by darkbeforedawn » Wed Nov 01, 2006 3:25 am
go here for live links:<br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://earthfamilyalpha.blogspot.com/">earthfamilyalpha.blogspot.com/</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br>Money and His Fool<br>Yesterday a tall, handsome, strong<br>young man stopped a moment to look<br>at our Icon Wheel, picked up an Afghan coin.<br><br>"I’m going to Baghdad next month," he said,<br>sunlight glinting across high dollar sun glasses.<br><br>"The writing on the coin says God is Merciful<br>and Compassionate," Jay told him.<br><br>"Why are you going to Baghdad?" I asked.<br><br>"I’m a security guard, just got back from<br>a year in Beijing.<br><br>"That was a better assignment," I said, making<br>a note to find out what Blackwater is doing<br>in China.<br><br>"This one pays more," he said and walked away.<br><br>"He's not going to come home," Jay<br>said just as I was thinking it.<br><br>We're probably wrong.<br><br>Blackwater has only lost 25 men,<br>several famously mangled on a Fallujah bridge,<br>since the US invaded Iraq. They train security<br>forces, for one thing, and are properly<br>equipped. Unlike Blackwater Guards<br>enlisted men and women do not earn<br>a base pay of $600 dollars a day.<br><br>I've been wondering who could possibly benefit<br>from scores of dead bodies, bound with Iraqi police<br>hand cuffs, heads bored through power drills,<br>battered by torture, that turn up<br>every morning in Baghdad — some reports<br>say it's a pay for kill scenario.<br><br>Even Newsweek reports the El Salvador option<br>holds sway in Baghdad.<br><br>Remember Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney fast tracking<br>training for Iraqi security guards?<br>Was that code for training death squads?<br>Blackwater was working for Bremer.<br><br>Government vehicles transport the death squads<br>in and out of Baghdad neighborhoods.<br><br>US Media wants to call it Civil War.<br><br>The thing is —<br>Sunni and Shi'a intermarry everywhere in Iraq.<br>It's a non-sectarian society so if there's a civil<br>war someone went to a great deal of trouble<br>to create it.<br><br>Better to locate oil fields.<br><br>Why did the United States build permanent military outposts<br>like Camp Balad, swimming pools, private air strips,<br>suburban neighborhoods, I-max theaters, body building<br>temples designed by Arnold Schwarzenegger —<br>instead of Iraqi schools, hospitals, water treatment plants,<br>roads, neighborhood grocery stores, government service agencies?<br><br>Why hire Halliburton for billions and not<br>Iraqi citizens to rebuild their own country?<br><br>Who benefits from jobless societies?<br><br>Who benefits from civil chaos?<br>To whose advantage is it when people live<br>in bombed out homes, are afraid to step outside,<br>and government is completely undermined?<br><br>Who will resist the multinational oil deals<br>just now being finalized, if the Iraqi government<br>is completely dysfunctional?<br><br>This tall, handsome young man who, briefly,<br>examined an Afghan coin yesterday<br>doesn't ask what you have to do to a society of people<br>who write God is Merciful and Compassionate on money,<br>to make them hate you.<br><br>He just does it, buying into the coin of<br>the Empire, nevermind it's teetering<br>on the verge of economic disaster, morally bankrupt,<br>lawless —<br><br>Afghans, when their money became worthless,<br>turned coins into jewelry.<br><br>How long before hundred dollar bills<br>turn up in Chinese Walmarts as paper finger pulls,<br>origami fish, folded paper earrings?<br><br>* Image: The Fool and His Money<br><br>©Susan Bright, 2006, <br><br>Susan Bright is the author of nineteen books of poetry. She is the editor of Plain View Press which since 1975 has published one-hundred-and-fifty books. Her work as a poet, publisher, activist and educator has taken her all over the United States and abroad. Her most recent book, The Layers of Our Seeing, is a collection of poetry, photographs and essays about peace done in collaboration with photographer Alan Pogue and Middle Eastern journalist, Muna Hamzeh. <p></p><i></i>