I continue to wonder about the
question of the Iraq war's objective legality. I say objective because in my mind it is a settled issue. In Britain, in lieu of baseball hearings and feeding tubes (though I suppose the Chelsea/UFEA scandal rates), we get at least the
appearance of concern.
In a way I suppose I'm being intellectually coy if only to preserve some sense of outrage and also the hope that the blanket of bitterness opponents of the war may sweat under might be cast aside by some miraculous intercession of the public's will to see fairness restored to a legal regime that suffers any depredation the powerful impose on it. I claim this coyness because I know there will be no atonement. That any ostensible concern by governments as to the legality of the Iraq invasion and occupation will be a lot of dumb show - not a conspiracy but mostly a defense mechanism to produce moral opacity and deference to the ideals of democracy where there is none.
Meanwhile, our schizoid public life seems to roll ever faster downhill as we marinate in dramas whose subtexts all deal with notions of what constitutes the morality of what life is worth to a society while assiduously ignoring a mountain of corpses. How can this grotesque disregard of the value life be explained? Racism? Continued paroxysms of fear and bloodlust traceable back to 9/11? It is as unknown to me as it clear that it will continue unchallenged and any public figure brave enough to assail this gran olvido will be instantly and irreversibly marginalized.
Yesterday, NPR featured profiles of the victims of the school shooting in Minnesota - five to ten second snapshots of the residue of their lives. It was, of course, very moving. But what if NPR were to do the same for the civilian victims of the Iraq war, people who have been maimed, punctured, decapitated, burned etc. by aerial bombardment or by infantry assault or in a fusilade at a checkpoint. I can anticipate the spittle-flecked and red-faced yawps of protest from the authors and apologists for the war at any attempt to publically humanize "collateral damage" in the same way we are selectively allowed to humanize other victims.
So NPR, and other broad outlets for news and information, self-censor an effort that would take days upon days: a roll call of the faceless, innocent dead and the residue of their time here on earth cut short by this ugly, useless, and illegal exercise in evil masquerading as good. And the one man who bears more responsibility than anyone for this mass murder is allowed to intone that "we should always err on the side of life" without the ground opening under his feet and the earth swallowing him whole.