the media. The trials would have happened with the trumpets or without. But it should never have happened, of course, so we're horrible people because it did.
You know what I think is really terrible? What the great crime in Iraq is, that we'll have to answer for years from now?
Do you recall when Saddam sent his forces to invade Kuwait? We stepped in to save our ally (or for oil, take your pick). We drove him off. And then we told the Kurds, Rise up. Revolt and we'll protect you and help you.
And the Kurds rose up. And we didn't do a thing.
Saddam killed them. He took the gas that he wasn't supposed to have or use ever again, and he killed them. He gassed whole villages. He killed thousands of them. His men put them in mass graves, and now only God knows all the people buried in the desert because we didn't follow through.
Better to have never said anything at all than to promise help and not show.
Saddam held his own people hostages. He told us we had to buy his oil, or his people would starve! And we told ourselves, "We have to buy it! If we let him starve them, we're responsible!"
Twelve years of this, before we stepped in and got rid of him. It took, what, three weeks? That whole time, we could have stepped in and flicked him away. Sure, the aftermath would have been hard, but we have 12 years of standing by and watching him torment his people on us. This could have all been over by now. It could have been over and Iraq a free nation literally years ago. Even the rebuilding would be well in the past by now.
But because we refuse to let men that no other nation will even hold in a jail cell go free, we're horrible people. Because we won't treat them, who tried to kill their own people as well as ours, as if they were our people, we're the terrors.
I'm so sick of it all.
We're such terrible monsters. Our soldiers catch these men. Men who rape women for not wearing enough clothes. Men who destroy homes and mosques because the people there don't pray enough. Men who pretend to surrender, just to get close enough to try to kill our soldiers. Men who take hostages, then cut off their heads and record their screams to broadcast them to the world. And our soldiers don't shoot them. We round them up and put them in a place where those men get meals and prayer rugs and Korans no infidel has touched. Guantanamo is such a terrible symbol of how horrible we are. The men we catch get fat in our prison. Sometimes, we keep them awake or play loud music. If we're really vicious, we might pour water over their faces, but always careful so that they aren't in danger of dying.
Maybe, if we were great men like them, we'd have shot them in the street. Our soldiers could have stopped wearing their uniforms and standing in front of innocents, and took them off and hid behind them.
And surely, we say, we do horrible things in these prisons. Look at Abu Ghraib!
Yes, look at it. Do you know what happened in Abu Ghraib before we were there? Husseins were there, and they raped women in front of their husbands. They killed children in front of their parents. And when they'd had all the fun they could, they took people and fed them feet-first into wood chippers so that they'd feel the most pain before death possible.
We stopped that.
And then, some small, mean people came with us, who did, yes, mean and cruel things. Nothing bloody or painful, but embarassing and stupid and cruel and classless. And we stopped that, too.
Not because the media found out. The military was almost done with its investigation into the matter when the pictures were shown on the media. The trials would have happened with the trumpets or without. But it should never have happened, of course, so we're horrible people because it did.
You know what I think is really terrible? What the great crime in Iraq is, that we'll have to answer for years from now?
Do you recall when Saddam sent his forces to invade Kuwait? We stepped in to save our ally (or for oil, take your pick). We drove him off. And then we told the Kurds, Rise up. Revolt and we'll protect you and help you.
And the Kurds rose up. And we didn't do a thing.
Saddam killed them. He took the gas that he wasn't supposed to have or use ever again, and he killed them. He gassed whole villages. He killed thousands of them. His men put them in mass graves, and now only God knows all the people buried in the desert because we didn't follow through.
Better to have never said anything at all than to promise help and not show.
Saddam held his own people hostages. He told us we had to buy his oil, or his people would starve! And we told ourselves, "We have to buy it! If we let him starve them, we're responsible!"
Twelve years of this, before we stepped in and got rid of him. It took, what, three weeks? That whole time, we could have stepped in and flicked him away. Sure, the aftermath would have been hard, but we have 12 years of standing by and watching him torment his people on us. This could have all been over by now. It could have been over and Iraq a free nation literally years ago. Even the rebuilding would be well in the past by now.
But because we refuse to let men that no other nation will even hold in a jail cell go free, we're horrible people. Because we won't treat them, who tried to kill their own people as well as ours, as if they were our people, we're the terrors.
I'm so sick of it all.
