Someone from Mars might ask the question today: How did you get sucked into this Iraqi quagmire? Didn’t you see it coming?

Many of us did, and said so. Many at the head of government recognized the potential for disaster and kept quiet, protecting their political futures. Now, there seems to be a growing admission among the citizenry that we were duped, that we went to war without either necessity or wisdom. And now we find ourselves on the horns of the dilemma: cut our losses and bring our troops home; or continue fighting until our supply of human fodder has been used up, our treasury plundered, our spirit broken, our patriotism and hope in tatters.

At first glance, bringing our troops home before even a semblance of victory has been won, appears not to be a choice at all. That was my thought before reading Christian Parenti’s book, The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq. Now, I think the only way to victory is to pull out, to cease being a lightning rod for every crazed insurgent, and allow the Iraqis to band together and fight for their homes, their families, and their cultural heritage. Yes, we can help them in their efforts, and we have a moral obligation to do so. But, let’s get out of the way, let’s draw down the hatred and suspicion against us. Let’s come home and heal ourselves before we are forever lost.

From the midst of human chaos, Parenti quotes Robert Lynd, Irish essayist and nationalist:

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.

After one year of occupation in the birthplace of civilization, Parenti points out that,

“Iraq lies in ruins: occupied, violent, corrupt, improvised, chaotic, mildly radioactive, and stalked by a gathering storm of religious fundamentalism, irredentist nationalism, and criminal mayhem.”

At the end of the first year, a freelance website in Europe, www.Iraqbodycount.net, estimated that between 8,800 and 10,000 Iraqis had been killed, with no official count of the wounded.

Looters, Parenti tells us, continue to cannibalize the country’s infrastructure, its markets are swamped with cheap imports, and in desperation, countless Iraqis are turning to a fundamentalist past.

Parenti explains that the Baath Party, for all its faults, constructed highways, canals, cement plants, universities, power grids, and modern working-class housing. If the citizens could do it then; they can do it again with Saddam out of the way.

Sadaam, the classic fascist, had set his sights on building a “nation.”

But the mad dictator built huge palaces and his decadent sons ran their own fiefdoms, resulting in an endless war with Iran in 1980. Iran blocked Iraqi ships from using the Persian Gulf and opened a counterattack that ruined Iraq’s main oil facilities at Fao.

Iraq, despite its riches, was going broke and advertised on nightly television its need for donations from the people. By the end of the war in July, 1988, with the second-largest oil reserves in the world, Iraq owed $40 billion to international creditors, and, Parenti tells us, 400,000 people had died in the carnage, with up to 750,000 wounded; the majority of the casualties were Iranian.

The author quotes Craig Unger (House of Bush: House of Saud) as explaining that Washington’s infatuation with Saddam went so far as provding the dictator with dangerous weapons: “Beginning in 1984, the Center for Disease Control began providing Iraq with biological materials – including viruses, retroviruses, bacteria, fungi and even tissue that was infected with bubonic plague.”

In April of 2004, Parenti, along with his colleague Dahr Jamail, visited al-Kena Hospital, the country’s main facility specializing in rehabilitation services for the disabled and war-maimed. He found that the hospital had not received an emergency order for prosthetic supplies it filed nine months ago with the US-funded Ministry of Health. Doctors complain that they are receiving only $3,000 a month from the Ministry of Health, when the workshop alone requires at least $2,070 to serve its patients.

In Ramadi, he visited a local maternity and a children’s hospital, where the doctors were as afraid of the Americans as they used to be of Saddam.

The journalist asks the doctor if he had enough medicine.

“No,” the doctor replied. The quality is better now, but it is imported and too expensive and we have too little, almost none.” The money is almost gone, he says, no one is getting paid, and he doesn’t know when more money will arrive. He sometimes goes to Jordan to purchase medicine on the open market.

Parenti tells us that he has seen several children in Baghdad with enlarged heads and huge veins bulging from their skulls and has been told that this condition and other bizarre cancers and childhood diseases are linked to roughly 1,700 tons of depleted uranium-tipped weaponry that the United States used on Iraq during both wars. The NGO Child victims of War says that “the number of Iraqi babies born with serious deformities has risen from 3.04 per thousand in 1991- to 22.19 per thousand in 2001. Babies born with Down Syndrome have increased nearly fivefold and there has been a rash of cases of previously little-known eye problems.

Parenti asked the director of the hospital if he sees many children with symptoms related to possible radiation poisoning, who refused to answer.

The author pressed further: “This is an important issue. The world needs to know about these things. Do you see children who suffer from radiation sickness or not? It’s a simple question.”

“I cannot answer.”

“What do you mean? Why not?”

“This is the freedom.”

We not only bring our war-dead home in the middle of the night, so as not to disturb anyone’s sensibilities, we bury our inflictions on Iraqi children in the silence of cowed doctors’ hearts. For what are we fighting, we must ask ourselves.

When Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari came calling at the White House this past week, he suggested the rebuilding of a postwar Iraq should be modeled after the reconstruction of Europe following World War II, and offered to call it “the Bush Plan.”

Let’s see if we have this straight: First, Bush lied us into this war, plundered our human resources of trained, dedicated, and educated service men and women, squandered our treasury, divided our nation, and left us friendless in a volatile world.

Then, we are supposed to spend more billions in reconstructing Iraq after a war that appears to have no end, and name the project after the instigator of our national moral and financial destitution?

Has Alice in Wonderland taken up residency on Pennsylvania Avenue?

Lord, grant us wisdom, courage, patience and abundant compassion for those we have injured and killed in these two wars, for our people injured and killed, and for the grieving families on both sides. Amen.

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