Matthew Good’s Journal Entry for 04.04.2003

The innocence of our generation hangs by a thread. On the streets of Baghdad it will be diminished and eventually taken from us. Our lives lived under the illusion that we are a just people and noble people will be stripped from us. This adventure will be the last of our great Disney adventures. And our children will be left to study our faces and come to understand that we were hapless pawns in a sham of supposed righteousness. Our embarrassment and shame will become that plain to see.

How do you take a city? The history of conventional warfare teaches us that a massive aerial bombardment usually precedes a ground offensive supported by artillery and armor. But the severity and thoroughness of that aerial bombardment is key. After the destruction of the city’s infrastructure, its civics, and communications, must come the diminishment of its morale. And to accomplish this it must be attacked with a ferocity that does not attempt to distinguish between military personnel and non-military personnel. It must be wholly consumed by a terror from the sky in an attempt to break its back and reduce those within it into nothing more than shocked shapes wandering its ruins in confusion. Dresden, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. That is how you take a city. You wipe it off the face of the earth and then enter it somberly observing the realities of what mankind is capable of. Those that you don’t kill have nothing left within them to resist. That is how you take a city. You do not take it. You erase it. And unless you do, unless that it your motive, you run the risk of turning everyone in it left alive into a highly motivated and vile tempered combatant.

Warfare is not something that subscribes to the stomachs of apathetic first worlders that sit at home and watch its progress as if it were a hot new reality series. It is ugly and desperate and unforgiving. There is no such thing as an “easy” war. War is not that simply put. War is something that appears to be a complicated matter but is, in the end, a very simple thing. It is the annihilation of the opposition. Not the hopes that they might change their minds given enough time. It is their doom that is sought, nothing less. Anything that does not subscribe to that definition is not war. It is a crusade led by monsters that wish to lull you to sleep before they devour you whole.

Like several examples over the last decade, this war has been advertised and sold to the general public like dish soap. With September 11th to help galvanize the rage of an uneducated American majority, it is easy to justify attacking Iraq because Arab = terrorist. The President Of The United States can publicly state that it has nothing to do with ethnicity or religion however many times that it pleases him. Most people equate Arab with terrorist, there’s no two ways about it. It has become a very dangerous stereotype that has come to confuse the issue long enough to allow the most powerful nation on earth to justify attacking a country that has had no ties found to link it to the events of September 11th. But there are other reasons, such as human rights issues. The Kurds were gassed by Saddam Hussein in 1988, for example, an act of genocide for which he should be tried in an international court of law. Not an American court of law, mind you. But even the human rights angle is thin. Because where were the Americans and their love of giving the gift of freedom when East Timor was in the grips of genocide? Or for that matter atrocities in nations such as Cambodia, Chile, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Tibet, and on and on. So one can safely say that human rights violations have very little to do with anything. If that were the case then Mr. Rumsfeld wouldn’t have been exchanging pleasantries with Saddam Hussein in the 80’s when it was in America’s best interest to befriend him. He would have been there delivering him his walking papers. But Empires do not act for the good of the people because the good of the people means the dissolution of empires.

So we find ourselves at the gates of Baghdad. Thousands of young men with nervous trigger fingers stand poised to attack, all of them wondering if that van speeding towards their position filled with women and children is laden with explosives and bent on their destruction. How will it play out in the streets do you suppose? How do you differentiate between a woman or young boy that is simply in the way and one that is carrying grenades in a bag towards your unit? You would have thought Vietnam had taught the US military a thing or two. Because they do not intend to take Baghdad the way the dictates of true warfare demand. That would be rather unpleasant for everyone watching at home. They will try and do it with kit gloves and try and convince everyone that it is something other than what it is. And we will probably hear very little of the truth of it. Because when it comes to such calamities it is always best to keep Greg and Laura in Pittsburgh in the dark as long as possible.

Perhaps the people of Baghdad will simply surrender and an American general will become their new benevolent master. Perhaps not a shot will be fired and the innocence of our generation will be spared the trauma. Perhaps we will be able to look away and convince ourselves that this has nothing to do with a new world order or oil or how the future will be shaped. Maybe we’ll be content enough to believe that it was all in the name of freedom and democracy and what we superior beings term as “right”. Maybe there will come a time when all that is Arabic will be forgotten, replaced by an Americanized version of it that walks and talks and thinks as it has been taught to. Perhaps that is the new world reality and this is merely the opening round.

We could banter back and forth about what we believe and what we perceive to be the truth. But in the end the real losers in all of this will be us no matter who comes out on top. Because we allowed it to happen and thus began a new era of intimidation and conquest. We will look back and come to the horrible realization that we were duped into thinking it all for the better. And, of course, by then it will be too late to do anything about it. And then we will be the Iraqis.