andreaaiub

I learned that while I was a new college grad in 2003 moving to Seattle and trying to make a good career for myself, Aaron, around the same age as me, was over in Iraq trying to get the word out about that countrys' situation to the rest of the world, especially America. Not very dangeorus at first, he met many Sunnis (the majority of Iraqis who were persecuted by Saddam) and Kurds who were glad to have American forces & allies there. But the military started fucking up - rounding up all the brown people and throwing them into jails like Abu Ghraib. Of course the American soldiers were scared; they were ill prepared and unaware of who was innocent or an enemy. (A reflection of their bosses', all the way to the top, to be sure.) The Iraqis who once supported American troops began to turn against them as more and more innocent Iraqi's were being imprisoned and held for months without reason (Glantz cites many children, including one that was developmentally disabled), shot in the neck in the street, confined to cower in their homes, living in fear and seeing death in the streets, every day (and we think we're surviving the "war on terror"). There's no profit in reporting on this side of the story, especially not in 2005 when American pop culture blacklisted anyone who was anti-war, and so it was rarely told. Knowing stories like these is the only way to fix the mess we made over there.

2023-01-25 16:13