I feel like I’ve forgotten how to be hopeful. There’s been a lot of white noise in my head over the past couple weeks. Fear, anxiety, despair … it seems the world is falling apart.
But let’s just take a moment and wish this newly sovereign nation all the best.
May they find their way through this dark tunnel. May they find a way to resolve differences through laws, and not war.
Again, I’ve forgotten how to be hopeful.
But I do wish this for them.
I just read that they executed the Marine that was being held hostage. I can cling to hope pretty hard, but my grip is almost desperate at this point.
I’m still clinging to the belief that the animals that murdered Spc. Maupin don’t have wide support among most Iraqis. I’m sure the Islamists love them, but the Iraqis have never really been as religious as their neighbors to the south or east.
I will be celebrating my retirement with a riverboat tour on the Euphrates. In the evenings, I’ll have dinner and drinks at a riverside cafe while staring across at the skyline of downtown Bahgdad.
Oops, I meant the Tigris River.
I heard it on the news, but you have a picture! Excellent, Shelia! Let freedom reign!
Now to find and kill the murderers of Spc. Maupin.
I know it’s hard to tell from the media coverage in the United States, but the vast majority of Iraqis support the United States, oppose Saddam and al Qaeda, and want to build a free, democratic, and prosperous Iraq.
But the enemies of hope and freedom in Iraq are numerous, and ruthless, and the media coverage they receive in this country only emboldens them, because it makes them think they are more successful than they really are.
Unfortunately, it will probably to continue to be a long and difficult struggle, don’t be deceived by the disinformation – we and the Iraqi people are gradually winning.
Sheila, I forced myself to read this book:
War, Evil, and the End of History
by Bernard Henri Levy
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0971865957/qid=1088472440/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/002-5728608-6847246
It is an upsetting read but it is very appropriate for what is happening …
US Marines: No greater friend, no worse enemy. Every day the terrorists demonstrate they prefer a failed civilization that has not produced anything useful for a few hundred years, but they want to return to it. The thing that amazes me is their belief that somehow this will cow us, or make the rest of the world fear and heed them by changing to extreme islam. What they may well provoke one day is a horrible end to their religion and civilization.
I hope this comes across OK.
I just learned of the death, the murder, of the missing marine by reading the comments to the post. Earlier tonight I finished Noah Andre Trudeau’s book “Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage”. “A Testing of Courage” seems a fitting comment to me on the present days, and I hope Lincoln’s words help put in perspective what I write or think in comparison to the the efforts of those trying to help in Iraq, like Spc. Maupin.
“The world will little note nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work that they have thus far so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task before us–that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion–that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain–that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom–and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Let freedom reign
Even though Ireland is so small and relatively homogenous compared to Iraq, I keep thinking of how exciting and uncertain it must have been forming a new state and government back in the 1920s.
I have a feeling a lot of folks in Iraq are going to wish they hadn’t gotten the Marines angry.