“KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE PRIZE!”

(…Here is yet another dated entry now being posted in a series commemorating the tenth anniversary of the American war in Iraq. Like the previous one, it was written five years ago.)

Why is the war in Iraq being waged at all? We have heard too many explanations of the reasons for going to war in the first place, and all of them have been proven phony. This is no longer about why America has got herself into this miserable war, but about how to get out of it. Presidential Candidate Barack Obama has put it quite adequately: Once the bus has been driven into the ditch, there are only so many (meaning, few) ways of pulling it out.

And yet there is so much preoccupation with the success of the surge, whatever that means, as if America is suddenly winning the war instead of losing it. I admit that it is hard to accept being a loser, especially if one is an American but what is the definition of success here when it is clearly just a temporary reduction in the monthly death toll, yet with no end of the war in sight this is only a protraction of the long agony which has been the American very presence in Iraq, surge or no surge.

Mr. Obama is right that the mission itself is the problem and that now it has to change, quite dramatically at that, from the task of being there to the task of getting out. Leaving Iraq with some dignity: such is the definition of success.

So, here is a fresh bite on the stale pastry from the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s bakery. His byword “keep your eyes on the prize” gets a new life in the context of the war in Iraq, and particularly in the light of this Nietzschean gem: "Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal."

The Bush Administration’s abhorrent war in Iraq is not a goal but a path they have chosen to pursue, with a commendable stubbornness, which would have been a virtue had it been applied to something of substance. The big question here is “Where is the goal?” Or, in Jesse Jackson’s lingo, “What is the prize?” And I do not mean the goal of the malicious shadow-leaders and their brainless Washington followers in the White House and on Capitol Hill, but the goal of the great American nation, as it keeps sailing into the future on board a doomed pirate ship, whose business-as-usual crew, by day, turns into a scary host of skeletons and zombies by night, while the passengers are so much preoccupied with their foodstuffs, personal effects, and other trivial minutia (“It’s the economy, stupid!”) that they have lost the understanding of the fact that their basic livelihood, their decent retirement, and the future of their children and grandchildren depend on a far larger set of factors than the tiny nuts and bolts of the economic machinery, and that larger picture of where the ship is headed to, and who is in control of it, instead of becoming their legitimate preoccupation, seems to be the last thought on their minds.

The clueless and unwinnable (because there is no sensible definition of victory whatsoever) war in Iraq will end up costing trillions of dollars with nothing to show for it. Meanwhile, the American nation has become so bewildered by all this that its middle class has given up even on its basic struggle for survival, allowing its bare necessities of tomorrow to be wasted and stolen in astronomical numbers by the new kind of crooks who have replaced the m in millions by b and even tr, which enables them to skim countless billions off the top of this nation’s essential wealth, adding up to trillions, and precipitously diminishing the prospects of a future prosperity…

So much for the American Dream.