Back to Fallujah

The famous warning by George Santayana that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" is like pearls cast before swine in the land of the permanent war that is the Homeland circa 2014. With the reverberations from former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ sucker punch to the solar plexus of former boss Barack Obama now in their second full day the dogs of war are howling and their keening pitch is that of Fallujah. This is the Iraqi city that was descended upon by American forces in spring of 2004 after the brutal ambush, murder and hanging of the mutilated bodies off four Blackwater mercenaries in the early days of Bush-Cheney’s "Shock and Awe" attack and invasion of Iraq. The grotesque abuse of the bodies of the armed intruders, hung from a bridge where they were mocked and had shoes and other debris thrown at them by insurgents was an image that did not jibe with the choreographed war propaganda like saving Private Lynch and the staged pulling down of Saddam’s statue. Americans who were already whipped up into a blood vengeance against Muslims by the neocons and the Bush-Cheney junta after the September 11, 2001 attacks were outraged and there was hell to pay. The military went into Fallujah heavily armed, often staging house to house raids in a Lidice style orgy of vengeance and were cheered in the land of black SUV’s adorned with those little magnetic yellow ribbon magnets. It was brutal and long before Obama and Secretary of Skull and Bones John Kerry tried to start another war in the Middle East (this time in Syria) over to this day unproven accusations of the use of chemical weapons by the regime of Bashar al Assad on civilians - American forces used white phosphorus munitions on the besieged city of Fallujah.

With the entire Middle East now destabilized thanks largely to the “Shock and Awe” attack on Iraq, a country that did not threaten America at all and followed by years of botched foreign policy by both the Bush and Obama regimes it was to much outrage (and little surprise to anyone with any sense) that Fallujah was overrun by Islamic militants said to be al Qaeda. The media and professional warmongers love to throw around the al Qaeda affiliation but anymore it is more of a franchised entity rather than the evil, unified vanguard of the new Islamic caliphate as the propagandists love to portray it. Think of it like McDonalds or some other successful American chain that has spread like a global blight, it is a brand name with instant recognition and an ever shifting array of front men who can serve as the Manichean devils and bogeymen needed to keep the American people lined up and saluting the flag, surrendering the economic futures of themselves and their grandchildren to support the big money war machine. Al Qaeda for all that we already know about who finances Islamic militants could be receiving their funding as well as marching orders from the Saudi Monarchy itself.  With Fox News providing the narrative that a resurgent al Qaeda is “virulent and spreading” the McDonalds metaphor fits well, Prince Bandar aka Bandar Bush could even be their very own Ray Kroc.

The symbolism of the fall of Fallujah to al Qaeda cannot be underestimated and the propaganda organs of the American war machine are using it for all that it is worth as a bludgeon with which to pummel the incompetent Obama with. Predictably leading the charge were the fanatical Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham two men who will always demand that the sons and daughters of Americans be sent off to die in illegal, profitable foreign wars of corporate conquest. The outcry being generated by those whose livelihoods depend on chaos, murder, incitement and pestilence is exploding throughout the state media as if the Gates slamming of Barry and Biden were exactly the right type of combustible mixture to ignite the smoldering fire of American whup-ass and the profits are already being booked as U.S. defense corporations arm Iraqis to the teeth for what will be a prolonged period of serious carnage and Vietnam style accusations that could have been spewed by Rambo himself that “they didn’t let us win”. 

Such rabble rousing has historical roots that are more appropriately placed in the early twentieth century and the post WW I “stabbed in the back” myth that the German leadership was responsible for the crushing losses inflicted in “the great war” and allowed for a festering, deeply embedded almost primal animosity that allowed a certain mustachioed demagogue to exploit a befuddled populace and summon forth a wave of violence that ultimately turned into a national funeral pyre.  There are those in our midst in an increasingly divided, economically doomed and politically betrayed colony of star-spangled sheep who are easily swayed by a similar myth, that now being propagated over the fall of Fallujah. They meekly surrendered their civil liberties, economic futures and ultimately their own souls for that great crusade to topple the Satan that was Saddam and the once glorious triumph in the city on the banks of the Euphrates River.  To see it in the hands of al Qaeda would mean that all of the blood and treasure that was once sacrificed was for naught.

The push for renewed  U.S. involvement in Iraq is being mounted outside of the Fox News studios and the media bubbles inhabited by McCain and his lackey Graham. Yesterday the venerable David Ignatius of the Washington Post editorial page bemoaned the fall of Fallujah and introduced the next piece of the storyline – IRAN was involved in the loss of the city:

Four years ago, al-Qaeda appeared to have been destroyed in Iraq. Last week, fighters from the group captured Fallujah, a city where hundreds of Americans were killed or wounded in the last decade fighting the jihadists. How did this stunning reversal of fortune happen?

Like everything else about Iraq, this is a tragic and confusing story. But two points seem clear: First, the Obama administration, in its rush to leave the country, allowed the sectarian Shiite government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to undo many of the gains made against al-Qaeda. Second, Iran has waged a brilliant covert-action campaign that turned Maliki and Iraq into virtual clients of Tehran — and in the process alienated Sunnis and pushed them toward extremism.

“What is tragic is that Iraq’s slide toward an Iranian axis and civil war were not only predictable but indeed predicted by Iraq experts within the U.S. government,” laments one former U.S. official. “Iraq’s current meltdown and its grave implications on U.S. national security interests were entirely avoidable.”

This should provide more cover for the treacherous cabal of renegades in the U.S. Senate that are now reportedly at fifty strong and on the way to a veto proof margin to sabotage the P5+1 talks and set the nation on a course for an attack on Tehran. It is whoppers like this one or the one that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 that are used to harvest the low hanging fruit and send a nation off to another war – this one likely will lead to WW III and trigger the great collapse that will then remove all of the already frayed restraints from the fascist surveillance machine and the paramilitary police state that will be unleashed to crush dissent in The Homeland while our boys and girls are sent off to valiantly be sacrificed a perverse game played by lunatics and profited off of by speculators and blood barters.

You can hear them dogs a howlin’ now, getting closer with every day, every press conference and every cable news segment.

Santayana had another famous quote, that should be pondered and that is that “only the dead have seen the end of war”.