Jonathan Schell: "The Exception Is the Rule"

[kevsand]

This was posted by bemildred in Editorials and Other Articles when it first came out a week ago, but it is so absolutely bone-chilling that I'm reposting it here in the hopes that y'all can pass it on to as wide an audience as possible...

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0616-25.htm

The Exception Is the Rule
by Jonathan Schell

This article will appear in the forthcoming issue of The Nation Magazine.

Sometimes the truth of a large, confusing historical enterprise can be glimpsed in a single news report. Such is the case in regard to the Iraq War, it seems to me, with the recent story in the Washington Post by Anthony Shadid and Steve Fainaru called "Building Iraq's Army: Mission Improbable." Shadid and Fainaru did something that is rarely done: spend several days with a unit of Iraq's new, American-trained forces. (The typical treatment of the topic consists of a few interviews with American officers in the Green Zone in Baghdad, leading to some estimation of how long it will take to complete the job.) The Post story starts with the lyrics of a song the soldiers of the unit, called Charlie Company, were singing out of earshot of their American overseers. It was a ballad to Saddam Hussein, and it ran:

We have lived in humiliation since you left
We had hoped to spend our life with you

The American press often discusses the political makeup of the insurgency, but no one until now has suggested that some of the very forces being trained by the United States might be longing for the return of Saddam. To the extent that this is the case -- or that these forces are otherwise opposed to the occupation -- the United States, far from improving "security," is now training the future resistance to itself.

Here is the link to the original WP story Schell references:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/09/AR2005060902245.html