SOCCER AND IRAQ

You might have noticed I start on one subject and end on another. It can be done it seems.

I have to admit I got up at 2am this morning to watch the Socceroos play the Azzurri, and the Italians won. Good luck to them. I thought they were better. Still if the Socceroos had won the whole of Italy would have gone into mourning. I say let some other team be the cause of the Italian tragedy.

The English soccer team is another national tragedy in the making, but by now that country has got use to be losing, and there are always excuses. Much as Gary Younge points out in the Observer, via Common Dreams, like the war in Iraq.

He argues the massacres by American soldiers in Iraq are an inevitable consequence of the invasion and occupation.

To treat even these few incidents as isolated chapters is to miss the broader, enduring narrative. For these are not the unfathomable offshoots of this war but the entirely foreseeable corollaries of it. This is what occupation is; this is what occupation does. There is nothing specifically American about it. Any nation that occupies another by force will meet resistance. For that resistance to be effective, it must have deep roots in local communities where opposition to the occupation is widespread. Unable to distinguish between insurgent and civilian, occupiers will regard all civilians as potential insurgents and all territory as enemy territory. “Saying who’s a civilian or a ‘muj’ [mujahideen] in Iraq, you really can’t,” one marine under investigation told the New York Times recently. “This town did not want us there at all.” Under these circumstances, dead women, children and disabled people are the price you pay for being invaded.

. . . International law was broken but there will be no punishment. The few who are responsible remain in the White House while the many who are embroiled in the conflict are brutalized or murdered, or both. “You’ve got to do whatever it takes to get home,” said one marine. “If it takes clearing by fire where there’s civilians, that’s it.” There is, of course, another option. Just go home. If the wanton murder of civilians is what it takes to complete your mission, there is clearly something wrong with the mission.

“Stick it out”, or “cut and run”, take your pick. Still at Socrates had it, “the unexamined life is not worth living”.