What is wrong with America

I first heard about Riverbend's Baghdad Burning from Billmon here. Here we have driftglass pointing us to her again. Heart heavy stuff...

Riverbend has this up (h/t to Mia Culpa)

The Rape of Sabrine:

It takes a lot to get the energy and resolution to blog lately. I guess it’s mainly because just thinking about the state of Iraq leaves me drained and depressed. But I had to write tonight.

As I write this, Oprah is on Channel 4 (one of the MBC channels we get on Nilesat), showing Americans how to get out of debt. Her guest speaker is telling a studio full of American women who seem to have over-shopped that they could probably do with fewer designer products. As they talk about increasing incomes and fortunes, Sabrine Al-Janabi, a young Iraqi woman, is on Al Jazeera telling how Iraqi security forces abducted her from her home and raped her. You can only see her eyes, her voice is hoarse and it keeps breaking as she speaks. In the end she tells the reporter that she can’t talk about it anymore and she covers her eyes with shame.

She might just be the bravest Iraqi woman ever. Everyone knows American forces and Iraqi security forces are raping women (and men), but this is possibly the first woman who publicly comes out and tells about it using her actual name. Hearing her tell her story physically makes my heart ache. Some people will call her a liar. Others (including pro-war Iraqis) will call her a prostitute- shame on you in advance.
…

And yet, as the situation continues to deteriorate both for Iraqis inside and outside of Iraq, and for Americans inside Iraq, Americans in America are still debating on the state of the war and occupation- are they winning or losing? Is it better or worse.

Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts: It’s worse. It’s over. You lost. You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq’s first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile.

Go read the whole thing, but be forewarned: it is utterly heartbreaking.

To it I have nothing to add but this:

If you read what Riverbend wrote and your reaction is something like “Merciful Christ. How will we ever be forgiven for what we have done to that country? How will we atone? And how can we still be debating this? How can anyone with a sliver of conscience still be invoking God and Homeland, Freedom and Faith, 9/11 and 'Fight Them Over There' to keep us trapped in this hell we sired?” you’re a Liberal.

If you read it, get halfway through, and your brain locks down and starts desperately scurrying around like a rat in a dumpster fire, looking for a way to rationalize it, to excuse it, to pick at its methodology…

Looking for a “Yeah, but…” to absolve you for having sown this wind and reaped this whirlwind…

Looking for today’s Magic Coward Words from Fox High Command that will let you complete the sentence “But the Democrats…” in some way that permits you to wriggle out from under your complicity in the Iraq Disaster…

Looking for some rebuttal, no matter how slight – maybe some anonymous email from somebody’s second cousin who has a friend, who knows a guy, whose half-sister is married to a guy, who went to high school with this dude who served in Iraq and says things aren’t really that bad – that will let you off the hook…

Or if you just sneer, say “Fuckin’ raghead bitch prolly had it comin’” and go about your business unmoved…

…then you are a Conservative.

And if you find that you are a Conservative, then you can quit bothering to hunt for phantom enemies within, like the Liberal Press and the Dirty Hippies, because you – personally and specifically -- are the enemy.

You – personally and specifically -- are what is wrong with America.