‘I grabbed her little sister and put her in front of me. As the bullets began to fly, the blood sprayed from between her eyes, and then I laughed maniacally … I blew those little fuckkers to eternity …They should have known they were fucking with the Marines.’

And so goes the final verse of a song that the military is investigating, that which was cheered wildly and robustly by the Marine’s comrades… a veritable campfire song… pass the s’mores.

‘Hadji Girl’ uses hyperbole and the contrast of a sweet melody with a violently twisted ending to capture the frustrations of a counterinsurgency in which the goal is not to win but to hold the line until the struggling Iraqi forces can do so.

It is a war in which 20-year-olds are counseled to have a plan to ‘kill everyone in the room’ in case they have stumbled into an ambush, but told their mission is to ‘win hearts and minds.’

At the moment we have a sudden buoyancy with the Bush Administration, and a renewed belief that the War in Iraq can once again be churned into a winning political issue. And so we have a political stunt in the halls of Congress with a stupdifying resolution calling on Congress-critters to vote yea or no on whether “We will win the Global War On Terror”.

Zarqawi, the now deceased head of a franchised version of al Qaeda, and the most nihilistic of the groups fighting in Iraq, from the estimated seven or ten percent of foreign fighters that make up the whole of Iraq’s fighters — my best guess is if we remove ourselves from Iraq, these foreign fighters would be the first to be decapitated before the sects turn against each other… but I know nothing, really.

What I do know is that you can’t be singing songs about killing Iraqi children.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 15th, 2006 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.