Turtles Can Fly

The Iraq you won't see on FoxNews. An interesting, well made, quality film (for a change) that was filmed on location in Iraq, and was a joint project between the Iraqis and the Iranians. A person might imagine that a film like this might be created to bash some political entity or personage like Bush or Saddam Hussein, or an attack on Americans in general. But actually, the film is not really an attack on anything but the grim realities of Kurdish refugees, the grim realities of war, a lifestyle of abject poverty where obtaining weapons is easier than food or medical care. And in many ways it's a love story, albeit a tragic one. I myself have travelled over the world and seen situations just about as grim in Central America, India and other places, although not quite as violent. People everywhere, in other countries regardless of culture, language, political or religious differences are basically the same and want the same things in life: love, freedom to live life as they see fit, peace, enough financial resources to have decent housing, clothes, medical care and to feed their families, and of course, always maybe a friend or two to share it with, and if lucky a love that'll last a lifetime. But none of these things are easy for about 5/6ths of mankind, and life often becomes just brute survival.

Yet even children may dream, but it is hard to dream when ones nights are interrupted by weapon fire, the possibility of an invasion which to children must really seem "the end of the world", where land mines from previous conflicts lie scattered about here and there, and of course the shattered lives and shattered remains and missing limbs here and there never troubled much the men (and sometimes women) who sit in their plush chairs in their big offices and send men into battle to kill each other while their leaders play golf, or sip champaign at fund raising dinners. I've seen his all over the world. It's an ubiquitous problem. I've always wonder why people are so stupid to give our leaders such power over ourselves. Are we really safer the stronger our government, the more powerful our weapons of mass destruction? Frankly, the facts prove otherwise. I've seen the corpses of dead children, animals, old ladies floating down the Holy Ganghes river and the people don't even look at them and go about their daily lives as if nothing is unusual about this. And for them it is nothing unusual. I've seen children in Honduras, smart, bright searching through trash for anything that they might be able to sell, often to feed a younger sibling. Children raising children is the norm in the third world. We listen to our leaders who scare us to death with "threats" that must be constantly shown to the people to keep us constantly willing to attack anybody and everybody. Yet the media rarely shows the truth that in both the Afghani and Iraq wars, American troops, highly trained, well equipped, backed up by multimillion dollar state of the art fighter jets with enough firepower to start WWIII, and who are our enemies? The leaders, the warmongers, the radical clergy who seek war are never on the lines fighting. The American soldiers new to Iraq might be surprised to find that the majority of the "enemy" consist of 13, and 14 year old boys, semi-illiterate, poor, uneducated, and poorly equipped, whose lives if lost matter nothing to either side of the conflict. And even the non-combatants suffer,everybody suffers from these wars, both sides suffer, except of course the leaders who gain power, prestige and often cold cash from starting these wars. I have seen this, but the majority of Americans have never seen anything like this. If they travel abroad it's to Cancun, San Tropez, Bermuda, Paris, London or Madrid or Rome. Americans in general never go to places like Afghanistan, Iraq, rural India, Central America, Vietnam, Kampuchea unless they are members of the military.

But this movie is not about the Americans except tangentially, it is just a story about children, refugees, whose names we'll never know, whose deaths are never reported in the news.

But even though the movie doesn't say it, I will. Saddam Hussein presented about as real a threat to the security of the USA as a five year old girl would to Bruce Lee in a fist fight. It is a bit queer that when we fight them with state of the art weaponry like cluster bombs which are such fun, smart bombs which are not always that smart, bunker busters,and what not, we call ourselves "liberators", "freedom fighters" and when we invade somebody else's country and they fight back with anything they can get their hands on,we call them "terrorists".

Probably the majority of Americans would not see anything "unusual" here, anything a bit "odd". War is a crime, and like most crimes, a good detective knows that in the majority of cases a crime is easily solved by following the "money trail".

The first question is not: who are the enemy? what religion do they follow? what weapons do they possess? but rather WHO PROFITS FROM THIS WAR? Answer that one, and you'll know everything. We have a military-industrial complex that produces profits in the 100s of Billions and are just itching to try out the latest in war gadgetry, and prove which country has more ingenuity in destroying lives, liberty and property than others.

Saddam clobbered the Kurds because he could. We clobbered Saddam because we could. Look upon it with an impartial eye and one soon realizes that Hussein was a loud mouthed bully, and so are we.