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November 12, 2004
Iraq Thread
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To those on the Right, slothrop, the object of alienation, of morbid fascination and popular villification, is the far Left. Not the Iraqis. Not Arabs or Muslims generally. Not dark-skinned people. But rather those who inhabit the further reaches of the Democratic Party.
Posted by: Pat | Nov 16 2004 0:35 utc | 101
BTW, reliable sources suggest that the famous “spitting on vets” incident was about as real as the Kuwaiti Incubator Babies (courtesy of Hill and Knowlton) story. review of book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam. The Vet Spit Story may be a genuine urban legend rather than a crafted (and crafty) bit of professional meme warfare, but substantiating evidence for it there appears to be none.
I find it interesting that Pat attempts to demonise the entire US anti war movement by bringing up alleged incidents that as far as investigation can determine, never happened, while stolidly refusing to discuss the implications of war crimes, GC violations, torture and casual brutality by US troops that are, by contrast, fairly well documented. The tactic to my ear sounds identical to that which prevailed during the election — let us avoid all discussion of the morality and purpose of this present war, by focussing on the mythology of a war from 40 years ago. Is this tactic printed up, with full instructions and examples of application, in a three ring binder or something?
Dogs eating bodies in the streets of Falluja
Posted by: Sic transit gloria USA | Nov 16 2004 0:45 utc | 103
pat
well let mùe answer thos questions for you. your military leadership is both decadent & corrupt. your much vaunted military institutions have created mediocre & hollow men. there are no leaders? no strategists there. you armed forces are what they are armed force. nothing more
a pure & utter brutality used consistently against those who have less than nothing
your posturing as a libertarian thinker is exactly that – a neat & convenient posture – to hide both a politcal & cultural arrogance that will not call out its name honestly
i have seen the enemy somewhere to the north of hue pat & unlike you i saw ordinary men in extraordinary situations. i wanted their defeat but i did not revel nor ignore their deaths
as you do,, consistently, what the fuck do you think is happening in iraq or afghanistan for that matter. you are murdering people. you can call that a war if that please you. if that satisfies your randian fantasies of the superman
you will not as denander says even make the most elementary decency of speaking of the deaths your armies have caused. no your sacred 54,000 – who in fact you don’t really care about either – they are a convenient loss for the libertarian cause. they are juust poor people anyway
& if leadership exists in your corrupt army it comes from men from those classes who see necessity in a very different way – to the soft work of interrogating east germans about questions that had no meaning at all – to you or to them
i’ll name drop as you say i’m so expert in – i know & met your old enemy markus wolf – a decent man – that they say john le carré based karla on – there is moire decency in this one man – than in alll the think tanks you shit out into the world with their little journals of no consequence except those with their little diplomas from georgetown that allows them to reify the massacring of people under the title of international relations
no, the 2,000,000 vietnames mean nothing to you at all. nor the indonesians or the filipinos or the chileans or the hondurans or the argentinians or the nicaraguans – no they do not matter to you at all
the left, you are joking – you’re really joking – i cannot believe you are serious in any real sense. there is no left in iraq – whatever is left of them are being exterminated by a phoenix programme of your armies or are being executed by fundamentalists.
there is no left there – only humanity
ô you are ridiculous – the left here – i think i have been here & billmons the same time as you & i think thos who write here would cover the waterfront – i think about the only thing that unifies us is the opposition to this immoral & unjust war
yes we might consitute a community of a kind & i have accepted, i think with good grace your insults & your venality – largely in part because i could understand alabama’s point about a pool of information needing to come from many splintered sources buut i do not possess the gentility of alabama – in the last month yes i sense a revulsion at best & at worst a sense of play with the community that is perverse in the worst sense of that word
intelligence operatives an oxymoron if i ever knew one
still still
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 16 2004 1:00 utc | 104
pat:
I agree. The left, however arbitrarily signified, is the “jew” perhaps now marked for extinction by some (Ann Coulter). I don’t doubt it.
I think the link you make between the motive of war and the excoriation of ‘librals’ is a stretch. The war is mostly geopolitical desperation of the ’empire.’ But, I don’t doubt that a byproduct of this long event will be to test the fealties of leftists to this unfolding genocide.
In any case, opposition to the war is imperative no matter the consequences, right pat?
Posted by: slothrop | Nov 16 2004 1:02 utc | 105
i neither posess the gentility of alambama, the wisdom & care of deanander or the irony of slothrop but i can tell you this for nothing
you are like foxnews – while others here source their material very carefully – you throw out lines like walter winchell cruelly did in some down at heel bar when he was delighting in the destruction of the ‘other’
i wouldn’t mind – i’ve seen my enemy in graver situations than this but what i am most angry about is your absence of honesty
still steel
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 16 2004 1:07 utc | 106
DeAndander
I think Pat is on to something here:
To those on the Right, slothrop, the object of alienation, of morbid fascination and popular villification, is the far Left. Not the Iraqis. Not Arabs or Muslims generally. Not dark-skinned people. But rather those that inhabit the further reaches of the Democratic party.
So the morbid facination and popular villification no doubt is quite adept at the task of popular (urban)myth making like the “spitting on returning vets” thing, and more recently the whole “swift boat veterans” yarn — only serves to illustrate how the right, even with political domination, can’t resist “cracking the whip over the heads” of any dissension, like the red states of the (old) South, and the red states of now — reason and compromise are sacrificed on the alter of rightiousness.
Posted by: anna missed | Nov 16 2004 1:19 utc | 107
….He said one Marine noticed one of the prisoners was still breathing.
A Marine can be heard saying on the pool footage provided to Reuters Television: “He’s f***ing faking he’s dead. He faking he’s f***ing dead.”
“The Marine then raises his rifle and fires into the man’s head. The pictures are too graphic for us to broadcast,” Sites said. No images of the shooting were shown in the footage provided to Reuters. ….
U.S. military probes shooting of wounded, unarmed Iraqi in Falluja
Posted by: Sic transit gloria USA | Nov 16 2004 1:24 utc | 108
rgiap:
chill.
w.s. merwin:
This way the dust, that way the dust.
I listen to both sides
But I keep right on.
Posted by: slothrop | Nov 16 2004 1:28 utc | 109
Pat: The anti-war (or anti-Bushitlerwar) industry is a sickening and painful spectacle, with enough fevered propaganda, vented spleen, and dark, insensible rumination to make the pages of World Net Daily.
Eh??? I’d feel a lot less oogie about what you’ve said here if you claimed it as your thoughts and feelings rather than as some sort of fact, or something that all of us “should” know and feel, if we were only “correct-thinking” as you are.
I-Statements, Pat… I think. I feel. I believe. I want. Never out of fashion I think, just as abhoring war and killing to my mind is never out of fashion.
Posted by: Kate_Storm | Nov 16 2004 1:30 utc | 110
“évidemment une chance est possible: que le brutalité, par son excès même, se détruise, ou plutôt, non qu’elle change de fin- – par définition elle n’en a pas – mais en arrive à s’éffacer, à s’anéantir à long terme, devant la violence. la colonisation du tiers-monde ne fut qu’une série de brutalités,très nombreuses et très longues, sans autre but que celui, plutôt atrophié, de servir la stratégie des pays colonialistes et l’enrichissement des sociétés d’investissements aux colonies
il en résulta donc une misère, un désespoir qui ne pouvaient que nourrir une violence libératrice”
jean genet violence et brutalité p 201 gallimard paris 1991
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 16 2004 1:35 utc | 111
Pat, of course it is. Why did you think I posted a link to Mark Ames “solution for right-wing America” in some of these recent threads?
Frankly, I don’t care at all if it’s counter-productive with “moderate” Americans to state openly that their army is just a bunch of stormtroopers; I mean, these are the people who just enabled Bush and condemned nearly half their people to worldwide opprobrium and global loathing, these are the people who think it’s just fine to murder in cold-blood ambulance-drivers, kids, elders and women. And it’s fine from you to acknowledge that the people the wingnuts really want to pour into ovens aren’t Muslims but the US “liberals”, or what’s left of them; though this probably includes pretty everyone who is at the centre-left and centre.
Now, if someone would care to explain what someone who is part of the Enemy, has openly acknowledged voting for Bush, and is taunting us since weeks about Bush’s fascistoid theft of the elections, someone who may well be a plant or some kind of ricidulous time-wasting psy-op/cointelpro, is doing here in the Moon, I’d like to know it, because I didn’t sign to post in LGF.
Well, since Pat seems to like that kind of things, let me state here that I really wish for all the mofos who took part in the recent Fallujah war crime to end up in one of Zarqawi’s beheading vids. They don’t deserve more. If they didn’t want to do it, they could go into mutiny, desert, or frag their officers.
Posted by: Clueless Joe | Nov 16 2004 1:35 utc | 112
And what greater anger to vent
Than to that of my brother
Who is not complicit in my crime
Against an enemy only I can see.
Posted by: anna missed | Nov 16 2004 1:37 utc | 113
ainsi sommes-nous depuis nos débuts,
alors, qui parmi nous pourra fuir,
et par quelle porte?
les maisons sont clôturées
les ruelles s’entrelacent,
et chacun cherche dans une livre
une mystérieuse nouvelle
pour une fois, arrêtons-nous à nous-mêmes
au fond de nous, peut-être retrouverons-nous
ce que nous avons perdu
puis oublié dans les affres du supplice
sami mahdi (1940 -? falloja, irak) le poème arab moderne
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 16 2004 1:46 utc | 115
@ slothrop
i am not an evangilical – i am not here to convince you or anyone else – i understood we were communicating – multiplicitouslly – my own position is so naked i don’t need to hit you over the head with it
it is my gift & perhaps my tragedy – i do not want it to be yours
i make a simple demand for honesty from pat not the sneering solioquies she wants to enunciate here & elsewhere
still steel
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 16 2004 1:50 utc | 116
How fascinating. So the invasion, occupation, illegal alteration of the Iraqi constitution and laws to permit American ownership and control over key parts of Iraq’s economy and resources and, via alteration to patent laws, submit Iraq’s farmers to a lifetime of dependence upon US suppliers and perpetually levy ‘tribute’ from the farmers to same, the torture, the cluster bombing of residential areas, the violations of Iraqi rights and the gross interference in Iraqi self-determination manifested in a fake ‘political process’ and rigged elections, the thousands of house raids, desecrations of mosques, violations of female privacy and dignity, wholesale slaughter of men, women and children and the unrelenting promise of years more of the same, the war crimes perpetrated against innocent civilians denied water, food, medicines and humanitarian aid, the war crime of seizing a hospital and bombing hospitals and clinics to deny medical treatment, the designation of defenceless civilians as ‘unarmed sleeper cells’, the better to justify their summary execution, the war crime of refusing to allow terrified civilians to leave an area of carnage, shooting those who try and sending the remainder back into the maelstrom to face death and injury, the thousands of brutal, racist and despicable acts of aggression being directed against the Iraqi people each passing day in order to facilitate the imposition of a Quisling American-appointed regime, the appointment to high-office of American-picked stooges to oversee essential aspects of Iraq’s economic, social and political development, the looting of Iraq’s oil revenues to make ‘compensation payments’ to US companies based upon bogus and spurious claims, the assassination squads roaming Iraq and killing opponents of America’s ‘grand design’, the ongoing construction of ‘permanent US military bases’, the harassment, brutalizing and incarceration of opponents to the American ‘grand design’, as well as the incarceration of thousands of others, many for no offence other than to have been caught up in US military ‘sweeps’, the unreported, off-camera executions of Iraqis that occur on a daily basis and the daily airstrikes upon Iraqi cities, towns, villages and farmsteads, the ripping apart of Iraq’s social fabric, the beggaring of its people, the fomenting of ethnic conflict by using Kurdish militiamen to slaughter Iraqis elsewhere, the damage to and continuing destruction of Iraq’s cultural heritage, a thing that is the legacy of all of mankind – there is no problem here with these acts in and of themselves?
It would appear that just as the thousands of gallons of Iraqi blood that soaks the land each week was seamlessly absorbed and suborned into US electoral discourse as ‘a point’ that the chief problem for some commenters here now seems to be the nature and behavior of those who oppose the carnage for grubby domestic political purposes? It is not the horror that is being inflicted on Iraq that is wrong but the social strata, social sub-culture, political affiliations, methods and motives of those who would speak out against it?
Please correct me if I am wrong. Please tell me that it is my perspective that is disgusting, inhuman and insane. If you cannot do that then you are supremely qualified to take each word – disgusting, inhuman and insane – and affix them to yourselves for the rest of your natural lives.
Posted by: Sic transit gloria USA | Nov 16 2004 1:52 utc | 117
Honestly, and far be it for me to accuse anyone of dilatory and vague prose, I don’t know where pat’s at; though, I’ll keep listening.
Posted by: slothrop | Nov 16 2004 1:54 utc | 118
you have sd what i would liek to have said in my clumsy way. word for word
still steel
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 16 2004 2:03 utc | 119
slothrop, I do not mean to suggest that the Powers That Be of the Right are hatching a plan to poison the nation’s supply of Tofurky and organic red lentils – only that for the vast majority in the Republican party, race, gender, and ethnicity are meaningless. Even religious affiliation counts for little or nothing. You are despised, reviled, and deeply resented because of your politics, or because of the political culture to which you belong. And, too, because of the sneering conceit, blithe contempt, and frank hatred to which they themselves are subject and of which they are always, keenly aware.
Posted by: Pat | Nov 16 2004 2:04 utc | 120
sic transit gloria usa
you have sd what i would liek to have said in my clumsy way. word for word
& i thank you fore the work on the links – something i am congenitally incapable of doing
thank you
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 16 2004 2:05 utc | 121
Sic transit gets the Grand Prix du Run-On Sentence, forever eliminating me from the running. I take off my cap in awed respect. A tour de force, STGUSA. And as it happens I agree with the content, as well.
it is clear pat that you will not – that you cannot take responsibility for your thoughts – they are no more no less than the refined bedside table talk of an o’reilly or an o’rourke – their & your demonisation self satisfying & without a doubt
unlike you, i honour my doubt
but as you once sd – discussion closed
we all have our scheherezade to tell one day or another
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 16 2004 2:10 utc | 123
deanander
i am conscious here that sometimes i do not have your care or the precision of an sic transit gloria or an alabama or anna missed – all who bring great gifts here
mine are the simple translations of the horror that i feel as our situation as a world worsens on the hour every hour
still steel
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 16 2004 2:14 utc | 124
Alright, I’ll take the bait.
Low-class republicans are my people. They hate mexicans, homosexuals, women, etc. Incalculable chauvanism. My people cannot argue theory. Not because they’re dumb, but because they prefer they’re manichean worldviews sustained by religion. Yeah, they hate intellectuals.
I love my people and in no way desire their harm by ‘zarqawi.’
These republicans you speak of, pat, seem to be establishment, ‘sophisticated conservatives.’ I don’t know them, because my mileau is low-class. Mills’ chapter in Power Elite talks about these people whose prophet is Machiavelli.
Just trying to figure out what you’re doing, pat.
Posted by: slothrop | Nov 16 2004 2:25 utc | 125
rgiap: you the man.
you wrote the greatest sentence: “I’m reading benjamin and listening to steve earle…”
Posted by: slothrop | Nov 16 2004 2:28 utc | 126
“And it’s fine from you to acknowledge that the people the wingnuts really want to pour into ovens aren’t Muslims but the US ‘liberals’, or what’s left of them; though this probably includes pretty everyone who is at the centre-left and centre.”
“I really wish for all the mofos who took part in the recent Fallujah war crime to end up in one of Zarqawi’s beheading vids.”
Clueless, I think you are mad. I don’t know how else to put it, but I can add to it. I think you are also vile.
Who here agrees with Clueless? Why not have a show of hands? Who earnestly believes that the present administration is carrying out or intends to carry out a systematic campaign of extermination of the Muslim “Untermenschen”?
Who here further agrees that every soldier, Airman, or Marine who took part in the Fallujah operation (or OIF generally) deserves literal condemnation – a pronouncement of death in the interest of justice?
Posted by: Pat | Nov 16 2004 2:35 utc | 127
clueless joe’s remarks are vile, yes.
I want to bring my people home, now!
Is this genocide? yes. not in a nazi way exactly. this is difficult to define as much as fascism is an inadequate definition of the consolidation here of power. We’ll now kill whoever unhappily stands on ‘our’ oil. In this sense, pat, your notion of the abstract ‘other’ is now refined. The ‘other’ is whoever desires to opt out of the domination of global capitalism.
fucking wheat shot drinking liberals.
Posted by: slothrop | Nov 16 2004 2:54 utc | 128
“…even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still, you would never escape from us. What happens to you hear is forever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back . Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze new empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.” . . .
. . . “The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.” He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: “How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?”
Winston thought. “By making him suffer,” he said.
“Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in caring human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love and justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy — everything.
I think that those who are seeking power for its own sake will kill whatever and whomever does not finally submit. I think that those who appear not to understand this are either in deep denial or deep agreement with the oppressors … this may be just a defense, of this I am not sure … psychic identification with those in power may keep some people alive longer.
Finally, I don’t wish for the death of anyone, ever.
Posted by: Kate_Storm | Nov 16 2004 2:58 utc | 129
Falluja in ruins
Doctor is haunted by siege of Falluja
Mosul revolt spreads to Tal Afar
Posted by: Sic transit gloria USA | Nov 16 2004 3:22 utc | 130
it is easy dor pat to respond to clueless joe’s anger but pat will not breathe noe word about sictranst gloria post 08:52
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 16 2004 3:26 utc | 131
rgiap:
I respect pat’s posts. I hope s/he continues to share her thoughts.
This war will drive us crazy. How did people suffer 10 years of vietnam?
Posted by: slothrop | Nov 16 2004 3:31 utc | 132
Sic Transit- I have avoided this thread because it is so painful and I am helpless to stop what is happening.
A man set himself on fire in front of the White House today.
He will be forgotten tomorrow. He was a crazy. Maybe he was a prophet for those who have ears to hear. But Thanksgiving Holiday is upon us, and the day after is the biggest shopping day of the year.
Americans will eat too much and shop too much and be horrified and outraged if American soldiers are harmed in the battles breaking out across Iraq.
The knowledge of the reality of America and Iraq makes me understand why people disassociate when their minds cannot tolerate their experience.
Pat- while I have no doubt that the extreme right hates the left (and not just the extreme left), I think they have ample capacity to hate many others, as well…like the French, anyone living in Iraq who does not bow to America’s will, anyone who would keep oil from their local gas pump, (in fact, I heard a comic from Texas on TV before the invasion of Iraq who had them rolling with his raging screams of “get your ass off my oil. I don’t care.”), anyone who would refuse the offer to bow to their god…it’s really phenomenal, in fact, how hatred seems to spur their worldview and give them a reason for existence.
I would love to save them the bother of hating me for being “unAmerican” by going somewhere else where they can hate me for being unwilling to be an accessory to the horrors that are now unfolding and that will have consequences for years to come.
Right now I have to accept that we share the same geography, externally if not internally.
But I find it increasingly hard to walk down the street and wonder who cares if horrors are unfolding in their names. I felt the same way after the pictures of abuse at Abu Ghraib were released. How could people just go about their lives as if nothing horrific was not unfolding in their names?
And now Gonzales is getting promoted, just as Bush was re-elected. Our military leaders said we are fighting satan. That, apparently, covers all sins.
Posted by: fauxreal | Nov 16 2004 3:46 utc | 133
Viet Nam? The anti-war movement? It was long, hard, boring, and it also failed, but who could have said this in 1975? I certainly didn’t say this: I said that our labors–the spending of our youth on a long, loud, and fruitless “NO!”–would surely keep us out of trouble for a long time to come. And how we fulminated against Reagan and Casey for their retro moves in Iran-Contra! And how we put that thing on hold….not!….And so I think of Rennie Davis, the great organizer of the ’69 moratoria, who suffered a psychotic break shortly therafter on a flight to LA, and who ended up working for a right-wing religious cult of some kind.
No regrets!
Slothrop (@ 9:25 PM), I’d find it infinitely consoling if you’d read just one page of Machiavelli’s prose. He was democracy’s greatest champion. Suspected of subversion by the Medicis, he suffered three turns on the strappado at the hands of their police without making a sound. When they finally let him go, he went off to his country house and wrote “The Prince”: he wrote it to show us what democracy’s up against.
Posted by: alabama | Nov 16 2004 3:52 utc | 134
@kate I’d feel a lot less oogie about what you’ve said here if you claimed it as your thoughts and feelings I think perhaps it’s what’s known in the trade as “plausible deniability”?
Slothrop, there is an enormous amount of suspicion and antipathy (and paranoia and hatred) on both the Left and the Right. And I find it extremely painful. I was not aware of the political climate during Vietnam; I was far too young. I spent the Reagan years mostly overseas and controversy and quarrel were way out on the periphery. I spent much of the Bush and Clinton years overseas as well, and became aware then not only of growing European resentment of the US, but also of a crude bigotry. It is the latter which is disturbing, and I’ve discovered it here at home, as well – among people of wildly varying backrounds, gathered about two poles and by every indication resigned to a permanent mutual malevolence. I find this extraordinary and increasingly portentious.
I see both poles – I know them both – and between them is what? Safe ambiguity? Sanity? John Kerry and the DNC?
[Rgiap, you’re a tiresome old scold and so apoplectic that I don’t know how you manage to keep from having a major medical event.]
Posted by: Pat | Nov 16 2004 3:58 utc | 136
alabama:
I meant of course how the venality and cold-blooded machinations of power insinuate ‘sophisticated conservatism.’
I’d never impute to Machiavelli an endorsement by him of such power, but the critique of this power.
I’ve only read The Prince.
I try to be honest in reference to my erudition, which is always limited. Sometimes, I’m wrong, but I save the snow for christmas.
Posted by: slothrop | Nov 16 2004 4:03 utc | 137
I’m sorry, Kate. Those are MY thoughts.
“Is this genocide?” Well, slothrop, genocide has, if I am not mistaken, a certain definition under international law and I would be in debt to the person who retrieves it for the instruction of all of us here. Otherwise we might be, though unwittingly, debasing the currency of the language, as it were.
Posted by: Pat | Nov 16 2004 4:30 utc | 138
Hmmm. so CluelessJ is “vile”? I thought we had recently established that bad guys are more interesting than good guys… that brutality and wickedness are more interesting than goodness, gentleness or kindness? but it turns out that some kinds of violent anger are just plain “mad” and “vile” after all. guess I can’t get the hang of this new postmodernist version of Rightist morality… maybe it’s too subtle for me.
I personally don’t agree with CJ’s wish, mostly because I don’t think anyone deserves beheading, particularly not with a video camera rolling — though heaven knows the media blackout being enforced by the Yanks in Falluja is as shameful, in its way, as the staged media events of the guys with the nasty beheading fetish. neither abomination erases or neutralises the other.
I’m not sure how to assign, let alone quantify, guilt or innocence for every participant in the invasion/occupation of Iraq. those who actually, personally tortured/raped/looted/murdered — up close and with their own hands, breath-to-breath with their victims — obviously should bear responsibility for their own actions: trial, disgrace, jail time. instead they are getting slap-on-wrist treatment. and those who engineered the torture, justified it, ordered it, are getting promotion. not a good start.
and those who in the darkness of a gun turret “merely” located a cursor over a blinking green box and pushed the Fire button? are they wholly, personally, utterly to blame? those who “merely” lugged the ammo boxes into position, drove the supply trucks, heated up the rations in the field kitchen? to what extent does the blame travel upwards, sideways, downwards? is the soldier responsible for the crimes he/she is ordered to commit? the GC specifies the soldier’s duty to reject an illegal order, but these soldiers are the frontline troops of a country that has become a rogue state by rejecting the GC and international law — these soldiers are in a “new” context where there is no such thing as an illegal order, because the will of those who order them is the only law. the war itself is a criminal undertaking, but in what court will it be judged so? are the kids responsible from the moment they sign up? should they “know better”? how? who has taught them any better? has any generation of young soldiers learned better without going through hell the hard way first?
how about those who engineer the deprivation and poverty that motivate so many of those kids — the rank and file — to sign up in the first place? or those who give the orders? or those who sit in comfort half a world away framing the grand strategic fantasy that results in the orders being given? or those who sit on their comfy couches watching the fireworks on Fox TV and cheering while human beings burn?
or those who merely, in their millions, by their petulant tantrums when the price of gas goes up by a few cents, send the message to the Powers that Be that anything — war, theft, corruption, collective punishment, war crimes, maybe even genocide — is less politically dangerous than touching the junkies’ next fix? where does the culpability end? where does it begin? if we dared to start a storm of beheadings — in our rage and shame, trying desperately to exorcise and separate the Evil from Ourselves — where would they end?
slothrop: This war will drive us crazy. How did people suffer 10 years of vietnam?
So many did not survive the suffering. I know only two men who were there, my cousin and my brother-in-law. They came back home, but they left important parts of their whole selves in Vietnam. They revisit themselves there often. Still. Their ongoing suffering impacts everyone who loves them. Still. War is the gift that keeps on giving. An equal opportunity destroyer…
“What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither destroyers nor the destroyed. That’s about it.” Barbara Kingsolver
Posted by: Kate_Storm | Nov 16 2004 4:36 utc | 140
pat:
apparently, international law, treaties like geneva of which the u.s. is member, are passe.
“I think if the Americans let us treat the injured, even in the streets,” he said, “we could have saved hundreds.” (from sic transit’s ‘doctor…’ link).
This strikes me to be genocidal.
This kind of semantic battle you recently aspire to is often useful in the attempt to forego a general consensus of morality. Lawyers do it all the time. Why are you eager to detain condemnation of this, whatever you call it, slaughter in Iraq?
Posted by: slothrop | Nov 16 2004 4:46 utc | 141
According to my American Heritage Dictionary genocide is “the systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group.”
It’s pretty specific.
Posted by: Pat | Nov 16 2004 4:56 utc | 142
Ok. I’d defend assignment of genocide to this horror of Iraq by asserting the use of u.s. military power to achieve assimilation of particularly arabs into the system of domination reproduced by global capitalists.
Posted by: slothrop | Nov 16 2004 5:03 utc | 143
it’s really phenomenal, in fact, how hatred seems to spur their worldview and give them a reason for existence
it’s funny, that.
I’m not sure where the US Right gets that idea that they’ve been the targets, poor things, of nonstop hatred and persecution and unfairness. has anyone been burning crosses on white Republican lawns lately? beating up Republicans’ kids in school? umm, is “Republican-bashing” going on outside bars where conservatives are known to hang out? are Republicans afraid to tell their Mom they’re Republican? has anyone suggested that Republicans should be deprived of domestic partner benefits? that Republicanism is “unnatural” and an abomination unto the Lord? that Republicans are just naturally inferior and we have a book here called “The Hell Curve” that proves it?
were there “hate radio” shows devoted to making fun of, insulting, even threatening rightwingers? I don’t remember one. there wasn’t, that I recall, any equivalent of Rush Limbaugh on the local “community supported radio” station, telling endless rude jokes about Republicans. there’s more of that going around these days, but I think it’s in response to the rise of right-wing shock-jock, hate-talk radio.
OK, for a while after Reagan there was that bumper sticker that said “Friends don’t let Friends Vote Republican” — a bit snarky I’ll admit, but it doesn’t convey the intensity of hatred that comes across in just one session of Mike Savage or his ilk. whence cometh all the self-pity, and the thirst for revenge? why do these stories get invented about spitting on veterans? my roomie in college for a while was a VN vet. sure, he had done some dreadful things and we knew it and he knew it — he was older than us by way more than a few years earlier birthdate, and he was kind of a haunted guy. the response of half the Lefty girls I knew at the time was to throw themselves into his bed — drawn to comfort his evident unhappiness perhaps, or maybe in the hope of “saving his soul through love.” not the most dedicated hate campaign, that. no one that I knew ostracised him — the worst that ever happened was a big housemate fight when he lost his temper and said he’d kill someone if they didn’t take their turn cleaning the bathroom floor, and everyone in the household freaked because he was the only person we knew who really did know how to kill people 🙂 we thought he oughta tone down the rhetoric a bit, it was too much like waving a gun around that’s really loaded.
have you ever heard people who are so powerful complain so much about their lack of power?
Posted by: slothrop | Nov 16 2004 5:14 utc | 146
via xymphora
The German people have been justly criticized for their failing to do anything to stop the Holocaust, with Jews disappearing off the streets of Nazi Germany to be killed while the Germans pretended not to notice. It has been one of the mysteries of history how the most civilized people on earth could have allowed the Holocaust to happen with nary a voice of opposition or complaint.
How does this differ from the remarkable lack of opposition in the United States to the war crimes being committed by American troops in Falluja and elsewhere (scroll down at this site to find most of the links of eyewitness reports of the horrors)? Actually, there is quite a bit of difference. Nazi Germany was a police state, and any opposition or even a hint of opposition would have been met with instant dire consequences. Despite the best efforts of John Ashcroft, the United States is still not a full-fledged police state (but they are working on it). Nazi Germany had a completely controlled media, and any information embarrassing to Hitler’s regime was simply not published. Despite the fact that the American media is disgustingly useless, Americans still have full awareness of what is going on in Falluja, largely because the Bush regime is quite proud of it. I once was impolite enough to ask some Germans in Germany who had lived through the Nazi period what they knew at the time about what was going on. They said they were very sorry about what had happened, but, although they had strong hints, they really didn’t know. Unless one is certain, what can an individual do in a police state when faced with hints of wrongdoing? Americans have no such excuse. The hypocrisy of Americans complaining about what is going on in Sudan while American troops are doing much worse in Iraq is amazing.
Some people think that Americans actually like killing Muslims. I have resisted this notion, but, given the complete lack of opposition to massive war crimes being committed against a largely civilian population for a crime which amounts to being insufficiently deferential to an illegal occupying army, I am changing my mind. The only possible reason which explains the attack on Falluja and the attitude of Americans towards it is that Americans like to see dead Muslims. I think the American people owe the German people an apology. Unimaginable evil can happen anywhere, and with remarkable ease.
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Nov 16 2004 5:20 utc | 147
First a joke: Why did California get most of the lawyers and New Jersey got most of the toxic waste dumps?
Answer: New Jersey got first pick.
So help me understand, Pat. If the entire target group is not completely exterminated by the agressor, and/or if the “plan” doesn’t include the extinction of every last individual of the entire target group, then no genocide?
Did the US government practice genocide upon the indigenous peoples of N. America? They did leave some of them alive after all. Well, mostly alive.
Boggles my mind.
Normalizing the Unthinkable
Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on “normalization.” This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as “the way things are done.” There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with the direct brutalizing and killing done by one set of individuals; others keeping the machinery of death (sanitation, food supply) in order; still others producing the implements of killing, or working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of defense intellectuals and other experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public.
(The Banality of Evil from “Triumph of the Market”-
Edward S. Herman)
Posted by: Kate_Storm | Nov 16 2004 5:27 utc | 148
We are the Europeans sent by our owners to conquer the New World some five hundred years ago–a mission that won’t go away. Centuries, generations, languages and confessions are secondary to this massive and simple mission.
Rabelais, Machiavelli, Luther, Shakespeare, Spenser, Montaigne, Cervantes, Luis de Gongora…..They saw the unwisdom of all this. They called it the “service of Mammon”, and while lots of people read what they said, most haven’t seen the point at all.
We aren’t teachable, we life in fear, and do as we’ve been taught to do, and so a wreckage is in the offing. All the same, we can throw ourselves in the reading of Rabelais, Machiavelli, Luther, Shakespeare, Spenser, Montaigne, Cervantes, Luis de Gongora…
Posted by: alabama | Nov 16 2004 5:27 utc | 149
alabama: … we life in fear, and do as we’ve been taught to do …
I remember reading an interview with Elizabeth II from a number of years ago. It might have been around her Jublilee celebration. One of the questions was semi-silly, but her answer was not silly, and it stuck with me. It went something like this:
Interviewer: How have you been able to be the Queen for so long, to be so successful at it?
Elizabeth: I had very good training.
My dear husband, when he’s not throwing around the “it’s a shit species” insult, hammers home that training is everything for human beings. We have at least learned this much, he and I. Old adages beg to be typed, but I’ll only do one: As the twig is bent, so grows the tree. Training.
My dear misanthrope has also been heard to say: “Hillbillies is as hillbillies does.” (This includes hillbillies worldwide; book-learning and decent socio-economic status not mitigating.)
Posted by: Kate_Storm | Nov 16 2004 5:42 utc | 150
Kate: a shot o’ moonshine fer yer pardner there. Hell, moonshine fer the house. We mebbe needs ta straighten up a few stools…..
Posted by: catlady | Nov 16 2004 5:50 utc | 151
Kate: a shot o’ corn moonshine fer yer pardner there. Hell, moonshine fer the house. We mebbe needs ta straighten up a few stools…..
Posted by: catlady | Nov 16 2004 5:52 utc | 152
Well just for the hell of it, thought I’d drag over this little piece of hyperbole I saw the other day, and that I see with increasing frequency around the blogsphere. And I would just bet money that it’s not even a stones throw away from what’s now being spoon fed our illustrious boys (&girls) now in Iraq. I would agree that what CJ said was over the top, in spite of it being basically a call for reciprocal justice, but compared to the below (and the lots like it) it’s a walk in the park.
Who cares what a bunch of murderous ragheads think?
Their stated goal is to convert to Islam and Sharia law all infidels. If you don’t submit, they plan to kill you. This is not a joke. It’s reality. It’s part of their culture RIGHT NOW. They believe that they will eventually dominate every nation. They don’t just want to push Israel into the sea, they want it all. And we are supposed to let it happen?
Do you think that you can do something to halt the spread of Islam .. something nice and kind that will stop them because hey, you are so very kind and sweet and all?
Wake up, asshole!
Our only mistake was not bombing Falujah, all Iraq, Saudi Arabia and all the other vile raghead countries into rubble immediately. Stop pussyfooting around and get it over with.
Islam Delenda est!
Oh well.
I suppose that for those barren of the gift of empathy or maybe a little imagination, all this talk is just a fantasy played out and recycled with the wreakage of ones own memories, and then heaved out as some kind of male plumage display of patriotic strength to then be reveled in. What I find frustrating, and I would expect rgiap to concur, is that the actual facticity of war and all its by-products in the actual moment are all so overflowing of the experience itself, I think Sartre would call de-trop as in “nausea”, that it is to say unbearable in the sheer sensory volume overload that is matched only in its psychic equivelent. No, to actually be a victim, see a victim, or to know a victim, is to have some knowledge imparted, or branded for that matter, onto ones self indelibly, brings forth this crazy frustration at those who would intentionally shield this true nature of war — be it first from themselves or from the other, be it government, the media, or whom-ever, it is a obscenity of some equal proportion to the act of war itself, to willfully euphemize, deny, obviate, shut -up, muzzle-up, gag-up, or plain old cover-up of all those facts that will with no doubt leave a trail of blood and then tears for at least a generation — even if it were to stop right now.
Anyway.
Posted by: anna missed | Nov 16 2004 6:07 utc | 154
‘I wish there had been another way’ – weasel words from Barham Salih on Falluja
Fighting in Baquba, Ramadi
Five U-S soldiers injured in car bombing in Mosul
Seven killed, seven wounded in mortar attack in south Baghdad
In wake of Falluja, pace of combat intensifies in Ramadi
Seven Iraqi policemen, 30 rebels killed in Mosul clashes
Two British mercenaries killed in bomb attack in Basra
‘There is more of this to come’ – editorials on Falluja
U.S. troops battle insurgents across Iraq
Overwhelming force
Company commander dies on mission to clear houses in Falluja
Annan frustrates US over UN stance on Iraq
Masters of war
‘This one’s faking he’s dead’ – ‘He’s dead now’
Posted by: Sic transit gloria USA | Nov 16 2004 6:12 utc | 155
This is quite a haunting thread.
I agree that the US Army is coming ever closer to genocide.
I agree with Pat that the front line soldiers should not bear thr brunt of the blame for that. Of course, they are the lethal end of the institution, and some have committed genuinely despicable and criminal acts, but they are basically doing what they have been trained to do – kill enemies.
All Iraqis have deen designated as enemies (“unarmed sleeper cells” for God’s sake. Think about it. We ALL are unarmed sleeper cells. You’re next). The US doctrine calls for overwhelming force to limit US casualties and – when possible, but this seems to be fully forgotten these days – civilian casualties. So overwhelming force it is, against the designated enemy – Iraqis. (They are not being liberated anymore, that’s for sure)
The problem is political. It’s not even the doctrine, it’s the fact the the US Army is used so willingly as a tool for other goals, which, as DeAnander stated clearly, are as mediocre as they sound (politicians trying to avoid domestic “complaints” rather than facing them off, pandering to fear, greed, entitlement – because IT WORKS for them – they get (re-elected). I am not sure about the US Army, but the current US leadership is most certainly guilty of war crimes, and all that support them should certainly be sent to Iraq to live through what they have encouraged.
The problem is that it seems that the ONLY way out (as reason seems unable to prevail) is for these policies to continue to their bitter end – until they bring havoc and unacceptable consequences/destruction to the US population. Germany required total annihilation of its Nazi incarnation to come back to its senses. What will be needed in the case of the USA? If public beheadings of US soldiers could be a way to generate enough revulsion and bring (enough) war-bent Americans back to their senses, I’ll take that rather than massive terrorist atacks against US and the Western world, or worst of all, an war of everybody else agaisnt gone-berseck-America. I agree with DeAnander that you can never wish for the death of anyone, but that arguments becomes pretty moot if you are an Iraqi and you seen your son die in front of you because he could not be brought to a doctor and your house destroyed and (the rest of) your family has lost everything.
Posted by: Jérôme | Nov 16 2004 6:56 utc | 156
Someone sent me a joke which they claimed had been sent to them by a rightwing friend who thought it was pretty funny. OK, this could be a setup. It could be a clever disinfo campaign designed expressly to vilify the poor, put-upon, disempowered right wing faction in America. George Soros coulda paid some hifalutin ad agency to make it up. Now that we’ve indulged our paranoid fantasies, I will say that the joke was in keeping with the general tenor of other jokes I have heard from rightwing guys that I’ve worked with in various blue-collar venues — except that the targets have changed over the years. It was consistent. It had the ring of the vernacular, the authentic, the traditional. It goes like this:
A family is sitting and watching Star Trek on TV. The little boy says suddenly, “Daddy, there are white and black people and Asian people and Klingons on the Enterprise. How come there are no Arab people?” And his Daddy says, “Because it’s the Future, Son.”
Now, apart from the initial reaction of eeeeee-yuck, this is an important scrap of the Zeitgeist to mull over. It’s the humorous invocation of the genocidal impulse — the normalising and cutesifying of the genocidal impulse. It’s the dream of the future “cleansed” of whatever group of people we’re being encouraged to hate this week. It’s the license to joke about the unthinkable, which is perhaps the beginning of the ability to think about it, which is in turn the beginning of the ability to plan it.
strikes me as just another variation on the rhetoric that describes the inconvenient Other as “cockroaches” (or any other insect perceived as a pest), as “animals” (various kinds), as “a cancer” (diseases of various kinds, infection), as “dirt” muddying up what could otherwise be a clean and happy landscape — just a “pest” that needs to be got rid of so we can have a “pest-free” home/Homeland/future. I emphasise that this rhetoric doesn’t belong to any one group or race or country or decade. It’s a well-worn groove into which the human mind plops when it needs to justify the unthinkable and normalise the unspeakable — it casts about desperately for some other metaphor in which to clothe the atrocity, tries to replace the actual crime taking place with the metaphor. It’s Hutu Talk Radio Rwanda. It’s the BJP showing its colours, inciting riots; it’s everywhere, it’s the enemy and it’s us.
These metaphors of the body politic and its “ills”, notions of being “infested” with the Other, being “afflicted” with the Other, needing to be “cured” or “fumigated”, needing to become “pure” and “clean” by getting rid of the Other, have deep resonance. It is reported, haven’t confirmed this yet, that the notorious Imus referred to Arafat (on live broadcast, during coverage of the funeral no less), as “dirty”, “beady-eyed,” and “a rat”. It is reported that his studio guest referred to Palestinians in general as “dirty” and quipped (har de har har) that the helicopters at the funeral should have been dropping soap. The same metaphors persist: dirt, animal — the repudiation, we might say, of the natural/biotic world and of the despised Other in one breath…
If there’s a state of “perigenocide” then we may be in it. I hope it’s reversible.
@Pat – You Have Got To Be Kidding.
Is it genocide yet?
“debasing the currency of the language” !!!
Bush, Blair, the Neocons, and you. All the lies and weasel words. You have not only debased the currency of the language, you have rendered it useless.
You just don’t get it. Mangled bodies and kids with bullets through their brains obviously has no effect on you. There’re just Arabs.
Posted by: DM | Nov 16 2004 7:01 utc | 158
Fighting spreads to more towns as Falluja operation continues
The dramatic leap in prisoner numbers suggests that the internment of Falluja males has begun – those that weren’t subjected to summary execution for being members of ‘unarmed sleeper cells’ that is. I wonder how many cross words this will elicit between American Republicans and Democrats as Iraqis rot away in US-run prisons? Because really, everything that happens in the known universe is all about American lives and politics, isn’t it? Dead, dying, imprisoned and to-be-killed Iraqis are just debating chips, aren’t they? Things. Irrelevances. Far away shrieking, bleeding, dying annoyances. And they’re not white. Besides, there are perfectly adequate dictionaries to reduce them to other, less human sounding nouns and the richness of the English language permits what’s being done to them to be finessed so that it hardly means anything at all. Still, it’s a good thing you can’t hear them screaming, eh?
Posted by: Sic transit gloria USA | Nov 16 2004 7:05 utc | 159
have you ever heard people who are so powerful complain so much about their lack of power?
Frequently. In the present, and historically. It’s always a bad sign.
@Jerome, DeAnander, slothrop, CP, r’giap, alabama et al
Thanks. There’s not many other places to turn.
Posted by: DM | Nov 16 2004 7:11 utc | 161
Senior member of Sunni party arrested
Posted by: Sic transit gloria USA | Nov 16 2004 8:02 utc | 163
Not an isolated incident?
…..The dramatic footage was taken Saturday by pool correspondent Kevin Sites of NBC television, who said three other prisoners wounded a day earlier in the mosque has (sic) also apparently been shot the next day by the Marines.,,,,,
U.S. to probe shooting of wounded Iraqi
Posted by: Anonymous | Nov 16 2004 8:12 utc | 164
Marines Self-Destruct
OP-ED
Robert S. Finnegan
Managing Editor
Southeast Asia News
“There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its ’finger men’ to point out enemies, its ‘muscle men’ to destroy enemies, its ‘brain guys’ to plan war preparations, and a ‘Big Boss, Supra-nationalistic Capitalism. It may seem odd for me a military man, to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to do so. I spent thirty-five years and four months in active service as a member of our country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps.
“I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General. During that period I spent most of my life being a high-class muscle man for big business, Wall Street and the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer – a gangster for Capitalism.
“I suspected I was just part of the racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like most members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical of anyone in the military.
“Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Hati and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China in 1927 I helped Standard Oil.
“During those years I had, as the boys in the back room say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, and promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate in three city districts: I operated on three continents”.
Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC, as quoted in Money, December 1951.
11/13/04 “ICH” — If only we had a Smedley D. Butler clone in the Corps today, Bush and his gang of Nazi wanna-be’s would certainly have their hands full.
Sickened by the deterioration of my Marine Corps – indeed what looks to be the destruction of anything resembling honor and fidelity – I must now relegate myself to the past Corps, where we at least had a semblance of our duties to ourselves and to our country. No more will I consider myself a part of today’s elite organization that began in Tun Tavern in 1775. I cannot lend my name to the sycophantic, mindless robots that now fill out our ranks. Marines who kill for fun. Who kill without question. Who kill for their false God, George Bush.
How did this come to pass? How was an honorable fighting force subjugated, degraded, and turned into unrepentant killers of civilians? We who prided ourselves as being above all other services, officers, NCOs, and enlisted who knew the difference between right and wrong on the battlefield and would die protecting the civilian population from excesses? What has happened to us?
To see my kids – yeah, MY KIDS – in a video clip exulting over the killing of an unarmed civilian with overwhelming firepower was the end of my association with today’s Marine Corps. Brain-dead Marine Corps Corporals and Sergeants mugging to the BBC camera, shouting “right on”, as they observe an unarmed Iraqi they have turned into hamburger from a fortified position with overwhelming firepower.
Some warriors. Perhaps their God Bush will give them absolution, and then hey, it’s right back to the killing. Fundamentalist Christian rock before the battle, baptism in a water-filled dinghy by prostitutes wearing the cross of the chaplain. Our slain comrades? Let Bush take care of ‘em.
This is straight out of an acid-induced nightmare.
So my children go forth to slaughter innocent civilians in Fallujah. May your God Bush bury you in cheap metal caskets. Perhaps the shedding of your blood will partially wash away the everlasting stain and disgrace you have brought upon our Corps. Our Corps and history will damn you. You will know everlasting shame.
And a final warning to young Marines – should you fire on American civilians in some future domestic insanity, you will be destroyed by your own kind – that’s right kids – your parents in the “Old Corps” will see to it that the likes of you will never plague the earth again.
Robert S. Finnegan is the Managing Editor of Southeast Asia News, a former Non-Commissioned Officer in the United States Marine Corps and the lead investigator/Senior Editor for The Jakarta Post, Jakarta Indonesia on the Bali bombings of 2002. He may be reached at seanews1@yahoo.com.
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Nov 16 2004 8:41 utc | 165
Deanander
I heard that joke at least two years ago (i.e. before the war), except that the two characters were the Saudi Ambassador and George Bush. (“Tell me, George, I love American culture, I love your country, you’ve been a great friend to us, but there is one mystery for me…3 – then the Same Star Trek question with almost the same reply (“it’s in the future”) by Bush himself.
This was more of a warning of the dangers of the war (and of the mindset of the WH back then) than anything else to my mind.
Posted by: Jérôme | Nov 16 2004 8:56 utc | 167
DM
I went to that link.
The picture of the dead children around the Abhrams tank, can we see that on the cover of the NYT, WAPO, Times, Telegraph and every other paper?
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Nov 16 2004 9:16 utc | 168
Cloned Poster,
I am not of the belief that that photograph is an authentic picture from Falluja. I have no brief for the killers of the USA but nor do I condone using emotive imagery out of context, imagery which, when correct details come to light, can then be used to cast doubt upon the credibility and authenticity of all genuine pictures from Falluja.
I am not making any claim to be an expert but I believe, given the light and the location, that the picture you are referring to dates from 2003 and is not of dead children at all but is of homeless street children in Baghdad who slept out in the open air and gravitated towards US troops in the hope – often met at that time – of receiving ‘MRE’ rations, candy and drinks. I suggest that you do not rush to publicize the picture until you have 100% knowledge of its origins – and I am almost 100% certain that my own assessment is closer to the truth.
Posted by: Sic transit gloria USA | Nov 16 2004 9:41 utc | 169
Further to my (anonymous) post at 3.12 am –
Testimony of journalist Kevin Sites in connection with the shooting of unarmed Iraqis in a Falluja mosque
Posted by: Sic transit gloria USA | Nov 16 2004 9:45 utc | 170
Sic transit gloria USA
Fair point…………… emotions running high at the moment.
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Nov 16 2004 9:50 utc | 171
Having seen all this before i.e.killing wounded prisoners, killing surrendering soldiers, killing civilians — there is not a shread of doubt, to me, that this is going down, sadly no doubt.
Posted by: anna missed | Nov 16 2004 10:29 utc | 172
US soldier killed in attack on convoy near Balad, fighting rages in Mosul and Baiji
Posted by: Sic transit gloria USA | Nov 16 2004 10:36 utc | 173
Not to say the other side would or are not doing the same, givin the chance.
Posted by: anna missed | Nov 16 2004 10:46 utc | 174
Convoy takes aid to Fallujah residents in nearby village
Posted by: Sic transit gloria USA | Nov 16 2004 11:10 utc | 175
@CP
See Kurt Nimmo’s blog
Also a link there to another site re Gulf War – the Prequel.
I wonder though, if anyone else saw the “graphic” video on CNN in 1991 showing thousands of Iraqis – civilian and military – who were literally melted into the tarmac by fuel-air explosives.
What had been a massive traffic jam at what looked like a tollgate to the freeway as the Iraqis were high-tailing it out of Kuwait, was turned into an horrific massacre. I saw this – twice. A live feed, then repeated maybe 15-20 minutes later, then never shown again, nor ever discussed. I saw this in Australia, so with time zones, I’m not sure who in America might have seen this. The lasting impression it left was a scene like a Salvidor Dali nightmare.
Oh, and does anyone think there is such a thing as a free press? I doubt that the Nazis or the Bolsheviks could have more control over the media, so I wont hold my breath waiting for any “emotive” pictures on the front page of the NYT.
Posted by: DM | Nov 16 2004 11:43 utc | 176
DM- It was called The Highway of Death.
I have a med. shot picture of a man sitting behind the wheel of his vehicle who was incinerated in the attempted escape. I enlarged the picture and copied it and handed it out at a local peace vigil organized by the Quakers on the week of the invasion of Iraq so that people who were passing, on their way home from work, could see war in something other than the abstract.
I also enlarged and made a small poster of a graphic that someone had made of the Statue of Liberty with her head in her hands covering her eyes in shame.
The two seemed to go together.
Posted by: fauxreal | Nov 16 2004 12:32 utc | 177
“I want God to make the mujahideen victorious against the American occupiers who have spared no woman or child.”
An Iraqi woman from Falluja, November 16th 2004
Broken kids pay the price of Iraq’s Falluja offensive
Posted by: Sic transit gloria USA | Nov 16 2004 13:21 utc | 178
Here is a piece of a piece by Stan Goff in FTW today. Goff seems to be one of the few who understand that the only solution to the crises we discuss endlessly here is to wipe away the structure of our beloved “democracy”. No other solution has a prayer of correcting this killing culture of ours. Goff himself concedes that his suggested transformation is very unlikely. I agree with him there, but IMO even if such a wipeout were to occur, the Roves and Ashcrofts of the world would inevitably set right back to work and regain their hold, and having already tested their methods, would succeed again in short order.
From Goff:
The external financing of US military expenditures forms the basis of US domestic economic stability in the near term. So claiming that “money,” here understood erroneously as some unchangeable carrier of value independent of the monetary-military world system, can be withdrawn from the US Department of Defense in order to correct the structural social deficiencies at home – “money for people, not for war,” as the slogan goes – is a great polemical device that will blow up in the Left’s face, because it won’t work. Subtract the military, and within a month bums will be wiping their asses with five dollar bills, and a lot of them will be jobless because their own employment was directly or indirectly connected to the military contracts where “the US state was acting as a surrogate export market for the industrial sector.”
The responsibility of the Left, in my humble opinion, is to educate people, even if we are telling them what they understandably don’t want to hear, not manipulate them.
The stark fact is, there is no easy way out of the predicament we are in, and there will be no solutions forthcoming from the system that put us there. A doctor does not tell a patient who needs an amputation to prevent dying of gangrene, “We can wait a few days, and surely things will get better.”
If this is to be dealt with in any meaningful way, it means the entire US political and economic establishment will have to be removed, and we will have to commit to at least a whole generation of bottom-up, radical changes in every single facet of our lives.
That would merely begin with dumping half the so-called service sector jobs in the entire economy, beginning with prisons and working up, into a massive jobs training program, draconian progressive taxation that limits personal income to $100,000 a year, a minimum wage of $20 an hour with imposed price controls, free universal health care, the expropriation of agribusiness and systematic abandonment of capitalist agriculture, the strict rationing of electricity, and the construction of a nationwide public transportation network as a first step to dramatically reducing dependence on fossil fuel.
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/
Posted by: rapt | Nov 16 2004 15:25 utc | 180
Thanks, rapt. I’ve been appreciating Goff for many months, and I don’t disagree with much of anything he as to say.
“… we will have to commit to at least a whole generation of bottom-up, radical changes in every single facet of our lives.”
“To the root”, as Henry David Thoreau might have said. The current system will continue its inexorable creaking toward its end. That is what systems do. Like the physician triaging the patient with gangrenous limbs I think amputation of the necrosis is the only remedy.
Posted by: Kate_Storm | Nov 16 2004 16:07 utc | 181
genocide need not entail any physical extermination. lemkin specified non-lethal qualifications which contribute to the destruction of a groups ability to survive as that group. can be social, political, economic institutions, etc… of course an American Heritage dictionary isn’t going to recognize such a damning definition. it took forty yrs of finagle their own interpretation into the un’s genocide convention. good coverage of the concept and controversy around us denial of genocide in ward churchill’s scholarly work a little matter of genocide: holocaust and denial in the americas, 1492 to the present
Posted by: b real | Nov 16 2004 16:48 utc | 182
People – let’s switch to the new Iraqi thread provided by Bernhard!
Posted by: Jérôme | Nov 16 2004 17:11 utc | 183
Change? You want change, Jérôme? That’s asking so much of mere mortals.
😉
Posted by: Kate_Storm | Nov 16 2004 17:20 utc | 184
Rapt; not wholly unrelated to Goff’s views:
These are the findings of the Education State Rankings, a survey by Morgan Quitno Press of hundreds of public school systems in all 50 states. States were graded on a variety of factors based on how they compare to the national average. These included such positive attributes as per-pupil expenditures, public high school graduation rates, average class size, student reading and math proficiency, and pupil-teacher ratios. States received negative points for high drop-out rates and physical violence.
4 of the 5 smartest states voted for Kerry.
7 of the 10 smartest states voted for Kerry.
8 of the 10 dumbest states voted for Bush.
16 of the 20 dumbest states voted for Bush.
The 7 dumbest states voted for Bush.
KERRY 1. Massachusetts
KERRY 2. Connecticut
KERRY 3. Vermont
KERRY 4. New Jersey
BUSH 5. Wisconsin
KERRY 6. New York
KERRY 7. Minnesota
BUSH 8. Iowa
KERRY 9. Pennsylvania
BUSH 10. Montana
KERRY 11. Maine
BUSH 12. Virginia
KERRY 13. Nebraska
KERRY 14. New Hampshire
BUSH 15. Kansas
BUSH 16. Wyoming
BUSH 17. Indiana
KERRY 18. Maryland
BUSH 19. North Dakota
BUSH 20. Ohio
BUSH 21. Colorado
BUSH 22. South Dakota
KERRY 23. Rhode Island
KERRY 24. Illinois
BUSH 25. North Carolina
BUSH 26. Missouri
KERRY 27. Delaware
BUSH 28. Utah
BUSH 29. Idaho
KERRY 30. Washington
KERRY 31. Michigan
BUSH 32. South Carolina
BUSH 33. Texas
BUSH 33. West Virginia (tie)
KERRY 35. Oregon
BUSH 36. Arkansas
BUSH 37. Kentucky
BUSH 38. Georgia
BUSH 39. Florida
BUSH 40. Oklahoma
BUSH 41. Tennessee
KERRY 42. Hawaii
KERRY 43. California
BUSH 44. Alabama
BUSH 45. Alaska
BUSH 46. Louisiana
BUSH 47. Mississippi
BUSH 48. Arizona
BUSH 49. Nevada
BUSH 50. New Mexico
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Nov 16 2004 17:27 utc | 185
“That would merely begin with dumping half the so-called service sector jobs in the entire economy, beginning with prisons and working up, into a massive jobs training program, draconian progressive taxation that limits personal income to $100,000 a year, a minimum wage of $20 an hour with imposed price controls, free universal health care, the expropriation of agribusiness and systematic abandonment of capitalist agriculture, the strict rationing of electricity, and the construction of a nationwide public transportation network as a first step to dramatically reducing dependence on fossil fuel.”
Dang, Goff has really been reading my mind all these years. Now, I’m quite freaked off 🙂
Posted by: Clueless Joe | Nov 17 2004 0:51 utc | 186
Karen Kwiatkowski has just posted a fascinating analysis of poss. USgov intentions/Iraq sol’n. Recall all the fighting going on in Sunni part. Shias & Kurds silence is deafening. The Iraq Solution – Coming Sooner Than You Think
Posted by: jj | Nov 17 2004 6:46 utc | 187
Can I ask, random question, why have the US put sanctions in place to stop Iran from buying planes or even spare parts of planes from the West? Just a little confused! Thanks!
Posted by: Laura | Dec 6 2005 15:07 utc | 188
@Laura
The U.S. has maintained such ‘sanctions’ on Iran since our Iranian ‘Saddam’, the US/UK coup installed Shah of Iran, was ousted by the Iranians in 1979 … We’ve effectively blockaded Cuba for 40 years, similar deal with Iran … the elites that run America have long memories and they do hold grudges, regardless of the ‘face’ of the administration (Dems/Repugs)…
The blockade and sanctions will remain until the Cuban and Iranian leadership/elites assume an appropriately subservient role as tributaries under the rule of one of our puppets …
Posted by: Outraged | Dec 7 2005 2:14 utc | 189
That is outrageous! So effectively, the plane crash that happened in Iran this week was yet another murder by Bush and Blair! The pilot reported technical faults with the plane and was instructed to make an emergency landing when he crashed into a block of apartments, killing 110, including several children. The plane was made up of old Russian scraps seeing as they are not allowed to obtain disused planes from the West. If these restrictions were imposed because the US/UK believed that Iran were going to be making fighter jets or somethng with them then that would be more understandable (just.) but the fact that these restrictions have not been imposed on other countries (e.g. Russia, didn’t the US have a little conflict with them recently, maybe the Cold War?!) this just seems as though it is a way of keeping strings on them. Stupid. The way Bush and Blair carry on makes me ashamed to be British. The French in 1789 revolted over less than this, they wouldn’t stand for everything that Blair has done to our country (e.g. for all the Americans out there convinced that England is perfect: our National Health Service has people on trolleys in the corridors once they actually get off the long waiting lists for their operations, we have a bug called MRSA circling round the hospitals killing the patients because the hospitals are so dirty, the waiting lists to see our local doctors were so long that Blair put targets in place of appointments on the day you phone resulting in 2 minute appointments, Doctors are so rushed that you are often given bad advice and problems are missed (my Doctor missed a potential heart problem AND the fact I have bad asthma!); we are taxed so much that the frail and elderly are being sent to prison for refusing to pay, those that do pay are being taxed to starvation, literally; the education targets are so stupid that those that ignore Blair’s targets are actually the ones who are SUCCEEDING, those that have listened to him have FAILED in assessments; our transport is terrible with no security at all (hence why it was so incredibly easy for 7/7 to happen), they say that screening bags and stuff would be unrealistic on the tube, but it was tried on 8/7 (the next day) and worked perfectly. So whats the excuse?!; our police force is I would say, terrible, police are given so much paperwork to do now that they don’t have time to follow up crimes, thus victims are being treated badly and are then too scared to follow through reports, I have first hand experience of this and so I know what it is like, plus, police do not feel safe anymore as the gun culture grows in inner cities (Something that Blair thinks will go away if he says ‘We have to stop this appauling rise in gun crime’ enough times); Also, note to Brits, did anyone else think that on 7/7 it was England coping and rallying around each other, distraught over loved ones, being led by Sir Ian Blair (Police Chief) whilst Tony Blair was up in Scotland away from it all? He made a two minute speech and that was it, Sir Ian was on tv all day issueing statements and guiding us, telling us to stay calm, etc. The third world debt is a very important issue and should never be sidelined, but on 7/7 I personally felt as though Blair couldn’t be bothered with us that much. I was in Paris at the time so I don’t know what everyone back home thinks, (please post opinions up here!) but in conclusion, Blair is incompetant at his job and seems to spend more time in the US than over here at the moment, he is letting Britain down and should be sacked. When he is actually over here, he has a tantrum until he gets his own way, even if Britain then suffers as a result. Note to Blair, if old people are starving because of the government’s greed then something is going wrong somewhere! Don’t say you support them and then raise taxes! When the hell does that make sense? sorry, scathing attack over (Just!) What does everyone else think about the points I’ve raised?
PS, Blair & Bush, Blood is thicker than Oil! So don’t spill the blood! Spill the oil!! Or better still, leave it alone!!
Posted by: Laura | Dec 9 2005 8:44 utc | 190