Bad winds blowing

My thoughts and prayers are with the victims of Rita and Katrina.

Last night, at a Progressive Democratic meeting, we heard how the leadership in the NC Democratic party explain why leading Democrats are still supporting the position that the US armed forces should stay in Iraq. The leading argument is that "if we leave, civil war will break out and things will get much worse for the Iraqi people". Well, this flies in the face of the fact that things are consistently getting worse in Iraq. Actually, much, much worse.

I read extensively on Iraq and what is happening there. This does not make me an expert, but it does make me well-informed. I know enough to draw certain conclusions, and while I am not immune to drawing the wrong conclusions, it makes it very unlikely.

I started paying attention to Iraq when I first sniffed the Bush administrations' intentions of going to war in a country that was not in civil war and had not attacked or threatened another country in 12 years. Furthermore, there was a history of gross civil rights abuses in Iraq, but that history was at least 12 years prior. (Actually, it looks like a lot of the claims we were lead to believe about Saddam were overblown and the worst of his abuses and killings happened with US administration support. I can send you photos of Rumsfeld shaking Saddam's hand.) And, if human rights abuses were a good reason for invasion, they we would have invaded Sudan or DR Congo, where millions have been killed in the last few years.

I wrote several impassioned letters to Mr. Edwards (Democratic Senator from NC who voted for this war) to inform him of what I saw and what I knew before this war started. He aided the starting of this war, and he enabled the Bush administration to do what they have done. I remember writing shortly after the war started "I HOPE YOU FIND THOSE WMDS TO JUSTIFY THIS ILLEGAL AND IMMORAL WAR". I knew, of course, that they would not.

When Kerry was running for President, neither he nor Edwards condemned this war or called for it to end. Instead, they claimed they could do war better. I don't know how anyone can win elections by claiming to do crimes better, and I knew they would lose. It is the last time I will vote for Edwards for any federal office.

IN IRAQ:

In this past week, we have seen the"liberated" (Iraqi police) pick up the "liberators" (British troops) because they were undercover and shot an Iraqi policeman. These arrested men were broken out of jail by British troops buy demolishing the jail. The MOD in Britain said they "knocked down a wall". That is a lie, and I know because I read and look at lots of photos from Iraq. The Iraqi think the car the British undercover troops were in were full of explosives, and they think that the Brits and Americans are behind a lot of the car bombings in Iraq. There is no clear evidence of explosives in the car. However, the British troops did not allow the Iraqis to examine the car after they took it away from the original police who made the arrests. The arresting police claim they saw explosives in the car. This incident certainly undermines any idea of "Iraqi sovereignty".

This past week, there are reports of $1 billion gone missing from the prior "transitional" Iraqi government.

This past week, we have had two reports of "terrorists" using children as human shields in two areas of Iraq: Baghdad and Mosul. In both cases, the DOD came out with the report that these "terrorists" were carrying children in their arms and the US military shot the "terrorists" and accidentally killed the children, because they did not see the children. So, we are supposed to believe that two identical incidents happen for the same reasons in two different parts of the country on the same day. And furthermore, we are supposed to believe that the US troops can see well enough to identify a "terrorist" by face recognition or because the "terrorist" is carrying a long distance weapon of some sort, but the US troops cannot see well enough to determine they had a child in their arms. I find that implausible.

Today, there is a report that US troops stormed the house of the deputy mayor of Dhuluiyah (a town in Iraq) and took him into the street and shot him in the head. The US troops also killed a couple of police in that town in the same manner. That sounds like an implausible report also, but I will not write it off just yet. I will wait to see what other stories or pictures or reports come out of Iraq to support or refute this statement. I certainly will not take the DOD as the last or final word on the subject.

I read about the Abu Ghraib torture (and many others) for a full 8 months before the photos came out. Torture is still going on, and most Americans would have never believed that our troops would engage in gay S& M pornography if those photos had not come out. The Pentagon is preventing the release of more photos and videos. Those videos reported contain film of young Iraqi boys being raped in front of their mothers. There is just no way you will ever convince me that the entire "chain of command" in these incidents is not culpable. And I will never be convinced they did not happen. Yes, some US troops are raping children in front of their mothers.

And it is getting clearer and clearer that the US forces over there do not know who is friend and who is foe.

And I would like to share a statement made on a website comment section that I regularly read. This is directed towards a guy who is a supporter of Bush and his war on Iraq, but keep in mind that it also apply to those who did not support the invasion, but support the continuation of hostilities. Every word of it rings true to me. I substituted his name for "Bush and war supporter" to make it easier to read.

Quote:"People like him are enablers of what happened to Falluja. They rationalize it. They make such things thinkable, and hence doable, and hence actually done. (Bush and war supporter) is parroting the civilized discourse of Wolfowitz, Feith, etc. That discourse led to dogs eating corpses, to the stench from the rotting flesh of hundreds of innocent victims who got in the way of the Administration's cockeyed objectives; and I'd like it if all those who argue like the (Bush and war supporter) had to have their unprotected noses thrust into those putrid mounds of the dead their arguments inevitably necessitate. That, rather than the arguments on our side, would be much more effective in ending such evil.

Yes, if every pro-Bush, pro-war American (Susan's note: that would include Kerry and Edwards and Clinton) had to personally clean up what they wrought in Falluja, and what they wrought in Mosul, Tel Affar, Ramadi, Samarra, Baghdad, al-Qaim, etc; if they had to pick up the body parts left from the wedding parties of Afghanistan and Iraq obliterated by American bombs, then we might get somewhere. But I've become cynical of civilized discourse with apologists for American empire. It's the deja vu, you see...Twenty years ago, people like the (war supporter) were defending the Reagan regime's Central America policy, its support for Jonas Savimbi, its support for Saddam Hussein....So yes, I think they need to be dragged through the city of Falluja to see what their rationalizations enabled. (NB--I said I would like to see them spat at, not torn limb from limb, and their ideological justifications and excuses treated with utter and thoroughly merited scorn by the mothers and brothers and grandfathers and children and husbands who had to gather up the fruits of the (Bush and war supporter's) myth in their bloodsoaked blankets and sheets.)

Those rationalizations are driven by an ideology---the ideology Bush supporters exemplifies so well--of American smugness and self-deluded assumptions of moral nobility that, I've become convinced after living for 17 years in the USA, is in fact morally intolerable in something quite akin to the way fascist ideology is intolerable, and should have been treated as such in the 1930s (but unfortunately wasn't).You see, it's not American neo-Nazi skinheads who presided over the killing fields of Vietnam, or Central America, or Iraq. No, it's the leaders who propagate mythic thinking--polite, civilized, decent, American small "c" conservatives, Republicans and Democrats alike, flag-waving soccer moms, teary-eyed veterans, small town editorialists, middle America. That's who enabled the illegal bombing of Cambodia, who discussed at the local diner whether napalm was justified or not (after a naked girl was shown running away from a napalm attack), and who are still defending the Iraq policy at the water cooler...

The (Bush and war supporters) of this country need to be much more ferociously exposed to the horrors of what their lazy, complacent thinking has wrought, and made to feel the full force of not just the hatred much of the world feels for America, but how well merited it is. (Bush and war supporter)-style thinking is a psychological defense mechanism---systematic denial---against the latter. As such, it needs to be ripped, not respected.The trouble is that (supporting Bush and war) enables the US to commit monstrosity after moral monstrosity with a 'good conscience', and despite appearances, it's immune (by design, like all psychological defense mechanisms) to rational persuasion.No, you have to drag these folks through the byways of Central America, Vietnam, Iraq, etc and thrust their faces in the gore, make them pick up the limbs and torsos of children, and subject them to the rage of their victims' parents.They need to be shocked into understanding the truth about these things, because the schoolbook/media version of reality systematically masks that truth, thus facilitating repetition after repetition of mass slaughter by the good ol' USA.

The myth that (Bush and war supporters) operates with needs to be smashed in much the same way that the Nazi myth needed to be smashed. Neither is amenable to rational argument, because the accepted categories in which polite discussion takes place simply serve to protect the myth, by suggesting that it deserves a hearing and should be accorded a modicum of intellectual respectability.

I don't believe it should.

You see, I've heard much smarter people than (Bush and war supporter) politely discuss and defend the myth--for example, inside the US embassy in San Salvador, 15 years ago. This after more than 10 years of funding for the murderous El Salvadoran military, a few months after they had murdered six Jesuit priests (and their housekeeper, and her daughter), and after tens of thousands of death-squad victims among the Salvadoran poor; but there they were--Ivy League, super-articulate professional defenders of the myth, and professional enablers of the slaughterhouse they effectively ruled over. ($4 billion for the likes of Colonel Elena Fuentes? School of the Americas? Oh yes, all very civilized, very polite, very rational).

I'm sorry, but I've no patience for that kind of civilized discussion. I came to the conclusion on my visits to Central America 15 years ago that it's like sitting down to tea with von Ribbentrop while the Wehrmacht marches into the Sudetenland, Austria, Poland and France. America has bombed or invaded Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Libya, Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq and supported death-squad activity in other places just in my lifetime. The death toll (that perpetrated by America, and by the German Nazis) in both cases is in the millions.

What's going on in Iraq is a large-scale atrocity committed by America. That is the essential truth that all the (Bush supporter's) witterings are designed to block out.You don't discuss that politely with those who would rationalize and defend it. You treat them with scorn and contempt, rather like LBJ and Nixon were treated by the anti-war movement. You win, not by according their arguments respect and a fair hearing, but by getting more and more people comfortable with ridiculing them, by a steady drumbeat of scorn and mockery, and by making them sense just how despised and despicable they've become."

The above was written on the comment section of Today In Iraq by someone named stunster.