In Colin’s Fields **

In Colin’s fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Colin’s fields.


Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Colin’s fields.

**(From "In Flanders Fields" by Lt. Col. John McCrae, M.D. (1872-1918))


It’s not terribly original, but the deja vu-abattoir-Merry-Go-Round waking nightmare that is Iraq has made me so sad for so long that it feels these days like an old and dreadful companion. The monster in the next room that won't be still, won’t let us sleep, and won’t go away.

Americans who used to be horrified enough to call for the end of a conflict if a handful of American soldiers perished, have long since stopped noticing that there is a pre-loaded “Death Box” in every major paper. Like the horoscopes or the crossword or the sports scores, the dailies have set aside a few square inches of holy ground for the numbers of Americans who have died due to George Bush’s folly each and every day.

And it is every day now, isn’t it? Or damned near. A bomb. A picture of smoke and the burnt out husk of a vehicle. The number of dead Iraqis, who might as well be so many Pac Man dots, so little do they matter to us as real, live human beings anymore. Not that they ever did, really.

And the number of dead Americans.

Yesterday we saw this story:

Iraqis Say Civilians Killed in U.S. Raids
Military Asserts Fatalities in West Were Insurgents
By Ellen Knickmeyer

Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, October 18, 2005; A01

BAGHDAD, Oct. 17 -- A U.S. fighter jet bombed a crowd gathered around a burned Humvee on the edge of a provincial capital in western Iraq, killing 25 people, including 18 children, hospital officials and family members said Monday. The military said the Sunday raid targeted insurgents planting a bomb for new attacks.

In all, residents and hospital workers said, 39 civilians and at least 13 armed insurgents were killed in a day of U.S. airstrikes in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, a Sunni Arab region with a heavy insurgent presence.

The U.S. military said it killed a total of 70 insurgents in Sunday's airstrikes and, in a statement, said it knew of no civilian deaths.

At Ramadi hospital, distraught and grieving families fought over body parts severed by the airstrikes, staking rival claims to what they believed to be pieces of their loved ones.

...
Residents and the U.S. military gave sharply different accounts of the air raid.

And a lot of us probably read right on by.

What the story is describing is a massacre.

When you call in air strikes because you are stretched too thin, or are unwilling to roll in the infantry, and your civilian-to-bad-guy kill-ratio is 3-to-1, that’s a fucking massacre pure and simple.

And it’s the kind of thing that most Americans used to get really furious about.

Of course the straight story is hard to pin down, and what the government said happened “sharply differs” from the accounts of residents. And were this 2000, I might be inclined to believe the government’s account of what happened.

But this is not 2000, and I am not so inclined for the simple reason that the government of my country has done little else but lie to my face every day for the last five years. Lied about every single detail regarding Iraq. Lied about 9/11. Lied about torture. About their cadre of fake reporters hires at taxpayer expense to lie to us more effectively. About Social Security. About FEMA. About global warming. About the budget. About the environment. About Valerie Plame.

Lied about pretty much everything you can possibly lie about, which is exactly the kind of thing that most Americans used to get really furious about.

In fact, we used to impeach people over it.

From Bush I never expected anything other that cowardice and mediocrity, and from Cheney I never expected anything other than bile and theft. They have traversed no moral arc: they started out as despicable and there they have stayed.

But from Powell I expected more.

Powell was the one man in the whole reeking whorehouse I had a little faith in. The one who lent integrity upwards, to those who did not deserve it.

Powell, who knew better enough to starkly warn George Bush of the consequences of being even a little bit wrong, but in the end found it easier to serve a bad President than a good principle. Who allowed himself to be tricked out like a hooker, and turned out on the corner.

Without Powell, there is no Iraq, because there is no one else of sufficient stature to close that deal: Powell the Statesman, reduced to Powell the Salesman, and finally to Powell the Sellout.

Powell is the one who took his beloved military up in his arms, carried them out into the desert, and left them there to be slaughtered.

Powell is the one who has broken “faith with us who die” and the dead -– the civilian women dead, the children dead, the fathers dead, our soldiers dead, ALL the dead -- want to know, Colin, why you have abandoned them?

These tragic ghosts that cannot sleep, though poppies grow
In Colin’s fields.