Drilled Brains – Moon of Alabama

December 4, 2006

Drilled Brains

I have had a serious date with my dentist today and now I’m in no mood to write something up myself.

But Bea points to a dark juicy piece at Middle East Online by Ahmed Amr, editor of nileMedia:

No one in his right mind is suggesting that exiting Iraq was ever going to be a tidy business. But that doesn’t mean we have to ignore that the man invited to sip tea with the president is holding a common household drill dripping with blood and brain tissue. Hakim keeps trying to wipe it off with his clerical robes to the amusement of the President – who has no clothes to help out his guest. Snickering in the corner, the assembled media dignitaries mind their manners and pretend not to notice.

Bush is now allying with the Persian puppet Hakim and his torturer gangs against Iraqi Sunni and nationalist Iraqi (Sadr) Shia. At the same time he is allying with lots of Sunni dictators against a (halfway) democratic Shia Iran. Maybe only a drilled brain can understand that strategy.

PS: Another recommendable piece by Amr: Get Feith and Exit Iraq without Bush

Posted by b on December 4, 2006 at 19:41 UTC | Permalink

Comments

2 great links. earlier i posted bea’s on another thread, the hired trolls appeared fast, en mass. i’ll have to send them a double wammy w/the other.
everyone knows this. the story is out. it is not some wacko leftist conspiracy theory. what kind of moral excuse/justification can america have? just that photo of hakim and bush. it’s surreal.
bernard, i hope your mouth feels better soon.

Posted by: Anonymous | Dec 4 2006 23:29 utc | 1

sorry, me

Posted by: annie | Dec 4 2006 23:31 utc | 2

excellent links… thanks so much Bernard for all you do… hope you’re feeling better soon

Posted by: crone | Dec 4 2006 23:34 utc | 3

Annie – Just curious: When you say “another thread,” do you mean here at Moon or on another site?

Posted by: Bea | Dec 5 2006 0:45 utc | 4

Thank you for the Ahmed Amr piece. Here is a World Socialist Web Site article on the Bush – Hakim meeting to go with it:

US seeks Shiite collaboration in attack on Moqtada al-Sadr
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the main Shiite political rival of the anti-occupation cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, is in the US today for personal discussions with George Bush. Coming just days after the meeting between Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Hakim’s visit is another sign of preparations for an armed confrontation with the Sadrist Mahdi Army militia in its Baghdad stronghold and an attempt by the US to refashion its puppet regime in Iraq.
…

Posted by: Alamet | Dec 5 2006 1:35 utc | 5

bea, i picked up your link up from here and put it on the comment section of another site, a more moderate one.
i wrote you a long answer, with links to the sites, iraqi sites, and must have previewed it when i was testing the urls, very strange, i could swear, i remember, ok, another twilight zone moment. because the post isn’t here to my amazement.

Posted by: annie | Dec 5 2006 2:59 utc | 6

annie:
It was probably the random demand that you decipher black letters on a black and grey background to prove that you’re not a robot that did it.
Since it’s a random occurence you forget that it’s a possibility and leave the page after pressing post.
This is very likely to happen in the event that you have already previewed the posting several times and are finally sure that it is correct.
It usually takes me three or four attempts to guess the damn black letters correctly when they do show up.
In all I think it is a security measure that is not needed.
I have never seen robot posts on this blog, have you?

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Dec 5 2006 3:22 utc | 7

no JFL. i don’t really know what a robot post is tho. today i had to fill out that thing 3 times for one post, but i think it is because after about a week of not being able to post i erased all my cookies and changed some settings as a result i have to sign in here daily. that’s why i am always forgetting and have to come back and identify myself on my first posts of the day.

Posted by: annie | Dec 5 2006 3:47 utc | 8

I’ve seen a couple of “robot posts” here… they usually pick a thread that’s over a year old and for some reason, a story about Judy Miller, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo or JamesJeff GannonGuckert suddenly reminds them that they had a ton of discount viagra they wanted to sell.

Posted by: Monolycus | Dec 5 2006 5:15 utc | 9

on @5
its just sad to see. SCIRI & Sadrs Mahdi army have had brief localized clashes. But the chances that SCIRI will vigorously confront Sadr on a broad basis are very low ? This sounds like just another dead-end street as thousands & thousands die.

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Dec 5 2006 6:23 utc | 10

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Dec 5 2006 6:23 utc | 11

This sounds like just another dead-end street as thousands & thousands die.
—
Right! And “who’s gonna save your souls” Americans???

Posted by: vbo | Dec 5 2006 6:39 utc | 12

They’re ALL dead-end streets where thousands die. The only choice for the US government to make is which street causes the fewest thousands…or at least, the fewest thousands reported by the media.

Posted by: Rowan | Dec 5 2006 6:47 utc | 13

Where’s a little sympathy for the devil ’round here?
Iraq is hard work these days. Poor Mistah Bush, he has to somehow keep that shattered play pretend of a nation together under one gummint, one gummint that can sign over extraction contracts for the oil that’s unde the ground. Any damned gummint will do, an’ we’ll kill ever damn body who gets in their way as they’re on the way to signing those oil contracts.
Then we’ll kill anyone who tries to stand up to the gummint that did the signing. Then we’ll kill anyone who tries to keep that oil from coming up outta the ground. All this for about twenty years, at which point we toss the whole region like an old orange rind after it’s been juiced.
This is proving to be hard work. But if Mistah Bush loses that nation to Splitsville — if it breaks into ethnic mini-states — he has no one to sign away Iraq’s oil to our American drillers and refiners.
There is a lot of smoke and mirrors about the process, but this is the only thing happening in Iraq. Except — it’s not happening.

Posted by: Antifa | Dec 5 2006 7:42 utc | 14

I have a certain amount of sympathy for the balance of the three-state solution. The Sunni and Shia states would be almost impossible to extricate and drag Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and everyone else inward. Meanwhile, a Kurdish state would almost certainly cause Turkey to invade, completely fucking up the only mostly non-fucked place in Iraq. Everyone loses!

Posted by: Rowan | Dec 5 2006 8:15 utc | 15

ot – robot comments – there were some ten spam comments a day before the “challenge” stuff went up – now there are one or two. I delete most of them pretty fast, so you will probably only see a few if any spam comments. Sorry for the inconvinience with the challenge, but it really helps to keep the place clean.

Posted by: b | Dec 5 2006 8:35 utc | 16

Census Counts 100,000 Contractors in Iraq

In addition to about 140,000 U.S. troops, Iraq is now filled with a hodgepodge of contractors. DynCorp International has about 1,500 employees in Iraq, including about 700 helping train the police force. Blackwater USA has more than 1,000 employees in the country, most of them providing private security. Kellogg, Brown and Root, one of the largest contractors in Iraq, said it does not delineate its workforce by country but that it has more than 50,000 employees and subcontractors working in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait. MPRI, a unit of L-3 Communications, has about 500 employees working on 12 contracts, including providing mentors to the Iraqi Defense Ministry for strategic planning, budgeting and establishing its public affairs office. Titan, another L-3 division, has 6,500 linguists in the country.

Imagine the chaos if there is a sudden retreat …

Posted by: b | Dec 5 2006 8:51 utc | 17

@15
I share the sympathy/sentiment that self-determination may endear as the least painful avenue in an environment as contentious & conflicted as Iraq is today.
But from most accounts, a good majority of Iraqi’s (non-Kurdish) do not want to break up the country. So I feel reasonably confident in the expectation that the Arab Sunnis/Shia will work things out eventually.
In a rough sense, Sunni/Shia contention is more like a sibling rivalry than like McCoy/Hatfield.
Siblings may hurt each other in the most ferocious ways but they sometimes do embrace & make-up at the end of the day.

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Dec 5 2006 8:56 utc | 18

rowan 15, from b’s link @ front page drilled brain post
But there was always one major obstacle that stood in the way of partition. It was called Baghdad. The Iraqi capital is home to one of every four Iraqis. Its seven million residents are a mix of Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and others. Before the war, it was a secular city where Shiites and Sunnis lived in relative harmony as evidenced by the high percentage of mixed marriages and mixed neighborhoods. It was the kind of place where it was considered poor manners to ask another person’s sect.
To partition Iraq – one must first partition Baghdad. What appears to be random tit-for-tat violence is actually part of a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing. The greatest mass migration in the modern history of the Middle East is underway. Over a million Iraqis have left the countries to seek refuge in Jordan, Syria and elsewhere. They include a high percentage of the crème de la crème of Iraq’s professional class.

Posted by: annie | Dec 5 2006 17:42 utc | 19

(I was being facetious – the idea of partition would be monumentally disastrous for the ethnic cleansing reasons as well as bringing the Turks and Kurds to blows. Might still be inevitable, but disastrous nonetheless)

Posted by: Rowan | Dec 5 2006 18:13 utc | 20

truth- about- iraqis

These “civilian” contractors, many of them live in the Green Zone and they have Iraqi whores working for them. Iraqi whores who pretend to speak for Iraqis, shedding crocodile tears.
Tsk, tsk, how the mighty have fallen. Weren’t you cheering but a few months ago how much pride you felt working with the American liberator? And now you sense your doom is near.
As did Hakim who visited Bush in the White House. My, my how the mighty have fallen. Bush sitting there saying we must rid Iraq of extremists as he sat next to the greatest extremist of them all.
Hakim, the man who spits at your American values. The man who prostrates before his loathesome religion of this and that, the religion of bloodletting, Kali, the goddess of war.
He was in the White House demanding the Americans kill more resistance fighters.
Hakim galbi, inta khayef? Liweish khayef? Is it because you have sensed the Americans will abandon you? Is it because you know the valiant resistance will strip you of your clerical robes and reveal the evil that you are?
Is it because the Baathists and the nationalists are ready to take back Iraq from you?
And Hakim spits at the Arabs trying to help Iraq survive as a nation. He refuses to hold a regional summit because he fears the intervention of foreigners?
La3ad shinu Iran ya gawad Najaf?
The tide is turning, the traitors will be purged. And they will be hunted down.
Long live the Iraqi resistance.
Long live the patriotic people of Iraq.

when i was younger i used to hike the sierras high above the timberline. the water there was crisp clear pure unadulterated straight from the melted snow high above and untouched by pollution.

Posted by: annie | Dec 6 2006 5:37 utc | 21

It is obvious that we both have different ideas about who was native to the land, the Palestinians or the Eastern European Zionist immigrants. Only one of us is right, so let the impartial science of DNA intercede to resolve the matter. If the results of the DNA testing proves me wrong, I will eat and fully digest my shoe and wage a campaign to ask every Palestinian to welcome every Israeli as brothers to our people. If you are wrong, I only ask that you begin a campaign to advise Israelis that Zionist mythology should be abandoned and acknowledge each and every crime committed against the Palestinian people.

I actually followed the original link in this post to NileMedia, since I’m always interested in finding new voices speaking of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. But then I found the above exchange which has permanently put me off this fellow.
There is a certain class of ideologues in both the Israeli and Palestinian nationalist camps which believes that if only you could disprove the historical legitimacy of the other sides’ claim to the land–then you could legitimately send them packing from land your side views as its own, not to be shared w. interlopers. This is such an arid, futile & useless exercise that I cannot for the life of me see what utiilty anyone sees in it–even if they are an ideologue.

Posted by: Richard Silverstein | Dec 6 2006 6:56 utc | 22

I am sorry but any person such as Amr who challenges Amos Schocken, publisher of Haaretz, Israel’s most liberal newspaper, to a DNA test to prove/disprove whether he is directly linked to the original Israelite tribes cannot be taken very seriously, no matter what he writes
I wonder what Amos Schocken has written to deserve (or not) such a response …
BTW: such tests have been done and the prove whatever viewpoint one prefers …

Posted by: b | Dec 6 2006 7:25 utc | 23

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