'Above All, Do No Harm': The War in Iraq and Dissent

The ancients, to divine the course of events to come, sacrificed chickens and sheep. Slicing open the creatures' viscera, seers sought to read the future in entrails still trembling with recent life. [1]

Twenty-first century America, by contrast, has sought to make its own future to order by tearing open a faraway country and laying bare that hapless land's innermost workings. But what Americans now see as they stare horrified into the jagged wound is not the trace of future events. Instead, in the flattened cityscapes, the dispossession of civilian populations, the ever-mounting deaths, the steady diet of lies and deceptions from its leaders, the degradation of its public discourse, and the reality of systematic torture as national policy, a sobered America now confronts its own reflection.