Nothing

In the coming weeks the nation will observe the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It will be a time of solemn remembrance of the 3,000 Americans killed in the attacks.

The war in Iraq is now in its fourth year with no end in sight. At least 150,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed as a direct result of the U.S. led invasion, according to Britain’s Lancet Medical Journal. Some estimates are as high as 250,000.

President Bush, at a recent news conference stated, “The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.”

A reporter asked, “What did Iraq have to do with that?’’

“Nothing,’’ was Bush’s reply, a stunningly flippant admission that effectively obliterates the carefully contrived nexus between Iraq and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that he and his administration have repeatedly claimed as a rational for the preemptive invasion in March of 2003.

The president continues to preach, as he has for the past three years, that Iraq is “the central front” in the “war on terror,” a “war” that, in fact, sprang preconceived and fully formed from the rubble of 9/11. Indeed, without the carnage at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon it is doubtful that there would have been a rush into the nightmarish abyss that has opened up beneath the shifting sands of “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Bush’s “freedom agenda” has brought nothing but death and destruction to the Iraqi people and helped to foster a future generation of nationalistic terrorism.

At the same time we still hear variations on the same theme, a cacophonous drone of self-righteous venom, vengeance and bloodlust from the garrulous ”patriots” on the far right; of a “post-9/11 world,” where “fighting them there before we have to fight them here” is arrogantly trumpeted as a rallying cry, while at the same time they spread a pathetic fear and paranoia that is quite unbecoming in the “home of the brave.”

The message echoes in mind-numbing reflections throughout the corporate media, where lethargic acceptance of the ever shifting cassus belli given by this mendacious administration for an immoral and illegal war has somehow become “mainstream”, and where those that speak out and question the obvious are ridiculed and marginalized.

Now, on the five-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks we will indulge ourselves in a self-pitying national lament about the American lives lost on that September morning, but will not give much thought to the devastation and suffering that we have brought to the innocent people of Iraq, a cruel and misguided retribution that they did not deserve.

It is my hope that amid the flag waving, the reveling in “freedom”, and yet more mindless exhortations to “stay the course”, and “fight them there”, the anguished cries of those that have felt our reckless wrath will fall upon our hardened hearts and remind us that this war of choice, in the words of the feckless man who started it, has been for nothing.