Night of the Living-Dead War Criminals
Little else sets the blood to boiling quite so furiously, as the rehabilitation of the despicably evil figures who walk among us, their crimes systematically forgotten, even as their victims cry-out from mass graves and the bills from their atrocities come due. So it is, with George W. Bush and David Petraeus.
The rehabilitation of Bush the Lesser has been edging-out from under the kitchen-crevices of history for some time now. It began with fawning media stories about his rebirth as an aspiring artist (how like Hitler!) and with tender scenes between him and Michelle Obama at public ceremonies. Those piles of corpses from an illegal and morally-unjustifiable war, perpetrated with systematic lies, against the Iraqi people? The death squads run by Bush, Petraeus, and the now thankfully-dead Simpering Ghoul, Donald Rumsfeld? The establishment of Torture as official U.S. policy? Forget about it! Now, war criminal Bush gets to cry about Amerika’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and is accorded the status of an ostensibly-respected Elder Statesman.
Lesser-known, but just as reprehensible, David Petraeus, who oversaw the Amerikan Death Squad program in Iraq as well as the disappearance of shrink-wrapped shipping pallets of U.S. $100 bills — literally still-hot from Treasury printing presses — into the unaccounted maw of the corrupt war-machine, was recently accorded a platform by CNN to offer his sage counsel as a “retired U.S. general.” He told Fareed Zakaria, “I fear we will look back and regret the decision to withdraw.” He went on, preposterously, to say, “. . . we will also look back and regret the HASTY WAY [emphasis added] in which we seem to be doing this.” Twenty years is “hasty”?
Twenty years indeed must seem “hasty” for a man like Petraeus, who, unlike real military hero Chelsea Manning, has never spent a day of his life being tortured in the brig. “Hasty” could also describe Petraeus’ decision not to keep it in his pants when being lionized by a fawning female reporter as he handed-over classified information to her. Conveniently left off his introductory CV, is the sweetheart misdemeanor plea-deal he accepted for the security violation and that his resignation from the post of CIA Director was prompted by revelation of the sexual indiscretion that precipitated it. Not only did Petraeus “get off light,” following his CIA resignation, he took a position with a New York Investment firm, of which he eventually became a partner. Today, he is alive and well, with an estimated net worth of two million dollars and a healthy pension.
Like the brain-consuming zombies that they are, men like Bush and Petraeus not only escape punishment for their crimes, but they also are publicly rehabilitated, rise from what should have been their unmarked social resting-places, and are asked for their opinions on weighty matters of the national interest. We cannot defend their culturally-undead status by reciting the Kyrie that “they were only doing their duty.” After 1945, we convicted and hung many Germans whose defense was “duty.”
To those who would say that “to the victor, belong the spoils,” we must reply that justice cannot simply be the privilege exercised by the conqueror upon the vanquished, the gloat of the winner toward the loser . There must be an equally-applicable principle involved, otherwise, we are merely exercising a savage behavior from our protohuman past, an evolutionary warlike knee-jerk that we share with the modern common chimpanzee.
