"The Price Has Been Worth It"

It's an ugly "joke" but it was an ugly war, too.

Big, strong kid from the Tennessee hills decides to seek his fortune in Alaska.  Asks advice from old-timers in the Frontier Saloon.  "Boy," he's told, "you ain't ready fer Alaska till you've screwed a Eskimo and shot a grizzly."  Youngster leaves.  A few weeks later he staggers into the saloon, gashed and bleeding, his clothes in tatters and a dead Eskimo over his shoulder.  "Shooting the Eskimo was the easy part," he says.  "The bear was somethin' else.  But it was worth it."

Enter Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and the latest "it was worth it" regarding the Iraq war. “I think the price has been worth it," he said, after a one-day visit, "to establish a stable government in a very important region of the world.”

Stable?  What is this guy smoking?

But even if the post-America Iraqi government were stable, would that really justify the cost not just in dollars, but in Iraqi and American lives and disability?  Only if you accept the racist "dead Eskimo" mentality as the acceptable American norm: that collateral damage in dead civilians is too insignificant to bother counting.

American troops not only died there, unnecessarily; they also committed atrocities there.  War crimes. 

But "it was worth it."

Only to the shameless profiteers who sucked enormous fortunes out of the trillions of American dollars wasted on this war whose "end" we declared last week.

Or to the blood-lusting ignoramuses who think there is "honor" in war.

Or to the Machiavellian schemers who see endless war as America's manifest destiny to force "democracy" on nations we deem incapable of managing their own affairs.

"The price has been worth it."

Has it?  The trillions of dollars?  The innocent lives lost?

What about the forfeiture of our Bill of Rights at home?  What about the utter demise of American democracy?    What about the decimation of our economy, the distortion of our standards of justice, the loss of our dignity as a nation, of decency as a people?

"The price has been worth it."

Go fuck a grizzly bear, Leon.