| By Ben Tanosborn Online Journal Contributing Writer | |
My contributory remembrance to this fifth anniversary of Bush’s infamous invasion of Iraq is neither a journalistic peace memorial to that holocaustic, still ongoing conflict; nor is it a disguised book review of Bilmes’ and Stiglitz’s “The Three Trillion Dollar War.” It has little to do with the infamy of a man presiding over the annihilative power of the United States, and his incompetent, amoral administration; or, for that matter, with the cold economic tabulation of war costs made in unsustainable, borrowed greenbacks.
Instead, it has to do with a cost that Americans -- an overwhelming majority of the adult population of this nation -- are unwilling to acknowledge, much less face: that the Iraq adventurous fiasco may have started as a criminal act of a few, but it’s continuing as a criminal replication of the many . . . ultimately resulting in total hardening of the nation’s compassionate arteries, and a complete loss of conscience and national shame.
Why, why have Americans hardened their hearts, encrusted and cauterized them with an impenetrable wall to feelings, emotions and morality? Have Americans in their self-indulgence for material things become so callous to the needs of others? Or even to the pain and suffering of their fellow men, particularly those beyond America’s borders? Have our people reached the culmination of insensitivity by permitting death when life is always an option at hand?
Sixty-two years ago, with Adolph Hitler dead, the Allies tried to find justice in Nuremberg by putting on trial 24 key individuals from the Third Reich. These “dirty two-dozen” were indicted for crimes of conspiracy against peace; and/or, planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; and/or war crimes; and/or crimes against humanity. And at the end of the trial, half of them were condemned to hang.
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