Here Lies Vera, God help Us All

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by Anwaar Hussain

Here Lies Vera, God help Us All

 

A woman’s body lay at the corner of two roads in the lower Garden District of the storm smashed New Orleans. Unclaimed for days, people covered the corpse with blankets or plastic sheets. By last Sunday, a short wall of bricks had risen around the body, holding down a plastic canvas. On it, someone had spray-painted a cross and the fateful words, “Here lies Vera. God help us.”No other six words, however eloquent, could so powerfully describe the devastating plight and the utter hopelessness of the victims. The forlorn feelings of despair and of having been abandoned by their government, that these words radiate, hit one like a ton of bricks. Not even the images from the calamity struck area of people trying to survive by scavenging like wild animals and dead bodies stuffed in corners of the Superdome or floating face down in the putrid sea water move one with such intensity. Those six words say it all.

And while that wall was rising around Vera’s body brick by brick, the President of United States was either fiddling or partying or addressing gullible Americans trying to resell the lost war of Iraq, on every chance that he got, with worn out clichés like ‘terror’, 9/11, ‘freedom’ and ‘sacrifice’ etc.

Does the man never learn? Does he not know that apart from the human toll of hurricane Katrina, the infrastructure and other damage that Katrina has done to his country is going to be needing every penny that he could muster to rebuild that region? He knows fully well that he has already spent $250 billion of American taxpayers’ money on his Iraq misadventure with the running costs now amounting to $6 billion a month, and his further five years stay there estimated to cost more than $1.3 trillion, or $11,300 for every household in the United States.Does he not take lesson from the conduct of his past predecessors in the duration of similar American misadventures?

Does he not know that like him, during the Vietnam War, President Kennedy too had said: “. . . we want to see a stable government there, carrying on a struggle to maintain its national independence…we believe strongly in that. We are not going to withdraw from that effort.”…and that Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson expressed similar notions while in office?

Does he not know that he repeatedly echoes President Richard Nixon who, in his ‘Silent Majority’ speech on November 3, 1969, had said: “for the future of peace, precipitate withdrawal would thus be a disaster of immense magnitude.”…and that “I [reject] the recommendation that I should end the war by immediately withdrawing all of our forces”?

Does he need reminding that like him, to prove themselves right, those Presidents let loose upon that unfortunate country over 70 million tons of bombs, about three-and-a-half times the total tonnage dropped on Germany during World War II, and amounting to 1,000 lbs for every Vietnamese man, woman and child. Not to leave success to chance, they also sprayed almost 18 million gallons of poisonous chemicals on Vietnam?

Does he recall that when the United States did finally withdraw ending the longest war in its history (11 years), and prove all four United States presidents categorically wrong, close to three million people were killed in that war with over 58000 of these being Americans…and that of those Americans, almost 11,000 were teenagers…not to mention the living dead, the 10,000 American amputees that the war left in its wake?

Does he need a lesson in history that later, their agent and the real peddler of Vietnam War, Robert S. McNamara, the then American Secretary of Defense, had to apologize for that brutal war, though it was not just his war? It was also Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles’ war, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson’s war, and Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s war-just as the current Iraq war, and the likely Iran war, is going to be George Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s war as much as Donald Rumsfeld’s and Paul Wolfowitz’ s war.

Can he not imagine that years later, after a similar human catastrophe, if and when one of these current American leaders ever decide to tender a similar apology, this war too will then be explained by the failed ideology of a generation of US policymakers and a disastrous set of policies that these leaders pursued in chasing a mirage?

To the President of United States of America and his cabal, therefore, one has only this to say;The world has finally taken off the blinds of 9/11 and now seen through your plot. Your ‘terrorism’ and ‘freedom’ clichés are working no more. You stand dishonored at home and abroad. Because of your failed policies, the dislike for the Americans is at the highest point since the birth of your great country…a fact now well beyond dispute.

Hurricane Katrina, a tragedy of immense proportions for thousands, now offers you a godsend opportunity. This is the very last chance that you can honorably withdraw form Iraq and go back to your own country with the face saving excuse of America now needing her troops, money and efforts like never before. This is the very last point for aborting your hideous dreams of Empire building and of your ‘perpetual war’ to achieve that.

Grab this chance Mr. President.You need to remember that Benito Mussolini too had once said, “War is to man what maternity is to a woman. From a philosophical and doctrinal viewpoint, I do not believe in perpetual peace.” He was hung from a pole for believing in that, albeit having already abetted in the killing of millions by then.

As to the rest of us, one can only say that our continued passivity is taking us down a course where the addition of a single word to the six words on Vera’s makeshift grave will turn these into a portentous message for us all.

Here lies Vera. God help us all.

Think.



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Anwaar’s articles appear simultaneously here at Truth Spring and at Soul Vibes in The Pakistan Tribune.


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