Not mattering.

Heard a story on public radio this week (here it is) about some Iraqi nationals - educated people - who had worked for the U.S. military and U.S. contractors in Iraq. The ones the reporter spoke to were among the very few who have managed to immigrate to America. Now they are out of work, out of money, and essentially unemployable except at the very bottom of the service economy. One man, speaking of his experience back in Iraq, told of how an American officer once told him that "working for the American government is a future". Now this unfortunate fellow is contemplating taking another job in Iraq - no small consideration, since doing so could easily cost him his life. Here all he can find is janitorial work at McDonald's-level wages, though he is a trained engineer. His expectation had been that in return for having served this country, he would be taken care of. All the government seems willing to do for these people is bring them here, get them hooked up with some goofy job counseling agency called "Upwardly Global", and fuck up their paperwork so that it's even harder to get a job. Welcome to America.

Can't blame these folks for being fooled. Our own people lap up the same lies about how we came to Iraq to help the Iraqi people. There are lessons in this for all of us, I suppose. The first is that Iraqis - in fact, any subject peoples within the American empire - do not matter beyond their relative utility at a given moment. Think about it. Our government did not arm and support Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war because they wanted all of those Iraqis to die on the battlefield; they didn't pursue deadly sanctions for a dozen years for the express purpose of killing half a million children; they didn't prosecute their unprovoked 2003 invasion to generate a million fatalities and 4 million refugees. No, our government did all of those things because they were a means to an end. The Iraqis simply served the imperial strategy by dying, starving, etc., and that is all. And when Bush's bogus rationale for invading Iraq (WMDs and Al Qaeda) fell apart like the house of cards that it obviously was, Iraqis served their strategy again by being the oppressed people to whom we would confer the blessings of liberty. Useful, but not important - a status doubly underlined by the fact that our government refuses to realistically estimate the number of people who have died as a result of their war of choice.

Iraqi expatriates like the ones NPR spoke to have learned this the hard way - by risking their lives to serve the U.S., only to be dropped like an apple core when their utility expires. (Our own G.I.s get similar treatment, but that's another column.) Fact is, this is a world run by pirates, and America is Long John Silver. Ours is a fully bipartisan pirate ship, it bears remembering. Aside from style, there is little that separates the foreign policy establishment in the Republican and Democratic parties. The G.O.P. is mostly a scurvy crew of unabashed cutthroat privateers, ready to burn and plunder at will. The Democrats, well... they put a nice tie on it, dress it up a little bit, tone down the rhetoric, but it's essentially the same set of rules: We own the world, and what we say goes. The first half of that is obvious from our behavior, the second and explicit declaration by Bush the First (a.k.a. "Pappy").

Now, if that isn't a pirate's creed, I don't know what is. ARRRrrrrrrrrrr.....

luv u,

jp