5 Years of War

Let me take the opportunity to wish happy belated anniversary to the war in Iraq. Happy 5th birthday to the bastard child of misguided foreign policy, outright lies of a psychotic president and his administration, and a vast conspiracy of ignorance. This war has cost nearly 4000 American soldiers' lives and who-the-hell-knows how many Iraqi lives (see the original Lancet article here), and has destroyed countless others' lives all over the world. This misbegotten war is the proud bastard legacy of a failed presidency that will be denounced as one of the worst ever for generations to come.

I'm going to keep this brief, because I don't have a lot of time these days, and there's something else more compelling for me to blog about (more in the next post). I remember the days leading up to the start of hostilities, and I remember the protests, I remember some of the news reports that attempted to cast some doubt on the reasons being presented to take us to war. Back in February 2003, I was still just a pharmacist, out in sunny California to attend a training session for my new job as a nuclear pharmacist. (And, if you'd told me then that 5 years later, I'd be a nurse with a pharmacist's license - or is it a pharmacist with a nurse's license? - I would have thought it about as likely as a really old guy running for president, who would be fine with keeping soldiers in another sovereign country overseas for another 100 years, and who can't even keep his facts straight!)

I remember passing by one of the corner protests on the way back to the apartment after the day's class, and I remember people holding up their signs saying (I'm paraphrasing here) honk for peace. I didn't rent a car out there, so I was on foot, but I still walked by, made a gesture like I was pulling on a truck horn, and said "honk, honk." A young lady sees this, smiles, thanks me, and invites me to a larger protest scheduled for the coming Sunday (?). I decline, my flight back to Philadelphia leaves the day before, but I say I still hope that peace will win out in the end.

Sometimes, I wonder if I should have just gotten on another flight, and called out sick at work the following Monday, just so I could take part in a historical moment. Granted, it was a historical moment that ultimately proved futile, but the point is, it was historical. Would it have made a difference? What could we have done? What should we have done? Where does one put the pebble of change in order to divert the stream of history into a more desirable course, further away from civilization, into a place where the flood does not wash away those whose only crime was living in the wrong place at the wrong time? All questions for the historians, I suppose.

Next post, my own take on Obama's famous speech.