In the world I see — you’re stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You will wear leather clothes that last you the rest of your life. You will climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. You will see tiny figures pounding corn and laying-strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of the ruins of a superhighway.
Everyone else is doing it… why shouldn’t I?
Except, I won’t call it a “war”.
Middle English warre, from Old North French werre, of Germanic origin. See wers- in Indo-European Roots.
Word History: The chaos of war is reflected in the semantic history of the word war. War can be traced back to the Indo-European root *wers-, to confuse, mix up. In the Germanic family of the Indo-European languages, this root gave rise to several words having to do with confusion or mixture of various kinds. One was the noun *werza-, confusion, which in a later form *werra- was borrowed into Old French, probably from Frankish, a largely unrecorded Germanic language that contributed about 200 words to the vocabulary of Old French. From the Germanic stem came both the form werre in Old North French, the form borrowed into English in the 12th century, and guerre (the source of guerrilla) in the rest of the Old French-speaking area. Both forms meant war. Meanwhile another form derived from the same Indo-European root had developed into a word denoting a more benign kind of mixture, Old High German wurst, meaning sausage. Modern German Wurst was borrowed into English in the 19th century, first by itself (recorded in 1855) and then as part of the word liverwurst (1869), the liver being a translation of German Leber in Leberwurst.
Where was I?
n 1: the waging of armed conflict against an enemy; “thousands of people were killed in the war” [syn: warfare] 2: a legal state created by a declaration of war and ended by official declaration during which the international rules of war apply; “war was declared in November but actual fighting did not begin until the following spring” [syn: state of war] [ant: peace] 3: an active struggle between competing entities; “a price war”; “a war of wits”; “diplomatic warfare” [syn: warfare] 4: a concerted campaign to end something that is injurious; “the war on poverty”; “the war against crime” v : make or wage war [ant: make peace]
Right, so anyhow… the invasion of Iraq.
Now, I refuse to label this as a war for the following reasons:
Iraq is not our enemy… we did business with them less than a generation ago. In fact, the only reason that we know they have “weapons of mass destruction” is because we kept the reciept on what we sold them! Those were only supposed to be used agains the enemies of our soverign nation though, never agianst us directly.
It is an armed conflict, but we are the agressors…
It is not a legal war, by the laws we helped establish after the last just war we fought in.
It is not a struggle between competing enteties… Saddam is not looking to outmuscle Detroit steel, sweep away our product trade with China, create a profitable tech sector…
He supposedly has huge stores of pure evil t his disposal. Why the hell isin’t he using them, if he has them?
Iraq is not injurious, not to Americans. MYOB America… let the world sort out its own problems. People love to cite the September 11th attacks as a repercussion of what happens when America “minds its own business”.
Bullshit. The government knew about the attacks, fuck all, they probably funded and fascilitated them. Our foreign policy 50 years ago is what started that fire burning anyhow.
Oh, but the Iraqis have oil. We want to have oil….especially now that we can’t torch our arctic refuge to get it!
Yup, they invaded Kuwait.
Yup, they did bad things to the Kurds.
Nope, I don’t think I’d like to spend time at length with Saddam… he’s probably not that nice a guy.
Yup, he is the head of a non-democratic nation.
So, for the last 11 years, what has he been doing? Is this like the reconstruction of germany post ww1? Why not bomb Japan again for working around thier naval restrictions by having a “sea security force”?
This is about money.
If Daddy Bush had felt threatened by Saddam’s deth threats, then he would have taken care of things last gulf war.
Bush jr. seems to think that threatneing daddy is just cause.
He thinks that the duct-tape links to the “terrah” organizations of the world are a just cause.
The Iraqui people, and thier precious oil must be liberated! Right, if they can live through the liberation process.
Howabout Cuba?
Howabout N. Korea?
Did we miss all the poor Tibetans?
Ooh, and lets not forget everything between the Panama Canal and tha Antarctic….
Bloody selective Cursades make me mad.
::sigh::
I’m ranting here, not at all being constructive.
I get so frustrated whenever I start thinking about this at length. That spills over any chance of consturctive thought.
Everyone is _appaled_ that they put POW’s on TV. Dit it occur to noone that the frezy the media pirahnnahs are having over this has piped the images of those POW’s into more pairs of eyes than if they had just lef the whole thing alone? I mean, really, how much of an audience does Iraqi TV have? Certainly not as big an audience as CNN, FOX, NBC, ABC, and CSPAN. Fucking MTV is doing war specials for christ’s sake!
So yeah, its bad that they filmed POW’s, its against the “Geneva Convention”. When I heard Rumsfeld giving that little speech, I nearly lost my lunch. How much better is it than the US media blazing pics of the “super Al-Queda agent” they nabbed a few weeks ago. I mean, if the war on terror is actually a war, as per the rules Bush is playing with, isin’t that making public the disgrace of a POW?
So yeah, nice coincidence that they film our soldiers, and that it ends up in every home in America as a “shocking tragedy”.
I hate hate HATE the war, I hate the media blitz about it. I hate the people who started it, and I hate the system that supports it.
I hate that anyone thinks that thier opinion is going to make a lick of difference. I don’t care if daddy fought in Vietnam, or Uncle Joe died when a cop got too weighty with a baton at a peace rally. This monster is going to jugernaut until we hit a wall, or establish our emperial way of thinking worldwide, bringing pupped democracies to all the countries whose dictators are unwilling to be puppets themselves.
The quote I opened with: there was a reason for it. I hope that Saddam has all kinds of shit, and is waiting until we get to Bagdhad to use them. I hope North Korea takes the ball and starts world war three. I hope we get nuked back to the stone age. That is, as I see it, the big hope, for our species, to find again the lsot synch we once had with our world. Not good odds on humanity…a pretty slim one indeed.
The apple is rotten… turn it in to sauce.