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ANOTHER SEPTEMBER 11TH has been and gone. Flags were waved, tears were shed and silence observed. Generals offered their assessments and politicians blustered. Across the political spectrum, we Americans continue to insist upon our unwavering support for the troops, from the right-wing call for continued funding of their work to the left-wing call to bring them home.
In what can only be called the epitome of American arrogance, concern for the plight of the Iraqi people, particularly the 4 million of whom are now refugees is absent from the rhetoric, the clear implication being that that our suffering, which is the result of our own failed policies, is far more important than the suffering we have inflicted upon others. Missing from the national dialog is any sense of pressing horror at the lack of electricity and potable water in Iraq, or the trauma and malnutrition, especially among children.
Of particular concern is the increasingly dire plight of Iraqi women, whose lives President Bush promised to better. "Violence against women and girls has been an invisible but constant feature of ethnic cleansing, which the U.S. continues to ignore," according to the human rights organization Madre in their analysis of the Petraeus report, a point made all too clear by the slaughter of women and children by U.S. Marines...