In the real world, there is a term used to describe people who can only see the hateful and fearful side of an equation. They are called haters. What haters do is prevent the rest of us from ever being able to change, to be happy, to make new friends, to solve problems, or to have peace. If you know any haters, you know already that they simply cannot stand it when they are challenged for control of a situation. They seem to have two primary fears, 1. That people will realize that what haters offer is merely hate, and its hurtful by-products, and 2. Haters bristle at the sight of hope, or relief, or positive change, because it creates an opportunity that people might wake up and realize that most of the time, haters are merely using their own fears and hatreds to move others to carry out the hateful deeds they are unable to carry out on their own, and the consequence is always more pain, more hurt, and more hate for everyone. We see their legacy clearly in our US Congress’s most recent hater legislation against the Palestinians. It’s a hater feel-good bill, intended to further erode the US image in the world as racist and biased against Arabs and Muslims, and Palestinians, and that will be their legacy. They are a minority, but they act like the majority, but only because before November 7, 2006, most of American was silent. It was the outgoing Congress, except a few that have remained, that led our country into war in Iraq. That stood by as our children, 3000 of them were killed for nothing, who drained our national treasury to feed Halliburton, and their friends, and who undermined our Constitution, and perforated the veil between Church and State, hoping to impose a hateful brand of Zionism on all of us, having succeeded in poisoning our government. .
The haters who are close to, and inside our government don’t want us to realize that they have used the US for many years, and especially since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Unsubstantiated fear and hatred of Iraq has cost us the lives of nearly 3000 Americans, and a countless number of Iraqis, and others. It was our choice, and not an imminent threat or danger that led us into Iraq. The same people who promoted the false idea that Hussein had WMD, and that we had no choice except to invade Iraq, are the same people who today voted to hurt Palestine as much as they can because they hate Palestinians. They are the same people who are saying that the Iraq Study Group Report on Iraq promotes defeat, and that under no circumstance should the US ever talk to Syria and Iran, and that to remove combat troops from Iraq, will leave our diplomats unprotected and subject to violent abuse by the Iraqis once the US leaves.
Haters can’t imagine that Iraqis are civilized people who are fighting a war because they were invaded, or that the war might end when the invasion is ended. On what moral high ground do we lay claim, when we suggest that these people are so ruthless and animalistic that the first thing they will do when US combat troops leave, is to start killing US diplomats? Does that mean that the US can never have a diplomatic mission in Iraq and that we must ad Iraq to the ever increasing list of countries that the US is not allowed to talk to? Or does it mean that so long as we have a diplomatic mission in Iraq, we must also have combat troops there in the hundreds of thousands to protect it? It was the haters who waged a war against a people whose only crime is the haters hated Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s former President, to the extent that we violated international law, and invaded a country, and killed, and destroyed and wasted a tremendous amount of life and treasure to dispose Hussein, and to destroy Iraq. That is pretty unbelievable when you really think about it. Still, the haters could care less about what this tragedy is costing in real lives, money and US credibility and prestige, since most of them don’t see life as having any value or meaning, unless it is to serve their various agendas, and to carry out their dictates. They tell who to hate, which is nearly everyone, and who to talk to, which is almost no one. They expect the US to attack, whom so ever they say attack, which is nearly everyone, and to have one ally, only, and forever, and that is the ally they choose, not the ones that we choose. Their criteria for friendship is racist and phobia ridden and should be rejected by all Americans as ill-suited to our nations’ character and moral compass, and contrary to our nation’s founding idea, which is that ” all people are created equally and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, among them, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This suggests that we must respect everyone’s pursuit of happiness, and not only our own.
How sad that our US foreign policy has become a policy of stagnating fear and hatred. Have we done so much evil in the world that we have to fear everyone, or to imagine that all people hate and want to destroy us? We were told by the likes of Steven Emerson and Daniel Pipes that Muslims and Arabs hate the US, and want to destroy our very way of life! Who is it that has worked to remove any semblance of God from the American public square? Who is it that has done everything in their power to undermine the US Constitution and our Bill of Rights? There is along list of evil that has been perpetrated against the people of the United States, and none of it came from Arabs or Muslims, or ever foreigners. It is arguable that most of the evil that has hurt the United States has been perpetrated by hate filled people who look out at the world and only see enemies. Anyone who doesn’t look like them, agree with them, eat what they say eat, think what they say think, etc, etc, etc, is considered an enemy, and it’s not enough that they only know how to hate, they want us all to be haters too.
The United States starved and killed more than 500,000 Iraqi children prior to the present war against Iraq, through an unjust sanctions regime wherein Iraq was denied even simple antibiotics that could have saved millions of children who died from curable illnesses. Did the Iraqis attack us? Israel illegally breeched Iraq’s sovereign airspace and bombed a suspected Iraq nuclear weapons installation; did Iraq attack Israel in return, or the US? The US and Israel have carried out more evil in the Middle East than any one can document, yet, we see very little of the type of violation retaliation, lust for revenge, hate and savage killing of Americans that the haters in our State Department, and others are always warning us about. They want to create within us, a fear of diplomacy that is aimed only at keeping the US, chained like a mad dog to a fence, and fed a regular diet of hateful propaganda against Arabs and Muslims; like mad dogs are fed gunpowder. The haters in our government and populace want the US to be isolated, a captive audience to the haters who dominate the media with their fright filled scenarios, who bribe and blackmail our politicians, and who create Muslim and Arab boogey men to keep the US off balance and limited, weakened by our reluctance and fear to talk to, and cooperate with others. It is perhaps easier to see the haters as wife beaters and the US as the battered wife. Wife beaters claim they love their wives, and after each beating they say to their victim,” look what you made me do to you?” Or maybe we can see them as child abusers who abuse the weak, and then slander them, or tar them in the eyes of society so they will never be believed when they cry out for help, or accuse their abusers. This is what they have done to the Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians. If they act to end the pain of the perpetual abuse by lashing out at the abuser, society calls them ungrateful, or terrorists, or even worse, anti-Semites. How can we ever have peace in the world if we allow haters to continue to control our foreign policy with their evil presumptions, and their fears and hatred?
The haters and Islamaphobes in our government and society want us to believe that everyone Israel hates should be mutually hated by the US, and that everyone that hates Israel hates the US. That is not true. They also don’t want us to talk to Syria or Iran because they say Syria and Iran has said bad things about Israel, that they support terrorists, which is nothing more than subjective BS and semantic games. Who are the terrorists? Are they the people who invade and illegally occupy other people’s lands, or the indigenous people who resist being illegally occupied? Answer carefully, because one day each of us might have to make this choice, to decide to fight for our independence again, or to roll over to the haters and allow them rule and ruin the US as they have ruined so many other places in the world. Also, isn’t it funny that the haters never mention the things that Israel says about Arabs, Palestinians, and Islam? No one ever mentions the provocations, the threats, the occupation, the killing, the mischief, and the targeted assassinations? If they did, it would become obvious that the evil presumption that guides our foreign policy does not find its origin in the American psyche, it was implanted there by our supposed ally and its wicked friends. No American has ever, until now believed in illegal invasions, illegal occupations, preemptive attacks, and torture as a way to have peace. The reality is that Israel does not want peace in the Middle East. They want chaos, and war and they have used US life and treasure to get what they want by poisoning the American psyche with hate and fear…until now.
The Iraq Study Groups report is more than merely a series of recommendations aimed at saving Iraq from our mistakes, and also saving the US from our mistakes in Iraq. Its regional approach to the problem is an approach that has been recommended not only by all of the major Sunni Muslim countries, and Iran, but also by Britain, our country’s number one ally in the world, and it cost 1 million in US taxpayer dollars, will the haters ignore it? The choruses of haters, who are balking now at the idea of talking to Syria and Iran about the future of Iraq, are the same chorus who serenaded us to sleep with lies about WMD in Iraq. They are the same people who said that the US could act unilaterally to attack Iraq, even though there was no threat from Iraq, or link to 9/11 that should have caused us to ever even imagine attacking that country again, let alone unilaterally. They are same people who over the years have caused the US to become the most hated and mistrusted country in the world and all they have to offer us now, is more of the same fear, hate and war based upon evil presumptions, and a wicked foreign policy.
It takes brave people to make and have peace. It takes people who believe that justice and not fear is what compels people to act or not, in defense of their lives and their rights. We have nothing to fear from the Iraqis except that they will at some point tire of killing one another, and will realize that their efforts might be better spent joining, rather than opposing the insurgency. The only way to avoid being a victim of the switch is to already be on the right side, the side of the Iraqi people, and to stand with them against the insurgents, and the real forces that are fighting a civil war, and it’s not the Shiite or the Sunni as the media would like for us to believe, this is sectarian violence. A civil war implies that someone is fighting the government of Iraq, and that can only be the Israeli backed Kurds, fighting to establish Kurdistan on land that is now Iraq. If we continue with this idea that every enemy of Israel is an enemy of the US, and that only Israel’s friends are friends to the US, we can give up any hope of ever realizing the security and stability that we so desire in the region, since Israel will never receive that type of cooperation from any of the major players, because it has acted over the years as an enemy to everyone.
Perhaps the most ridiculous argument to date against the Study Group report, is that Syria and Iran are not willing to help save the region from an all engulfing war, because they are gloating and happy that the US is in a quagmire in Iraq. That hater assessment of foreign relations is not really worthy of a response, even though it does say a lot about how we got into this mess, and how we will remain in such messes so long as we continue to follow the same people who present these arguments for hatred, fear, isolation and more war.
From now on, when the talking heads hit the airwaves to further poison US foreign policy with fear and hate, let’s put them to the test. When they talk about Iran, why can’t we have representatives from Iran to counter their accusations, so the US public can hear both sides of the story? When they talk about Iraqi retaliation killing, why can’t we have Iraqis there to explain to us the various sentiments coloring Iraq in respect to the US and also about Israel? Why wont the media in the US allow us to hear both sides, and to know the truth? We must not allow the haters to stifle the debate on peace in Iraq as they did in respect to war with Iraq, burdening us with their presumption of evil that has thus far poisoned US foreign policy, and led our nation into an unnecessary and unjust war. We must not be naïve, and still we cannot accept the presumption of evil as a cause for war, or for a cause to continue to undertake war as a remedy for everything. There is another way, and the Iraq Study has suggested something, whereas the haters only offer us more war. War cannot solve problems, it cannot make real economy for our families, it cannot educate our children, or cure disease, and it cannot bring peace. Let’s presume that we can change things, and that we can end the carnage in Iraq, and let’s not assume that because everyone except us are so evil, that we must remain always and forever embroiled in unjust wars, and let’s settle once and for all, that you cannot make peace through war, and once we decide that peace is a much more powerful possibility than war, let’s get on with the pursuit of peace, and take the steps necessary to end the war.
