Burns is a total idiot

Photo: An Iraqi internally-displaced man wheels himself into his makeshift housing, erected next to an old governmental building in Baghdad on March 12, 2008. After five years of bloody violence, the United States is still accepting only a trickle of refugees from Iraq, despite admitting that conditions for those forced from their homes are getting worse. (AFP/File/Ali Yussef)

FIVE years on, it seems positively surreal.

But from that first impact, among many on the roof, the mood was scarcely one of cool detachment, or at least not as cautioned as it might have been by the longer-term implications of what we were seeing. Part of it, no doubt, was the air show — the sheer, astonishing, overwhelming demonstration of power, more like an act of God than man, unleashing in those watching from the roof something approaching awe. But the larger part, the one that seems surreal now in the light of all that has followed, was the sense that, with the beginning of the end of Saddam Hussein’s evil, the suffering of millions of ordinary Iraqis that we had chronicled, and pitied, was ending.

Once again establishing that our corporate media be fools and evil ones, at that. Take a look at the picture above – does that look like a person who’s suffering was coming to an end? Do they look happy?

…..As they must have to many Americans watching the live television coverage, those missiles and bombs seemed, in the headiness of that moment, to be fit retribution for a ruthless dictator, and the medieval wretchedness he had visited on Iraq’s people. That it took such force to accomplish seemed mitigated, at least somewhat, by the precision of the strikes, with only isolated instances, during the 19 days before American troops reached Baghdad, of errant missiles killing innocent civilians.

They killed thousands of innocent civilians and caused vast destruction – FAR WORSE THAN WHAT HAPPENED ON 9/11! Those days of “shock and awe” left me in a puddle of tears, and never once struck me as “a fit retribution” for Saddam’s evil – BECAUSE I KNEW DAMN WELL THEY WERE TOO STUPID TO EVEN HIT SADDAM WITH THEIR “smart” BOMBS! What evil shits these people are who write this drivel. “only isolated instances” my ass! They never bothered to count the Iraqi dead at all, so how would any one know how many they killed?

….. Late in the day, at the oil ministry, I discovered it was the only building marines had orders to protect. Turning to Jon Lee Anderson, a correspondent for The New Yorker who had been my companion that day, I saw shock mirrored in his face. “Say it ain’t so,” I said. But it was.

Well, no shit – this was THE PLAN ALL ALONG. This guy is an idiot.

….Looking back, it has been fashionable to say the Americans began losing the war right then.

No, they lost it the instant they decided to bomb. And they lost it because it is an evil war of conquest for control of the oil resources in the area. Americans greatly deserve to lose, and they deserve to suffer ten times what the Iraqi people have gone through. Particularly the author of this drivel.

In the article “Looking Back at Five Years in Iraq”, Mr. Burns said “Back in 2003, only the most prescient could have guessed….” and then he goes on to talk about the toll the war would take on Iraqi lives and others. I guess you can label me “prescient” because I clearly thought there would be no WMDs found in Iraq, no connections between Saddam and al Qaeda, and the end result would be the deaths of millions and the ruination of the country of Iraq. And there are not “a million or more” Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries, the number is between two and three million, with two or three million more internally displaced, living like the guy int the photo above. Tens of millions of lives have been ruined, thanks to this invasion and occupation. The county of Iraq has been destroyed and I have believed since 2002 that this was the Bush administration plan from the start.

I work as a pediatric health care specialist, and I may be smarter than some Americans (and clearly smarter than Mr. Burns) but I am not a genius. This invasion was a war of aggression against a country that could not hurt anyone, but happened to be sitting on an ocean of oil. This invasion was a violation of the Nuremberg Principles, and therefore a war crime. Bush has brought the Iraqi people the freedom of the grave and the democracy of death.

Beyond these, there were the instances when America’s intentions were betrayed by its troops in more personal ways, with the abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib, with the shooting deaths of 24 civilians in Haditha and with the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl at Mahmudiya, along with the killing of three other members of her family, all leading to court-martial hearings that tore at the heart of anyone who starts from a position of admiration for the American armed forces.

“American’s intentions were betrayed”????? Hardly. What Americans intended, via the bush/cheney administration, was total destruction of the country to control it’s oil resources. Neither bush nor cheney nor any war cheerleader, ever had good intentions for Iraq. They could not care less if Iraqis live or die. And what the soldiers or Marines did was a reflection of what they were ordered to do, and/or their own evil nature allowed to run rampant.

He goes on: “we have to acknowledge that we were less effective, then, in probing beneath the carapace of terror to uncover other facets of Iraq’s culture and history that would have a determining impact on the American project to build a Western-style democracy, or at least the basics of a civil society.”

AMERICANS WHO ORDERED THE INVASION OF IRAQ DON’T GIVE A RAT’S ASS ABOUT A ‘WESTERN-STYLE DEMOCRACY’ OR ‘BASICS OF A CIVIL SOCIETY’. They never did and never will.

“They know, too, through coverage in this newspaper and others, of the deep fissures, of ethnicity, sect and tribe, that were camouflaged by the quarter-century of Mr. Hussein’s totalitarian rule.”

This is bullshit. While US papers talk about the ‘sectarian violence’ that is the result of Saddam’s years of ruling Iraq, they FAIL TO NOTE that the recent Iraqi refugees in next door Syria are not have any problems among Christians, Sunnis and Shias. If this sectarian violence was the result of anything other than the US invasion and occupation (and the al-qaeda wantabees who followed them), then there would be sectarian tension in Syria and Jordan. EXCEPT THERE IS NOT.

"As much as America’s policy failures,”

WHAT POLICY FAILURES? They deliberated planned every last detail of this invasion and occupation. They did it ON PURPOSE, ALL OF IT.

Opinion polls, including those commissioned by the American command, have long suggested [NO, OVERWELMINGLY SAID THEY WANTED - dancewater] that a majority of Iraqis would like American troops withdrawn, but another lesson to be drawn from Saddam Hussein’s years is that any attempt to measure opinion in Iraq is fatally skewed by intimidation. More often than not, people tell pollsters and reporters what they think is safe, not necessarily what they believe. My own experience, invariably, was that Iraqis I met who felt secure enough to speak [OR WANTED YOU TO LEAVE THEM ALONE, SINCE YOU ARE A CLUELESS IDIOT - dancewater] with candor had an overwhelming desire to see American troops remain long enough to restore stability.

That sentiment is not one that many critics of the war in the United States seem willing to accept, [BECAUSE IT IS FALSE - dancewater] but neither does it offer the glimmer of cheer that it might seem to offer to many supporters of the war. For it would be passing strange, after the years of unrelenting bloodshed, if Iraqis demanded anything else.

SO, THE AMERICANS ARE THE SOURCE OF THE VIOLENCE, YET THE IRAQIS THIS WRITER TALKS TOO WANTS US TROOPS TO SAY TO RESTORE STABILITY. IT WOULD BE VERY STRANGE FOR THE IRAQIS TO TAKE THIS POSITION, BECAUSE IT MAKES NO SENSE. Now, some of the Iraqis want the US to stay to protect them from the US-run, US-trained and US-funded IRAQI ARMY AND POLICE. How’ that for mission accomplished?

I’ll tell you what seems “surreal” – that this evil man is PAID to write this evil shit. I hope one day he actually realizes what happened to the Iraqi people, and I hope all the dead people of Iraq visits Burns in his dreams every night of his life for as long as he lives. Even then, I doubt that Burns will comprehend what evil he has done in the world. Or, as this journalist said:

Robert Fisk: The only lesson we ever learn is that we never learn