April 21, 2004, Gee... A Few More Days Like This, and Maybe Saddam Won't Seem So Bad...
I'm not kidding. If I had the power to do it, I would see to it that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and alas, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Condoleezza Rice and anyone else who advanced the official lies that got us into this, stood trial for crimes against humanity for the horror that they have needlessly unleashed on the Iraqi people, such as today's horrifying blasts in Basra that killed at least 68, including well over a dozen children on school buses. I'll interrupt your Michael Jackson indictment and Kobe Bryant exclusion of victim medical condition discussion to tell you that I find it absolutely hilarious (though in no sense in a laughing kind of way) that this occurs on the very same day that the American-puppet "Iraqi Governing Council" purports to set up a tribunal to try Saddam Hussein on the very same day. (That'll go over well.) And much as the Sauds are responsible for the 9-11 atrocities, I mourn the senseless loss of at least 10 lives in bombings in Riyadh, in apparent Al qaeda related suicide bombings in the Saudi capital.
If we can't provide the most basic security function for people whose lives we have disrupted by invading and occupying their country, stealing their national wealth, and insisting that they have a "free and democratic future", as long as it involves being an American vassal state, is it any wonder that they hate us and are forming more and more persistent and effective resistance? Honestly, there are times when I view the Iraqi resistance to the American occupation as almost a sign of national health. Unlike, say, the Yugoslavs, who removed Milosevic on their own, or the Romanians, who removed the Ceauciescus, or even the Russians, who brought down the Soviet system with their own hands, the Iraqis have been "liberated" by foreign invaders, and have been permitted exactly nothing by way of national pride at participating in their own "liberation".
We have "helped" the Iraqi people by humiliating them once again-- as our soldiers do inadvertently, and I suspect as our mercenaries and other "contract workers" do quite intentionally.
What have we brought upon the Iraqi people? We have painted some of their school houses? What? We have killed and maimed them by the tens of thousands, we are stealing their oil (well, not exactly, since it will take 5-10 years to get the infrastructure up to the point it CAN be stolen, seeing as we have allowed that infrastructure to be sabotaged), we have opened the borders to terrorists, many roads are 100% lawless, even for armed convoys-- we have brought the Iraqis hell on Earth.
And there is no excuse for any of this. The WMDs remain a sick little joke, the terrorist ties have long since been de-bunked, and "liberating the Iraqi people" would seem to be the sickest joke of all. This wasn't our business. We have wasted over a year, the lives of hundreds of our bravest citizens, hundreds of billions of dollars, all of our international good will, and for what? OBL is not only still out there, he is laughing at us.
And, given that polls show that the President is a strong favorite for reelection, with damned good reason. I only hope the polls are the result of a biased, and bought media, and we are still a democracy, where being the worst fuck-up ever to hold the office, as well as a war criminal, are actually reasons to be voted out of office, even against a not particularly attractive tax and spend liberal.
Comments
Couldn't agree more completely, except the part about the polls. Don't panic about the polls. Center for American Progress put up an interesting poll analysis yesterday, which should comfort you. The Admin's fundamentals are sinking steadily and a distinct majority of voters are also indicating that they intend to vote for the Democratic candidate for Congress next fall. Events in Iraq are genuinely horrifying, but the election situation is not. Bush really got very little for his huge expenditure on media ($50 million in about a month! --similar to the entire media budget for recent presidential campaigns), and Kerry's ads have barely begun to air. Patience.
And there's definitely going to be some slippage in Bush support among a couple of interesting constituencies: military personnel and their families, Howard Stern listeners . . . .
Even college students have turned around and started registering and polling Democratic, where the Republicans for years had been getting a majority of new voters.
Sen. McCain said on TV this morning--I saw and heard it myself--"Somebody is going to have to teach us a lesson and I hope it will be the voters in the fall." Um, wasn't that a suggestion that people toss out the Republican Congress? He's an odd man, isn't he?
Posted by mamayo at April 22, 2004 10:59 AM
Couldn't agree more completely, except the part about the polls. Don't panic about the polls. Center for American Progress put up an interesting poll analysis yesterday, which should comfort you. The Admin's fundamentals are sinking steadily and a distinct majority of voters are also indicating that they intend to vote for the Democratic candidate for Congress next fall. Events in Iraq are genuinely horrifying, but the election situation is not. Bush really got very little for his huge expenditure on media ($50 million in about a month! --similar to the entire media budget for recent presidential campaigns), and Kerry's ads have barely begun to air. Patience.
And there's definitely going to be some slippage in Bush support among a couple of interesting constituencies: military personnel and their families, Howard Stern listeners . . . .
Even college students have turned around and started registering and polling Democratic, where the Republicans for years had been getting a majority of new voters.
Sen. McCain said on TV this morning--I saw and heard it myself--"Somebody is going to have to teach us a lesson and I hope it will be the voters in the fall." Um, wasn't that a suggestion that people toss out the Republican Congress? He's an odd man, isn't he?
Posted by mamayo at April 22, 2004 10:59 AM
I'm sorry for the double post--error message appeared to eat it up the first time.
Posted by mamayo at April 22, 2004 11:00 AM
I sure picked a good time for a slump, huh? With what's going on in Iraq, who notices?
And the even better news is that this thing in Iraq could last the whole season!!!
Posted by A-Rod at April 22, 2004 04:46 PM
A-Rod,
I can't believe that you can find humor in what's happening in Iraq. It just shows how shallow you Yankees players are. You call Red Sox series war-you should have to go into the real thing. By the way, can you get me Jeter's autograph?
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Well, thank you El Latin for your contribution to Poetry on Fridays, observed faithfully on my own blog but seldom imposed (by me at least) on other bloggers.
Hang tight, man. This is going to be a long season. Pace yourself. There's a lot of us in this lifeboat that don't think Capt. Bligh is going to be in charge much longer. (Did I just mix my metaphors again? Damn, I hate when I do that.)
Posted by Houston at April 23, 2004 10:04 PM
Captain Bligh was competent, dammit (the mutiny was, by and large, not his fault). It's Captain Queeg you're thinking of.
As for Kerry, the New Republic reports that his bizarre passivity is actually a deliberately calculated "rope-a-dope" move -- they've decided to work on the new campaign strategy of letting Bush burn up his money advantage early without replying to him, and then start counterpunching in early summer. They may or may not know what they're talking about, but at least they aren't doing this out of absolute idiocy (and it is a fact that, in every poll I've seen so far, all that ad spending has given Bush only 2 or 3 percent more of the vote while reducing his remaining funding to pretty much the same level Kerry will have from now on).
However, Kerry's continuing refusal to state an Iraq strategy in more than the nebulous terms of his Washington Post op-ed is more serious -- it indicates that he really may be intellectually vacuous on the most important political issue of them all, namely how to carry out the global war against Megaterrorism properly. It galls me to agree with Charles Krauthammer, but he's entirely correct in pointing out that Kerry's only recommendations so far for Iraq -- just hope that NATO will give us more troops and the UN will actually give us effective help with civilian administration and reconstruction -- is an exercise in deus ex machina thinking. What the hell do we do in the (very likely) chance that they don't come to our aid? Not a peep so far from John.
Nor do I see anything yet that gives me confidence that he won't develop his own particular disastrous Moby Dick obsession -- namely, chasing the increasingly irrelevant leadership of Al Qaida around and around Afghanistan while Iran, Pakistan and North Korea continue to manufacture Bombs and stateless Moslem terrorism continues to break up into a swarm of individual groups who have no connection with Al Qaida but are still highly competent at building suitcase bombs and hijacking large planes. (Richard Clarke's apparent belief that destroying the "leadership" of Al Qaida will destroy Moslem terrorism -- as though it was a real-life version of SPECTRE -- is an extremely serious flaw in his own thinking.)
For an infinitely more useful and detailed program to pull as many of our chestnuts out of the fire in Iraq as we possibly can at this point, see Peter W. Galbraith's superb piece in the NY Review of Books ( www.nybooks.com/articles/17103 ) -- the single best piece on Iraq I've ever read anywhere. Galbraith for Seretary of State! (And if Kerry -- as he keeps saying -- really wants a running mate with "national security experience", why doesn't he throw a real chill into the Bushites by naming Rand Beers? There's nothing in the Constitution that says the Veep can't double as an NSA -- it's been proposed previously that Colin Powell could serve as both Veep and Secretary of State -- and I would dearly love to see the TV debate between Beers and Cheney.)
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