"Baghdad Has Been Bled to Death"

[Ariadna: The voice of Joe Wilson, a WASP relic with lingering spasms of conscience and morality for which he and his wife were to be later punished, a career diplomat in the cloaca of the kosher State Department political appointees, is suddenly heard in Hillary Clinton’s confidential e-mails. The fact that he wrote all this to her, however, suggests he was a poor judge of character.]

Joe Wilson’s “Confidential Letter” to Hillary Clinton in 2010: Baghdad “Has Been Bled to Death”

By Zaid Jilani
The latest release of Hillary Clinton emails includes a sobering, confidential 2010 letter (excerpt below) from ex-Ambassador Joe Wilson [pictured left] in which the former diplomat reflects on a trip he had recently made to Iraq, the devastation caused by the war, and how waste and racism are obstructing the rebuilding process.

Wilson was an early critic of the Bush-Cheney administration’s lies in the run-up to the war in 2003. His wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame, was outed by White House staffers as part of an effort to discredit him.

The opening paragraph of his letter describes the society-wide destruction he witnessed upon traveling to the country:

My trip to Baghdad (September 6-11) has left me slack jawed. I have struggled to find the correct historical analogy to describe a vibrant, historically important Middle Eastern city being slowly bled to death. Berlin and Dresden in World War II were devastated but they and their populations were not subjected to seven years of occupation that included ethnic cleansing, segregation of people by religious identity, and untold violence perpetrated upon them by both military and private security services. I have not been to Gaza but suspect that the dehumanizing effects are somewhat similar. … The occupation and especially the walling off of neighborhoods have destroyed the very fabric of the urban society.

Wilson also wrote about the failed reconstruction efforts. …..

He then described the racism he saw on display at the store on the American military base at the Baghdad airport:

The soldiers I saw on the base are not infused with the commitment to help Iraqis help themselves. I scoured the PX for t-shirts for my kids to memorialize my trip but was hard put to find any that were not horribly bellicose or racist in nature. Shirts with mushroom clouds conveyed the Baghdad weather as 32,000 degrees and partly cloudy. Others referred to Arabs as camel jockeys and those were the least offensive. Were I the commander those shirts would not be on the shelves as they convey adolescent macho Pastor Terry Jones attitudes. The service people don’t see themselves there to bring peace, light, joy or even democracy to Iraq. They are there to kill the “camel jockeys.”

Six years later, Wilson tells The Intercept:

“I think that the extent to which things have changed since, it has been for the worse. Other than the fact that there are fewer American servicepeople and bases in the country, it strikes me that attitudes, if anything, are worse.”

Continues…