Mine eyes have seen the Glory

I haven’t been planning to watch the new HBO series Baghdad ER for several reasons.  I don’t really like Emergency Room dramas and I don’t want to get myself all riled up about the needless carnage unless of course it’s a comedy like M*A*S*H where the senseless incompetence, stupidity and futility of war has only a thin veil of bullshit to cover it.

Apparently the Army doesn’t want me to watch it either because of their concern that it may prompt anti-war sentiment.  HBO in fact, has gone to lengths in it’s TV trailers to assure us that it takes no position on the war, in line with the new concept of patriotism that insists on being fair and balanced even if they have to lie to do it.  

The big concern apparently is the effect the documentary, which shows the heroic, bloody and horrifying happenings at the  86th Combat Support Hospital in Ibn Sina, Iraq will have on military personnel and their families.  That is a very legitimate concern, yet one wonders at the need to hide the horrors of war from those most intimately concerned with it; an attempt that the media and the Government for which they stand has been very successful at.  Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, the Army Surgeon General warns that the show depicts the “ravages and anguish of war” and could cause post traumatic stress disorder and flashbacks in military personnel.  I’m sure he’s right. It may also cause the 18 year olds full of visions of glory and honor to reconsider their enlistment.  

To much of America this is a football game; where there is only us and the other team, there is no question of right and wrong, where the game is always necessary and needs no cause or explanation.  The only two outcomes are winning and losing. The only cost to the fans is the price of a ticket or a television.  

Perhaps this program, horrible as it might be will prompt a few more people to shed the blinders of patriotism and party loyalty and question those who started this war on one false pretext after another and who keep the reality from our minds with red herrings and smokescreens and censorship and intimidation.  The question of course is: “Is the pain and death and anguish and terror too big a price to pay for a bungled and perhaps irredeemable attempt to overthrow a dictator in a country willing to die to keep us out?”

I hope Bush and Rummy and Cheney and Rove watch it.  I hope they listen to every scream and prayer and see every drop of blood and shredded flesh and splintered bone and I hope there is a God to have mercy on them and forgive their cowardice and their lies and their greed and their malice.  If there is a God he knows that I cannot.