America Smells Like Rotten Fish

Timothy Reese, a colonel in the U.S. army, describes the Americans in Iraq as “smelling like rotten fish.” He quotes a proverb that says “Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” Except that the colonel’s words came after six years and four months, [the time that] the Americans have spent in the land between the two rivers. During the first months, they believed that they had achieved the greatest victory of the twenty-first century. This is what former U.S. President George W. Bush rushed to announce on May 1st, 2003, when he gathered a crowd of soldiers and officers and climbed aboard a warship to give the so-called “victory” announcement. He was applauded by perhaps over 90 percent of the American people and the U.S. military, since everyone had taken off on a flight of fancy and been carried far away in their intoxicating rapture, believing that the scent of roses wafted from their faces onto the land of Iraq.

It is not only the Americans who smell like rotten fish. For beneath their robes of putrescence sit all those who planned for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, as well as those Americans and Britons who cooperated in the invasion and the countries that facilitated it and conspired for the good of the invaders. Then comes the list of countries that are squatting on the sidelines and sent their troops to support the American occupiers so they could continue their heinous crime that over the past years has left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis either dead, missing or crippled.

The rottenness and its foul stench did not stop at Iraq’s borders, but spread to all towns and countries that participated in the occupation and destruction of Iraq. I can almost hear the questions that the soldiers and officers who returned, defeated at the hands of the Iraqi resistance, will be asked by their families. They will be mocked by these questions, ringing in their ears; asked about what they have achieved by their occupation of Iraq. Then will come the stammering replies of the defeated losers – but the words of the defeated are worth nothing.

You can find this rottenness now in every household where someone participated in Iraq’s occupation and in every household where someone helped to support the occupation and spied for its sake, starting with the cities and towns of Iraq, then passing through some neighboring countries, before reaching those countries that participated directly or indirectly in the crime of occupying Iraq.

However, everyone acknowledges that the enormous force that turned the tables on the invaders and those who aided them is growing brighter every day; even the invaders themselves were forced to describe the Americans as “smelling like rotten fish.”