I have scoured all the data, factored in the countless bombings and roadside detonations (and there are, seemingly, millions); I have made pie charts and bar graphs, plotted points of interest on special war paper, geo-located all the various deadly flashpoints using Google Earth, all while making 10,000 little explosion sounds with my mouth, just like George Bush used to do in the bathtub when Uncle Dick talked about "liberating" the Middle East.
I have come to some important conclusions. First off, as mentioned just about everywhere -- including by the president himself -- talk of these documents "putting lives at risk," is complete and utter BS, and is merely meant to discourage and intimidate anyone from doing anything like this ever again, because it's all been just hugely embarrassing and humiliating to U.S. intelligence, sort of like Tiger Woods' pervy text messages appearing on the front page of USA Today. They hate that.
War is hell. Have you heard that before? Of course you have. Do you know what it means? From what I can tell from the WikiLeaks scandal, here is what it does not mean: It does not mean war is some sort of rugged Herculean manly uberpatriotic exercise in glorious freedom, justice, truth, that just might also, whoops, get a little bloody. It does not quite mean a noble force for good and democracy. It might have meant that once, long ago, for a shining moment, maybe, on the back of a coin somewhere. It hasn't meant anything near that for 1,000 years. Capitalism saw to that.
It's sort of like evil. We love to imagine evil to be this towering, fanged menace, this spectacular fiend, a creepy and gruesome beast borne of a thousand horror movies. The truth is at once far less interesting, and yet far more terrifying. Because evil is more like Dick Cheney's tiny sneer, the religious nutball's weakest synapse, the wheezing death of the soul.
[...] The truth is, we will all be dead before we know the full costs of these wars. A generation or two will have to pass before we can get them in scale and perspective, and even then, like so many before them, they still won't make any goddamn sense.
They don't have to make sense as long as they make money.
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