By libbyliberal 
I’m slow to the gate discussing Obama’s faux-"promise kept" declaration concerning the Iraq War. It has given me an opportunity to explore some reactions of the messengers of the profoundly disenfranchised and neutralized left, and even a more direct victim of the Iraq War, who are compelled to call out a President and US government for their stunning amorality, their willful enabling, perpetration and/or continuation of war crimes. The exasperation of these messengers seems to be ever escalating along with their eloquence and justified passions.
My own frustration is escalating. The propaganda for perpetual destructive war, and the cover up of increasing violence in Iraq right now in particular, is indeed sickening.
The Obama administration’s and the Democratic Party’s political needs coincide tidily with General Petraeus’ political needs — the appearance of success of this misadventure in spite of its grim reality especially during election time. The media is ever willing to collude in a dog and pony show of any “historic”-branded transition. The administration’s getting Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow in on the end-of-the-war game was an effective maneuver, too, with their "exclusive" coverage.
Now the faux-end of the war is mixed with last week’s “mosque” continuing scenario. Imagine the hypocrisy of government and military "officialdom" speaking out righteously to condemn the indecency of burning a Muslim holy book. It’s not that they shouldn’t. It’s "what about bomb-burning hundreds of thousands of living Muslims for covert corporate opportunism?" That goes unmentioned and uncondemned? A grotesque degree of political morality cherry-picking with a media that is as much on the corporate leash as the administration and jingoism-mongering or -fearful legislators.
Also, when a probable 1 million Iraqis are dead by the United States and its allies, and 4 million are displaced, and with the nightmarish atrocities of rendition and torture, how dare our decision makers profess disappointment and surprise that an anti-Muslim sentiment has been brewing through the decade. Pulllleeeeeze! Those 50 or so core book-burning bigots are dangerous, but for heaven’s sake, it is not like they invented Islamophobia. It’s not like an actual genocide for the convenience of US/Israeli/UK etc. imperialism — hegemony — and oil and natural gas rights hasn’t been taking place before our denying eyes.
And instead of sanity finally surfacing at long last, and our country making amends as imperfectly and pathetically as we can to the surviving people of that devastated Iraq nation — among other nations -– we have waves of non-Muslim Americans with hearts of darkness now ready to demonize and punish innocent Muslim Americans. These racists all hopped up on political/military patriarchal, corporate-cronied, media-manufactured paranoia. You can’t make this grotesque level of insanity and injustice up.
And in what Maddow once called “an ethical freakshow of a universe” will we now be forced to witness a kangaroo court crucifixion of a 23-year old Bradley Manning who assumed America would be capable of recognizing evil deeds and stop them? Bradley, God Bless YOU, not America, right now!
What follows are responses to Obama’s speech I found most compelling among some industrial-strength-honest narrators of the alternative media:
The moral divide in this country is now wider than the Grand Canyon.
Some of you may remember the anti-Vietnam War slogan, “Enough.”
Choose. Either we live as “Good Germans” or we say “Enough.” We are so beyond enough, actually, but to paraphrase George Eliot, “It’s never too late to be the country — the awake and moral citizenry — we might have been.”
Thanks for this assessment of the situation. The article following it shows that in fact the illegal war just grinds on in Iraq.
Before and after the invasion of Iraq and for a long time thereafter, I wrote to Bush almost daily and ended each argument for either not beginning or for ending the illegal aggression against that country with a reminder that it is never too late to change and to do what is right. I knew then that it was futile to try to change the regime, but I felt impelled to do something.
World Can’t Wait continues to demand the end to these atrocities. I am grateful. The regime has not had enough, but if we have, we can work to stop US aggression, not rename it.