December 24, 2004

Oh no not the gun-issue,
and fuck that because I can’t do the math, it’s going to be short and scattered – it exempts my logistic abilities. But, here`s my dilemma: What makes a war a war?
Firstly: The course for which it is fought, and secondly the number of fatalities that keeps the reasoning at hand, and thirdly an excessive presence of arms and related industries.
The piece of math I couldn`t do would have consisted some of the following set factors: The death toll of American GI`s in the Iraq-war – which today reached 1321, and the death toll of dead Americans killed by guns on domestic American soil, which statistics marks at 30.000 per year (including suicides, lawful protection or accidents)

The unknown factors would be:

An argument for going to war in Iraq was to eradicate the Baath-party, though single-handedly ruled by Sadaam Hussein, non the less constituting a system that over the last two decades has killed in the neighbourhood of 250,000 people, some same up to a million or more…Fair enough. The bully had to go, one way or the other.

Any potential US engagement in any foreign country taking the lives of 30.000 Americans per year would create a national and international rampage. Most definitely such an engagement would be called a war, and would – besides the sorrows and yellow ribbons and a fully erect military industrial complex – be taken seriously, that is: grab the evil by the root, smoke it out of the cave.

But: with 30.000 Americans dead by means of weapons on domestic American soil, 90.000 since 9.11 2001, 600.000 in the same two decades that Hussein rocked the boat in Iraq, do we hear anybody claiming that America is at war with America? Not blaming the system only, but not ruling it out either, the ideal America is imposing is battered beyond beyond.
Its old news, its sad but true, its pure math. I love you but I have to kill you.