To the Death, Crushing the insurgency, saving Iraq.

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Of all the articles on Iraq I have read in a while a few stood out, and one of them was one about the opinion of a former NSA boss, retired General William E Odom on Iraq. He dared to say that he thought the US should leave asap and cut their losses as staying would only increase the price for an unavoidable outcome.

Thanks to the US intervention Iraq will IMO blow up anyway, leaving would not only surprise the world with sudden insight, but also counter Bin Laden's talk about the US conquering and crusading the middle east (Bin must have read National Review to get such far-fetched thoughts ... more on that later) ...

Unavoidably, he took heat, like from intellectual dwarfs like Rush Limbaugh, who took offence in Omon being quoted on an Arab newspaper first (sic!). Right, but what about Odom's arguments? Nevermind.

When it is saddening on the home front, the situation at the actual front isn't much better: The US go to Iraq to liberate them from Saddams dictatorship – and what happens?

• They booted Saddam only to put Bremer in Saddam's old palace - from where now Bremer, just as insulated from the Iraqis as Saddam was, decrees over Iraq ...
• The US move in to stop Saddam’s cracking down on civilians (remember Halabja ?) ...
• and when in Fallujah one marine and 4 US mercenaries are killed – the US move in to level parts of the city “to show strength” and to intimidate the insurgents by doing so - and kill some 700 people in the process, an unknown percentage of which were civilians, objects of a display of force, like: "Sorry for the loss of your families pals, but you have to understand, it was high time we showed we really mean business!" - just like Saddam the US are imposing order with brute force and exemplary violence ...
• ... among other things the US went in to stop Saddam’s despotism - and one of the first things to do for the US is to set up detention camps beyond the rule of law ...
• like in Saddam’s old torture prison where seemingly US troops carried on the tradition in their unique way: Where Saddam employed brutish thugs for his dirty work, the US have undisciplined pervs and sickos instead, keen to help breaking the prisoners for interrogation, who didn’t even need to be ordered.

These are just highlights, and likely the ones that are seen in the arab world especially. Looking at the recent pics from Iraq, the ones of retards lording over Iraqis for fun, and the US bombing civilian quarters in Fallujah, the US have lost the war for pictures already.

The Bush administration has been, despite all their spinmeister savvy, unable to control the information flow from Iraq the last year and the bad pics don’t mean the press is mean but that the situation is grim. The symbols couldn’t have been chosen worse.
A very good comment on that from TomDispatch, hosting an article from Juan Cole (whose website InformedComment is one of the bright spots on the internet concerning Iraq.

But then for the National Review readers there is hope! The May 3 issue yells from the cover “To the Death, Crushing the insurgency, saving Iraq."*

‘nuff said A good comment on it is this one: National Review’s Plan for Victory in Iraq.

What makes me truly and utterly sick is that all the warmongering, soft-bellied armchair-farts of National review, American Enterprise Institute or the Wall Street Journal (or FOX, the Weekly Standard or the Washington Post for good measure) spout out their imbecilities in the safety of their offices, preaching sacrifice, blood and gore while giving nothing but hollow words. What have Bill O’Reilley, Anne Coulter or their more intellectual colleagues like Max Boot or contributed to the war?

Actually not much except for pushing the discussion to the right, delaying long overdue reality-related adjustments in policy. Eventually, Chalabi got the boot and the neo-con agenda for Iraqs looks dead. But that’s too little too late. For the actual US policy on Iraq, of trying to cure the last mistake with a new one, there is a wonderful german word, named “verschilmmbessern” – it basically means to make things worse by trying to fix them.

I’d really like to see those “let’s get tough on Iraq” braindeads being treated like the Iraqis on these pics were threated - only to see if they would hold up their current point of view that human rights are for sissies and that the rights of physical integrity and dignity are dispensable - in a war we all have to make sacrifices, right? I cannot imagine any one of them to really do what they propagandise. But they preach “to get tough”. For crimes, like the mistreatment of the Iraqis in US prisons, agitators like them are responsible too. With a right intellectual elite like that one doesn’t need to wonder about soldiers like those in Abu Ghraib.
To reverse a conservative line: They are giving aid and comfort to the perpetrators.

Didn’t the US go to the middle east to make a difference from all the thugs? If so, it seems as if National Review didn’t share this sense of mission: Theirs is “absolutism”, not democracy. And to me, that smells like facism.


* How can they do that? Talk about wanton and irresponsibility. That will only bring hordes of morons to reiterate theses, not understood, on internet web-blogs and message boards – the same way Max Boot brought them the “pigblood against martyrs” strategy from the Phillippines … In “Savage wars for Peace” Boot found that the slaughter of just some 200.000 Philippinos by US troops was actually a good price and suggests the Phillipines as a model for success in Iraq Bleh. And now I see this stuff all over the place. ). I wonder if Boot writes all his stuff only to piss me off . A great comment on Boot here.

[ May 04, 2004, 19:59: Message edited by: Ragusa ]