i hate my government

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4440664.stm


this grieves my heart.

the U.S. used white phosphorus in the attack on fallujah. i saw that headline on the BBC front page and thought, oh shit, that can't be good, and decided to find out what it was. (of course, we lied about it afterwards.)

white phosphorus starts burning on contact with oxygen, and doesn't stop until A) deprived of oxygen or B) until it burns itself out. as some military guy is quoted in the article, "it'll burn down to the bone."

the horror of this is . . . i want to say incomprehensible, but i know it isn't. i know too much about DU, about agent orange, about the flattening of vietnam, about the army essentially giving my grandfather hodgkin's, about gulf war syndrome, about john crawford, to even pretend to believe my government wouldn't do this because oh yes, it would.

it is bad enough to know my government, with money from me and my parents and my grandparents, is lobbing bullets and "traditional" bombs (by traditional, in this case, i mean bunker busters - bombs that weigh more than i want to think about and create craters wherever they land, including houses we "mistakenly" pick out as targets) at the Iraqi people. we are literally raining fire down upon the people of Iraq.

it's a chemical weapon when launched at civilians. (why it doesn't count as a chem weapon when launched at "combatants" - as if we're even pretending there's a line in iraq - is beyond me. i am lucky: most of war is beyond me.) of course the army fucks are claiming we didn't lob it at civilians, but there is much evidence that those guys are NOT to be believed, isn't there?

no one deserves to have a chunk of this shit burning through their bodies; terrorist, father, brother, cleric, or otherwise. i am sure - sure as i know anything - that this DID hit civilians, and that means grandmothers and babies, with clothes burned through, screaming about a fire they did not know how to stop, fleeing into the streets in the hopes they'd be shot - anything to stop the burning.

the beauty part is the U.S. is not a signatory to the section of a treaty that would make this bombing illegal. (don't even get me started on our lack of "fair play" on treaties and the international scene.)

i hate my government.

i want to believe this shit will stop, but . . . i know too much.

in the new world, first it was the indians, and then it was the africans. it took us a long, long time to fuck up three whole continents' worth of people. (anywhere from two to four, actually: north america and africa, definitely, and south america too, and europe if you believe those on top are hurt as much by the actions against those on the bottom.) but once we were done with that, we turned outward: the phillipines, the conquering of Hawaii, the way we treated immigrants, vietnam, cambodia, the list of misdeeds in central america is longer than i can recount. we have sponsored death squads in dozens and dozens of countries. there's always another set of people to hate, whether it's the commies in vietnam, the jihadists in afghanistan (remember afghanistan?), or the saddam-sympathizers in iraq. this will not stop on its own.