Hit Me Again and Again

When considering the premise of reparation being paid for the Iraq War it would be natural to assume that the party to whom such payments would be made would be the Iraqi civilian population, the ordinary people who suffered the brunt of the devastation from the fighting.

Fought on the false pretense of capturing Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the war resulted in massive indiscriminate suffering for Iraqi civilians which continues to this day. Estimates of the number of dead and wounded range from the hundreds of thousands into the millions, and additional millions of refugees remain been forcibly separated from their homes, livelihoods and families.

Billions of dollars in reparations are indeed being paid for the Iraq War, but not to Iraqis who lost loved ones or property as a result of the conflict, and who, despite their nation’s oil wealth, are still suffering the effects of an utterly destroyed economy. "Reparations payments" are being made by Iraq to Americans and others for the suffering which those parties experienced as a result of the past two decades of conflict with Iraq.
~ from Iraq Foots the Bill for Its Own Destruction by Murtaza Hussain ~

It should go without saying that this whole story highlights a great injustice on the Iraqi people, but, sad to say, it's par for the course. I'm sure, at some point, the Libyan people will find themselves in the same boat.

But we don't have to look at other nations to see this same strategy at play. Here, in our own country, the national economy is built upon the premise of the poor and middle class paying reparations to Corporate America and Wall Street for running it into the ground. By providing the rich with lavish tax cuts, WE put money in THEIR pockets. When our leaders rip to shreds what is left of the social safety net, this again benefits only the smallest sliver of the population.

It is as if we are being forced by our government to be abused and, when we continue to send the same kind of yo-yos to Washington to represent our needs, it's like we're saying, "Hit me again and again."

The chief difference between the American and the Iraqi people is that the latter have no choice. They have no say so in how much they get slapped around.