The abject and total collapse of the Iraqi state led to the slavish obedience of allies to attempt its rescue on behalf of its American leaders who already had abandoned the scene of their failure, their double failure – to establish a democracy and to secure its oil revenues. That America has succeeded in forcing men to die for this impossible scenario speaks not so much of men’s stupidity as it does of their financial dependence on the U.S. based capitalist order.
The legend of barbaric and massacring rebels with a fantasy of statehood against the forces of western civilisation simply must not stand. It is not the dreadfulness of the Post-Saddami atheist military re-appearing as radical Muslim killers, that is to be diminished. What has to happen, in the name of reason, is the transversal of roles with America as the brutal destroyers and the Iraqi Arabs as the exhausted humans in the last stages of degradation and survival.
The brave and eloquent Senators, Feinstein and McCain, sole defenders of the ruined American experiment, in their report to the U.S. Government of the long hidden catalogue of torture and rendition to un-monitored depravity by a secret service operating without state control, laid bare the true tragedy in Iraq and put the finger of blame finally on the guilty party – the failed Republic of the U.S.A.
The age of breaking news does not unveil the deep historical crime committed against the Syria/Iraq zone still trapped in colonial frontiers from a century ago.
To grasp the true vibrancy of human suffering experienced by all parties, I repeat all parties in Iraq, it is necessary to go back to the great mapping of the human consciousness, in fact its unconscious, in the epic of the great Augustan poet, Ovid.
In the ‘Metamorphoses’ he relates the unconscious drives, in our language the D.N.A. record of humiliation and brutality now experienced in Iraq.
In his narrative, Hecuba, mother of theTrojan nation is driven to such an edge of suffering by the Greek aggression that she is transformed into a howling dog.
“As mute as stone, as stiff,
she’s stunned; she stares at what lies at her feet,
and now lifts up her grim face heavenward,
and now stares at his face, now at the wounds
of her dead son as he lies there, outstretched,
but its the wounds on which she’s most intent;
it’s these that fuel her anger, arm her wrath.
Just as a lioness
stripped of a suckling cub, fanatically
will track her stealthy enemy, just so,
fierce Hecuba goes straight to Polymestor,
the author of that execrable murder.
And here he urges her with lying words.
‘Come, Hecuba, be quick! Give me that hoard
you want your son to have.
I swear that anything you give to me,
your son will get, just as he has received
the gold you gave to me before.” His speech,
his promises are false: ferociously,
she stares at him; the anger in her seethes.
Then – suddenly – she grips him; and she calls
upon the other Trojan women – all
her fellow captives – as she digs her nails
into his lying eyes; and she rips out
his eyeballs from their sockets (it is rage
that gives her strength). And then in the place
that once contained his eyes, she drives her hands,
soaked with his guilty blood: she plucks his flesh.
The Thracians, at the sight of his distress,
began – with stones and lances – to attack
the Trojan women. But she tried to catch
those stones: with a hoarse howl, she snapped her teeth.
her jaws could only bark, though set for speech…
And then, for long through all the fields of Thrace,
remembering her many griefs, she howled.”
The transformation, the metamorphosis of the Trojan queen into a barking dog is that same reality which has turned the Iraqi and Syrian peoples into the dogs of war, no rules remaining.
First, the injection of Baathism by a Roman catholic into Syria and Iraq, an act which enthroned the christian minority as an elite and was annually blessed by the Pope. With Assad and Saddam installed decades of slaughter followed on Muslims in Syria, Shi’a in Iraq and Kurdish everywhere. After mass murder came open invasion – shock and awe they boasted. A whole civic society was fragmented and the invaders installed a reign of terror climaxing in the sub-human tortures of Abu Ghraib. Baghdad, the former capital of Islam and home of Imam Abu Hanif, Shaykh Abdalqadir al-Jilani and Imam Junayd was handed over to a foreign country and a foreign religion. Millions have died. Now the wild dogs are let loose, but it is their enemies who must be seen as the perpetrators of this ancient crime – the terrible defeat, deception and denial of a great people by a nation which began its existence annihilating the Navaho and has arrived at its end doing the same thing to the Arabs.
