St. Augustine blesses the kill list. And liberalism is just a nicer, slicker, more PR-savvy way of carrying on the brutal work of empire.

Behold President Obama, on the second day of his presidency, flanked by retired generals and admirals, signing an executive order to ban torture and declaring that the prison at Guantanamo Bay would soon be closed — fulfilling, in other words, some serious campaign promises.

“What the new president did not say,” a recent New York Times story explains, in gleeful servitude to the ironies of military-industrialism, “was that the orders contained a few subtle loopholes.” Those loopholes left, it turns out, plenty of room for the new administration to continue Bush-era, war-on-terror business as usual, preserving such controversial practices as extraordinary rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention.

“They reflected a still unfamiliar Barack Obama,” Times reporters Jo Becker and Scott Shane proceed to tell us, “a realist who, unlike some of his fervent supporters, was never carried away by his own rhetoric.”

And Obama’s base of support is dismissed in an instant as fervent fools who actually believed all that nonsense about . . . what was that word again? Oh yeah, hope. If you are stressed about human rights abuses, torture, indefinite detention, pre-emptive invasion, the slaughter of civilians, the occupation of sovereign nations, drone warfare, government-sanctioned assassination, the shredding of constitutional rights, depleted uranium, toxic military waste, the counterproductivity of war and such like, my friend, you are not a realist.

Realists recognize that certain human beings are expendable.

The buzz-generating article, published at the end of May, is “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” a 6,000-word opus taking us on a tour of the Obama war room. It’s a remarkable piece of work, based on interviews with three dozen of the president’s current and former advisers. The story’s primary revelation is that Obama and his security team meet every week to discuss the “baseball card” bios of suspected al-Qaida members in such places as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and “nominate” the ones to kill in drone attacks. The president insists on having the final, life-and-death say.

The story is a mostly uncritical celebration of the process and of Obama’s “pragmatism” — which is to say, his abdication of do-gooder principles whenever they become inconvenient and get in the way of America’s safety.

Indeed, Obama comes off as a heck of a commander-in-chief, decisive and tough yet adept at spouting liberal rhetoric and conversant with the just war theory of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Thus, unlike George Bush, he is able to certify his war as morally acceptable to intellectuals, no matter how cynically he may compromise the principle that “thou shalt not kill civilians.”

One of the most blatant bits of cynicism the story reveals, which has deservedly received much critical comment, concerns the way the Obama team was able to reduce, or at least contain, the number of civilian casualties its drone strikes created:

Obama simply “embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants . . . unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”

But hey, that’s realism. My concern about this is not only with the Obama administration’s cynical pursuit and expansion of Bush’s brutal, destabilizing war, but with the subtle banishment by the Times of all substantive criticism of it into the margins of fanaticism. Alternatives to the violent pursuit of “safety” and self-interest do not appear in the story; there’s no acknowledgement they even exist. The only counter-ideas given voice emanate from Dick Cheney and the rabid neocons, which serve mainly to reinforce the moderate reasonableness of Obama’s war.

Yet there’s nothing moderate or reasonable about it at all, or even, as far as I can tell, “pragmatic” or “realistic.” The message I take from the Times story is that terrorism is simply less frustrating to deal with if it’s reduced to a logical, utterly abstract, win-lose problem, rather than dealt with in terms of long-range principles or seen in a context that includes a re-examination of American policy and self-interest. What primarily matters is that those in power be able to reassure themselves continually that they’re “doing something” by taking out bad guys. (Realists play video games!)

The Times story looks no deeper than this, but at one point the writers describe Obama as following “the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands.” Why is the enemy metastasizing? Well, they later note, in what Tom Engelhardt calls the “single outside-the-Beltway sentence” in the entire article, that both Pakistan and Yemen “are arguably less stable and more hostile to the United States than when Mr. Obama became president.”

Obama the realist is pursuing a policy that isn’t working, even in its own terms, but the powers that be, including the media, don’t seem to notice. Meanwhile, the secret kill list protects us — from those who claim safety requires creating a just and humane world.

(Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, “Courage Grows Strong at the Wound” (Xenos Press) is now available. You can respond to this column at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.)

“The Lakotah had no language for insulting other orders of existence: pest, waste, weed . . .”

But what about “bugsplat”?

That’s the word for the cop at UC Davis, walking up and down the line of students sitting with their arms locked, zapping them in the eyes with pepper spray. It’s the word for the Tunisian police and bureaucrats who humiliated Mohamed Bouazizi and destroyed his livelihood as a street vendor. It’s the word for anyone whose power exceeds his humanity.

And, according to a 2003 Washington Post story, it’s the name of a Defense Department computer program for calculating collateral damage, as well as, apparently, casual terminology among Pentagon operation planners and the like to refer to the collateral damage itself . . . you know, the dead civilians. CIA drone operators talk about bugsplat. The British organization Reprieve calls its effort to track the number of people killed by U.S. drone strikes — in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen — Project Bugsplat.

It’s a term I’ve only recently come across, but I can’t get it out of my head. The only way I know how to begin thinking about it is to quote that passage from Rupert Ross’ extraordinary book about Native American wisdom, “Returning to the Teachings,” and contemplate the idea of a people who have “no language for insulting other orders of existence.” Such a thought, it seems to me, is worth sitting with for a while, especially as we read or listen to the news and behold the daily unfolding of our casual disrespect for every order of existence, including our own.

Ross goes on to talk about “the core teaching that all aspects of Creation were essential, none were superior and each must be respected if all are to survive.”

What if this is actually true? What if this is the depth at which we need to transform ourselves, not merely personally but at every level of our interaction with the world, including geopolitically?

“But even when they’re not targeting civilians, which is probably most of the time, they end up killing massive numbers of civilians,” journalist Allan Nairn told Amy Goodman in a “Democracy Now!” interview last year.

“The Pentagon has a word for that, too,” he went on. “They call it ‘bugsplat.’ In the opening days of the invasion of Iraq, they ran computer programs, and they called the program the Bugsplat program, estimating how many civilians they would kill with a given bombing raid. On the opening day, the printouts presented to General Tommy Franks indicated that 22 of the projected bombing attacks on Iraq would produce what they defined as heavy bugsplat — that is, more than 30 civilian deaths per raid. Franks said, ‘Go ahead. We’re doing all 22.'”

And this is the foundation of our national security.

I go back to the now-infamous video of the policeman at UC Davis, acting not so much in personal disdain toward the students he was pepper-spraying as in a context of institutional disdain for them. The police defined their role as restoring order, but what they were doing was re-establishing turf. To that end, they were simply doing their jobs: removing impediments.

The extended video of the incident, showing the chaotic aftermath of the spraying, with the crowd screaming “Shame on you!” as the injured students clutch their faces and roll on the ground in pain, as some are cuffed while they lie face-down in the grass, is almost as harrowing to watch as battle footage. At one point someone shouts in outrage, “These are children!”

While the balance of power seems remarkably uneven in this incident, in reality that’s not the case. As the demonstrators focus their anger and cries of shame, the perplexed police are the ones who stumble backward, at least momentarily.

This doesn’t happen where we wage our wars. This, for instance, is from a New York Times article on Thanksgiving Day, about a NATO airstrike in southern Afghanistan that killed seven civilians (including six children):

“Abdul Samad, an uncle of four of the children who were killed, disputed the government’s version of the attack. He said his relatives were working in fields near their village when they were attacked without warning by an aircraft.

“His brother-in-law, Mohammad Rahim, 50, had his two sons and three daughters with him. They were between 4 and 12 years old and all were killed, except an 8-year-old daughter who was badly wounded, Mr. Samad said.”

Project Bugsplat is the name of every war, at least from the planners’ point of view. A winnable war is waged from above, invisibly, with godlike impunity. Such wars, especially in today’s political order, cannot be effectively opposed with acts of equally brutal counterforce; they can only be prolonged.

“Bugsplat” is a term of ultimate disrespect and indifference, and it begins with a state of mind. The global Occupy movement, with its humane and nonviolent core certainty, is tipping the balance. Finally it comes down to this: Occupy consciousness.

(Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is a nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.)

(c) 2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran . . .

Or as Mitt Romney put it, playing the irresponsible-lunatic game convincingly enough to become the leading Republican presidential candidate: “If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon.”

The consensus congeals: Our next war must be with Iran. A report issued by the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, which the New York Times called “chillingly comprehensive” (though this is debatable), stoked this long-simmering agenda. It charges that Iran has conducted secret experiments on nuclear triggers and created computer models of nuclear explosions, among other things, which proves that the nation, despite its leaders’ protestations to the contrary, is pursuing . . . oh God, oh God . . . a nuclear weapons program.

War hysteria springs eternal. It certainly makes great fodder for a presidential campaign, as virtually all the GOP commander-in-chief wannabes are playing tough as nails on the issue, yanking the debate screamingly to the right. This is the way the game works. The Obama administration thus has to defend itself for eschewing, so far, a military response to the threat and pursuing only economic sanctions.

No matter the current sanctions have “applied so much pressure that the Iranian economy has ground to a halt,” according to an administration spokesman. Iran’s alleged hideous crime, of pursuing weapons only the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea are allowed to possess, requires a military pummeling of the first order. And this, then, is the national “debate”: war or war by other means. No other perspective is allowed or acknowledged.

Defending sanctions, for instance, U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, said: “Critics also argued that these measures will hurt the Iranian people. Quite frankly, we need to do just that.”

This closed, airtight national discussion fails to acknowledge a few things: most glaringly, that a stance of brutal toughness is horrific national policy and always creates unintended consequences that overwhelm the initial objectives.

Furthermore, there is significant counter-evidence, such as Seymour Hersh’s lengthy investigation that ran last June in the New Yorker, that Iran does not, in fact, have a nuclear weapons program; and that, like Iraq’s phantom nuclear program before it, it’s a bogeyman conjured up by the war establishment, both at home and abroad, to rev the engines of our next big military fiasco.

But even if the IAEA allegations are accurate and Iran is indeed developing a nuclear weapons program — well, why shouldn’t it? As Eric Margolis wrote recently at Huffington Post, “Iran has some pretty strong reasons for wanting nuclear weapons for defensive purposes — the same reason used by existing nuclear powers.”

After all, Margolis notes, Iran was invaded by the British and Soviets in 1941, with its oil fields seized to support the war effort; and in 1953, its democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by U.S. and British intelligence, thus preventing him from nationalizing Iranian oil production. The U.S. also supported Iraq in its bloody war against Iran in the 1980s. And nuclear-armed Israel is, of course, a serious threat from Iran’s point of view.

I say this not in support of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, but simply to point out the obvious holes and hypocrisies in the conventional logic, which isn’t logic at all, just propaganda surrounding a given: Iran is our enemy. No matter what.

It is in this context that I bring up a surprisingly ambivalent New York Times editorial on the IAEA report, which ran last week. The editorial, while adding its bit to the excoriation of Iran and calling on the U.N. Security Council “to quickly impose a new round of even tougher sanctions on Iran,” also made a feint, albeit confused and apologetic, in the direction of sane foreign policy and the larger picture.

“We’re not sure any mix of sanctions and inducements can wean Tehran of its nuclear ambitions,” the editorial lamented, neatly razor-slicing its own argument. It went on: “We are sure that a military attack would be a disaster — and the current saber-rattling from Israel should make everyone nervous.”

What refreshing confusion! Might the Times actually oppose a war with Iran? My guess is that it wouldn’t. Once the bandwagon began to roll, the Gray Lady would, I fear, clamber aboard. But here it is, acknowledging uncertainty that force and coercion would do any good at all, bringing what amounts to an antiwar consciousness to bear on the situation. Praise the Lord — sanity returns from exile, at least tentatively.

The next logical step is to acknowledge global nuclear disarmament as the key to our safety, and everyone’s safety. As Howard W. Hallman, chair of Methodists United for Peace with Justice, puts it at Strategic Peacemaking: “. . . for deterrence of other nations’ nuclear arsenals, a wiser and safer alternative is mutual elimination of all nuclear weapons.”

Such wisdom may not yet be part of the official debate, as it is monitored by the military-industrial establishment, but much of the world is massing with locked arms at its edges, shouting: No war with Iran. No war anywhere.

(Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is a nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.)

(c) 2011 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

“Play faster!” he cried, wildly, over and over. “Play faster!”

The dame who was tickling the ivories complied, out of control herself. The music revved to a dangerous velocity — oh, too fast for decent, sober, well-behaved Americans to bear — and . . . well, you just knew, violence, madness, laughter were just around the corner. The year was 1936 and, oh my God, they were high on marijuana, public enemy number one.

The scene is from “Reefer Madness,” arguably the dumbest movie ever made — but smugly at the emotional and ideological core of American drug policy for the last three-quarters of a century. The policy, which morphed in 1970 into an all-out “war” on drugs, has filled our prisons to bursting, created powerful criminal enterprises, launched a real war in Mexico and presided over the skyrocketing of recreational drug use in the United States. The war on drugs just may be a bigger disaster than the war on terror.

“The war on drugs, as it has been waged, has not only failed to curtail drug use; it has become a major public health liability in its own right,” writes Christopher Glenn Fichtner in his comprehensive new book on our disastrous war on a plant, “Cannabanomics: The Marijuana Policy Tipping Point” (Well Mind Books).

Fichtner, a psychiatrist — he served as Illinois director of Mental Health for several years — takes a long, hard look at the politics of irrationality and lays out a compelling diagnosis: “essentially, social or mass psychosis.” You can also throw in racism. The war on drugs is simply a race war by another name, fueled by fear of Mexican and African-American culture, with the weight of law brought down on African Americans with wildly disproportionate severity:

“. . . during a period when the number of prison sentences for drug-related convictions increased dramatically for all drug offenders,” Fichtner writes, citing Illinois statistics between 1983 and 2002, “it increased for African Americans at roughly eight times the rate of increase seen for Caucasians.”

But reading “Cannabanomics” kept leaving me with the sense that there was a deeper irrationality to our anti-marijuana crusade than even the racism. For instance, “Examples abound,” he writes, “in which the application of mandatory minimum sentences has led to harsher penalties for marijuana offenses than for violent crimes ranging from battery through sexual assault and even to murder.”

And the violent enforcement of zero tolerance hasn’t been limited to the pursuit of recreational potheads. Those using cannabis medicinally have also been harassed, arrested and sometimes treated with such shocking violence you have to wonder whether the official paranoia about marijuana use — that it leads to mental derangement and violent behavior — is sheer projection.

For instance, early in the book Fichtner relates the story of Garry, a California man who used marijuana to relieve arthritic pain. Despite the fact that this was legal under state law, his house was raided by federal agents: “As he opened his front door, he was greeted by a battering ram and a physical takedown maneuver that left him with a dislocated left shoulder, right hand fractures, blunt head trauma, and a back injury that aggravated the arthritis for which he grew cannabis in his garage in the first place.”

Much of “Cannabanomics” is devoted to the extraordinary medicinal uses of marijuana, which has been called one of the safest therapeutically-active substances known to the human race. It has been used, usually with little if any side effect, to alleviate chronic pain and chemo-induced nausea and relieve the symptoms of a stunning array of illnesses and conditions, including epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, cerebral palsy, diabetes, hepatitis C, AIDS, cancer, Tourette’s syndrome and Alzheimer’s. The list goes on.

The herb has been “part of humanity’s medicine chest for almost as long as history has been recorded,” according to Dr. Gregory T. Carter, writing on the NORML website.

In light of this, our war against it — at extraordinary human and economic cost — illuminates a crying need for us to change the way we govern and look after ourselves. Another story Fichtner tells is about an Illinois man named Seth, who had suffered from epileptic seizures most of his life. He reluctantly tried using marijuana — one inhalation a day — because his prescribed medications weren’t helping much, and soon reduced the incidence of grand mal seizures from several per week to one or two per month.

The amazing part of this story, Fichtner notes, is that none of his doctors were willing even to discuss the therapeutic use of marijuana, though they were quick to recommend invasive procedures, including temporal lobe surgery. “. . .we Americans,” he writes, “live in a society in which it is acceptable practice for surgeons to destroy a piece of someone’s brain in order to prevent seizures but where use of marijuana for the same purpose . . . is a criminal offense.”

To my mind, it all smacks of the military-industrial metaphor that rules the American roost. We’re quick to seize on something as the enemy and organize ourselves blindly around its destruction, never stopping to notice that what we’re destroying is ourselves. In the case of the war on drugs, our “enemy” is our greatest ally.

(Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is a nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.)

(c) 2011 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

“Mr. Obama and his senior national security advisers have sought to reassure allies and answer critics, including many Republicans, that the United States will not abandon its commitments in the Persian Gulf even as it winds down the war in Iraq and looks ahead to doing the same in Afghanistan by the end of 2014.”

I pluck a paragraph from The New York Times and for an instant I’m possessed by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, aquiver with puzzlement down to my deepest sensibilities. I hold you here, root and all, little paragraph. But if I could understand what you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what empire is, and hubris . . . and maybe even, by its striking absence, democracy.

The paragraph contains the careful verbiage of exclusion, which is the only language in which the geopolitical powers that be are able to communicate.

The paragraph, one of many that could have been plucked for study and put under the microscope of outrage, is from a story just before Halloween, by Thom Shanker and Steven Lee Myers, informing us that, while the United States will be pulling troops out of Iraq at the end of the year, the regional war is anything but over: The U.S. military will be massing troops in Kuwait, sending more warships to the region and tightening its military alliance with the six nations that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council (including Saudi Arabia and Bahrain), in order to develop “a new security architecture” in the Gulf and establish its “post-Iraq footprint.”

Or in the words of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “We will have a robust continuing presence throughout the region.” And this, she explains, “is proof of our ongoing commitment to Iraq and to the future of that region,” which we care about because it “holds such promise” — oh God, the compassion is killing me — “and should be freed from outside interference to continue on a pathway to democracy.”

What’s striking, first of all, is that the “news” is presented to us, under the guise of objective reporting, as a fait accompli: Our supreme leaders have the following plans, the cursory details of which they are nice enough to let us in on.

There is no countertide present in reporting that emanates from the national defense beat — no acknowledgement of a rising national disgust at war or our enormous military failures of the past decade, which the plans the Times story outlines merely continue. There’s no acknowledgment even of obvious contradictions or hypocrisies, such as the fact that our presence in the Gulf arguably constitutes the very “outside interference” from which, according to Clinton, the region should be freed.

And certainly there isn’t the least irreverence: no suggestion, for instance, that we have an interest in this oil-rich region beyond a deep love for the people and their democratic aspirations; or that our partners in the Gulf Cooperation Council are autocrats who brutally repress dissent and, ahem, democracy.

The story reads, instead, like interlocking blocks of propaganda dropped into place, not so much disseminating information as protecting the security state planners from questions and challenges. This is the news of empire.

Note that when the story does acknowledge critics, those critics are Republicans, that is to say, empire fanatics as opposed to empire moderates, thus implying that the only reasonable question our post-Iraq footprint raises is whether we should be “post-Iraq” at all. “. . . American military officers and diplomats, as well as officials of several countries in the region, worry that the withdrawal could leave instability or worse in its wake.”

This much should be clear: War is a given. Got it?

And war could follow more than one trajectory. If there’s a “security collapse” in Iraq, our troops in Kuwait could quickly redeploy to the country we’ve already destroyed. But those same troops could also respond to “a military confrontation with Iran.”

Perhaps the most telling quote in the Times story was from Bahrain’s foreign minister, Sheik Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa. With the United States out of Iraq, a regional alliance is necessary because, he said, “Now the game is different.”

Yeah, well . . .

The only thing wrong with this comment is that this isn’t a game: not our eight and a half years in Iraq, our decade in Afghanistan or our possible invasion of Iran. Innocent people have died and will continue to die in horrific numbers, toxins will spread, lives will be destroyed. The consequences cannot be contained. They are bleeding now and will continue to bleed into the future. But the Times story affects no awareness of this; it has the depth of a gamer review.

Is there a democracy at either end of the missiles, warships or troop deployments? Suddenly I’m back on the sidewalk with the Occupy movement, which has arisen at last in this era of passive citizenship to confront the embedded helplessness and hopelessness that come with the corporatocracy and its subservient media.

Citizens are standing up to the assumptions of empire. Their numbers are small — for the moment — but their spirit could prove to be irresistible.

(Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is a nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.)

(c) 2011 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

This won’t be Vietnam, exactly. No helicopter whisking the last remaining Americans off the roof of the embassy. A contingent of 16,000 State Department contract employees — more than 5,000 of them armed mercenaries — will be staying on, running what’s left of the American operation in Iraq.

But there’s little doubt we lost this war — by every rational measure. Everyone lost, except those who profited from (and continue to profit from) the trillions we bled into the invasion and occupation; and those who planned it, most of whom remain in positions to plan or at least promote the wars we’re still fighting and the wars to come.

But in a certain profound sense, the war in Iraq, as we have come to know it over the last almost nine years, is shutting down. The Obama team couldn’t get “Iraq’s inspiring but fragile democracy” (in the immortal words of Joe Lieberman, waxing absurd in a USA Today opinion piece) to approve immunity from local prosecution for American troops. Our noble cause trembled, collapsed, and for a moment we became a democracy. The will of the sick-of-war public prevailed.

I find myself reflecting on this the way I might reflect on a berserk car alarm that finally shuts off — with the ringing still in my ears, with anger and frustration still wracking my body. Something that shouldn’t be happening has finally ceased happening, or soon will, but I hardly feel like celebrating.

“If any good comes of the Iraq war,” Michael Lind wrote recently in Salon, “it will come in the form of an Iraq syndrome, like the Vietnam syndrome that made Americans wary of large-scale military intervention abroad from the fall of Saigon in 1975 until the Gulf War of 1990-91. The mantra then was ‘No more Vietnams.’ That needs to be updated: ‘No more Iraqs.'”

I agree, but I don’t think this goes far enough. “No more Vietnams” is still operative: The public still hates war; even neocons acknowledge that Nam was a disaster. Because of it, the war interests spent a generation retooling their agenda, and ultimately American society, to work around this fact. Elimination of the draft, for instance, while seemingly a progressive step, took self-interest out of the antiwar movement.

And war propaganda became savvy and benign. Our post-Vietnam military adventures, while still fear-driven, also had “humanitarian” components, like spreading democracy or defending women’s rights. We developed “smart bombs,” which only destroyed, you know, infrastructure. And as Colin Powell famously proclaimed, as the Iraq adventure was starting to get ugly, “We don’t do body counts.” No daily kill reports this go-around; that would just turn the American stomach. With the help of an embedded media, war became largely invisible. The public went shopping.

Whatever “syndrome” does coalesce around this disastrous mistake must develop an intelligence that transcends the machinations that brought it on. For this to happen, we must stare deeply into the heart of the war’s consequences.

Most commentary has focused on the two most glaring failures from the point of view of national interest: strategic and economic. Strategically, we “lost” in that the war failed to turn Iraq into a stable, subservient ally. Instead, as Jonathan Steele put it recently in the UK Sunday Observer, “thanks to Bush’s toppling of Saddam Hussein, Iran’s greatest enemy, Tehran’s influence in Iraq is much stronger today than is America’s.”

Economically, the Iraq adventure cost more than World War II, as David R. Francis pointed out recently in The Christian Science Monitor. It wasted more than $800 billion in direct appropriations. And when other costs such as ongoing medical treatment for injured vets are figured in, the money bleed grows staggering beyond all imagination — as much as $6 trillion, according to the well-publicized calculations of economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes. To realize that such money could have gone into education, health care and the rebuilding of our crumbling, bankrupt nation is to start to feel the weight and scope of Iraq Syndrome.

Then there’s the death toll. Officially, almost 5,000 U.S. troops have died, with another 32,000 wounded. These numbers hardly begin to measure the extent to which vets’ lives have been shattered; most of them return from extended duty with some form of PTSD.

But the numbers go wild, and Iraq Syndrome swells into a raging antiwar movement, when we consider the war’s consequences from the Iraqi point of view. We don’t do body counts, but some years ago the British medical journal Lancet calculated the civilian death toll at more than 650,000. Other estimates go beyond a million dead. In addition, 4.7 million Iraqis were displaced from their homes. And what about the “inspiring democracy” we’ve created? According to Transparency International, Iraq is virtually a failed state, ranking 175th globally in corruption, ahead of only Somalia, Myanmar and (ahem) Afghanistan, as Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis noted on Common Dreams.

Finally, Iraq Syndrome must include awareness of our toxic legacy, in particular the radioactive fallout resulting from exploding several thousand tons of depleted uranium munitions. Last year, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health published a study of the devastated city of Fallujah, pointing out that, among much else, it is experiencing higher rates of cancer, leukemia and infant mortality than Hiroshima and Nagasaki did in 1945. And birth defects abound: “Young women in Fallujah are terrified of having children,” a group of British and Iraqi doctors reported.

The failure of the Iraq war is the failure of all wars, past and future: national policy grounded the dehumanization of a people. A military-industrial economy requires such policy to continue, and so it does. Iraq Syndrome may be our best hope in thwarting the power of the war consensus, especially if it includes the awareness that what we do to others we eventually do to ourselves.

(Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is a nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.)

(c) 2011 Tribune Media Services, Inc.