A very disturbing feature of our collective national consciousness these days is that most of us don’t seem to think much about the seven-plus years of war dragging on (despite pronouncements by our President to the contrary) with no real end in sight. Some of us (on one end of the political spectrum) are too busy doing the Chicken Little thing about how we have no money for health care reform to think about the billions still flowing into Iraq and Afghanistan, some of us (on the other end of the spectrum) are beyond numb with disillusionment, and most of us (no matter what our political stripe) are cued to non-attention by media marginalization and blatant disregard of the issue.
It’s useful, then, to remember that wars aren’t like action movies: Violence as a cathartic spectator sport, followed by a satisfied grunt and exit from the theater while the credits are still rolling. Even when a war is supposed to be “over”, it really isn’t.
The dead are still dead, the devastation persists, the maimed aren’t whole, and the oddly high troop levels morph seamlessly, as if with cinematic special effects, into the army bases and “friendly” governments we leave behind. Study the statistics compiled by the Boston Globe on March 20th, the seventh anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and you’ll see that the current US troop level in Iraq hovers around where it was when we first invaded in 2003 (scroll down to the lower lefthand side of the page).
Or read this update on Fallujah’s epidemic of deformed babies (including one born with two heads, who has since died) and see if you can even remember the particulars of what happened in Fallujah in 2004 (the use of white phosphorus? apocalyptic bombardment with “unusual” weapons?) and how they might account for these tragic anomalies.
Think about the poisons left behind by earlier wars–the Agent Orange, the residual landmines, the unexploded ordnance–and imagine how much the past seven plus years have added to the toxic residue.
Think about the homeless, mentally shattered Vietnam vets you’ve seen over the years, and wonder how many of the 1 in 5 Iraq and Afghanistan vets diagnosed with PTSD in 2008 will join them, since only 10% of those diagnosed have actually been treated…
War doesn’t end, it reverberates, horribly. Even when we’re no longer listening.

