Craven
I too have found myself arguing positions which others often consider unbalanced or immoral, positions which can even surprise myself. I got in a fair bit of trouble last week when I expressed to someone that the single event which effected me most deeply was the protection of the Ministry of Oil while the National Museum was looted. The lady thought I ought to have been more concerned with those who'd died.
I think war is the most despicable of human activities, planned and perpetrated by individuals who are completely insulated from personal risk and whose children almost always are too. Scowcroft was right - Richard Perle ought to have been in the first wave of foot soldiers.
These people gain from war - they gain financially, or in ego gratification, or in temporary social stature. In the prosecution of war, they don't look tired or regretful or horrified the way Churchill often seemed. Instead, we see them ebullient and chest-puffed. They ARE Sadaams and Mussolinis, but in Western three piece suits. Amost to a man, they have lived lives of enormous wealth and priviledge. There are no plumbers or bakers in this crowd.
Given all of this, I am deeply relieved that more fathers and brothers and children and women didn't get blown to ****. But it seems to me, as I know it does to you, that is one of the few slivers of light in all of this, yet it is deeply shaded with the knowledge that it occured mainly for reasons of PR - to avoid repetition of the Viet Nam experience where the nation and the world SAW THE REALITY AND SAID "STOP!"
Gel
Thank you kindly for the link.
How can it be (and this is not directed at you Craven) that we, and particularly you American citizens, can abide such deceit by those who rule?
Thank you Blatham for expressing my rage
He stole the firt election, will he win the second on the bodies of women and children?
Published on Monday, May 12, 2003 by The Charleston Gazette (West Virginia)
Bush Should Be Impeached and Tried for War Crimes
by Denise Giardina
One image from the conflict in Iraq continues to haunt me. A photograph in the New York Times includes the school pictures of three girls. Marwa, Tabarek, and Safia Abbas were dark-haired beauties, aged 11, 8, and 5. They could be from anywhere, but until recently they lived in Baghdad. Note I refer to them in the past tense.
According to the Times, their family was agonizing how to tell their injured father that an American bomb killed his daughters. "It wasn't just ordinary love," they said. "He was crazy about them."
So much for photos. The most haunting quote has come from a military man, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Don Shepperd.
"The dog has caught the car," he said.
Indeed. Some fools may think the war in Iraq is over. In truth, it has just begun. And we all know what happens to dogs that catch cars, even if all they wanted was the oil.
Most of the world's nations, spiritual leaders, Nobel Peace Prize recipients, and artists, opposed this war. There was a reason for that. Consider the objections:
* The war would be bloody. It has been. The world community is documenting the widespread death and suffering that continue in Iraq. Americans may not understand this since American television has abandoned its responsibilities. The Abbas girls are only three of thousands of dead civilians.
Particularly appalling was the use of condemned weapons like cluster bombs which continue to kill noncombatants, especially children. The Pentagon has admitted that about one in 10 missiles missed their target. Add to that the reports in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the foreign press, of truckloads of dismembered bodies of women and children, of far greater casualties than the Gulf War, of U.S. troops killing civilians and journalists, sometimes indiscriminately, even firing upon ambulances. The protesters shot by U.S. troops in Fallujah were mostly schoolboys.
* The war would destabilize the Middle East and empower Islamic fundamentalists. Take out a dictator like Saddam Hussein without proper planning, and you get a power vacuum. The fundamentalists who gave us 9/11 are more than ready to step into it. Donald Rumsfeld says it won't happen. But how does he intend to stop it, except with another bloodbath?
* The Iraqi people would not be happy to have us stay and run their country for them. They clearly aren't.
* The war would be about oil. This seems accurate considering the care taken to protect the Iraqi Oil Ministry offices, while allowing the sacking of hospitals and museums. Iraqis go without water and electricity but the oil wells are running. Bush's corporate crony Bechtel is busy already building pipelines, and companies like ExxonMobil will be major players.
* Bush and Blair were lying about the threat Saddam Hussein posed to the world.
Armchair warriors, who seem to think combat is like a Civil War re-enactment in Putnam County, love to compare Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler. The comparison is absurd. Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein had nothing in common save cruelty and moustaches.
In 1938, Hitler commanded one of the most powerful armies on earth. In 2003, Hussein's army was a shadow of its 1991 strength, not remotely close to a force that could dominate the world. In 1938, Hitler took over Austria and attacked Czechoslovakia. In 2003, Saddam attacked and conquered no one. He was, in fact, scarcely able to defend his own country.
Hitler made clear his aim to conquer Europe and enslave its people while leading Germany to world domination. What Saddam Hussein made clear was that he was one of scores of vicious dictators in the world today. Left to himself, his regime would have imploded of its own evil and madness, as did that of Idi Amin in Uganda. Saddam lasted as long as he did only because of years of support from the Reagan administration, including Donald Rumsfeld.
Weapons of mass destruction? Saddam no longer had them. If he had, he would have used them. And if any are found now, the cabal that has hijacked our country will have planted them there. That is why the Bush administration has made clear it will not allow the U.N. back in the country to provide neutral inspections.
Here is what is coming clear. George W. Bush and his cabal lied to the American people so they could attack another country to seize its oil wealth. Bush has, as Doonesbury and others have pointed out, assumed the mantle of Julius Caesar. He is in the process of ruining the American republic and establishing an American/corporate empire. A favorite motto at the White House is "Let them hate us, as long as they fear us." Emperor Caligula liked that saying too.
The American people should be clear about two things. History never judges kindly a rich, powerful nation that attacks a small, poor one. The second is that empires ?- all empires ?- end up on the ashbin of history.
George W. Bush should be impeached. After that, he should stand beside Saddam Hussein in the dock to be tried for war crimes. First witnesses ?- though they cannot speak for themselves ?- should be Marwa, Tabarek, and Safia Abbas.
Giardina's novel "Saints and Villains," about German theologian and Nazi-resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, won the Boston Book Review's Fisk Fiction Prize in 1998.
###
Blatham -- What you say is exactly right. The administration is so bad that it's virtually impossible for me to feel, much less express, any fellow feeling with those who support it -- here in these pages or elsewhere. I was reading early this morning some reviews of the Sidney Blumenthal book about the Clinton administration (which I don't plan to read!) and was connecting the dots between the hounding of Clinton and the continued hounding of any entity which stands in the way of the right wing or which might serve their interests or self-glorification in any way. These are not reasonable people who the left is being rude about, but ruthless bastards who need to be rooted out before they do any more damage. So I don't hold to the "let's be nice" to their supporters. Their supporters are either thoughtless or ruthless themselves.
Indeed Bush should be impeached -- except that, along with everything else, the right has degraded impeachment.
Craven - Yours is a reasonable point of view and I respect your opinion, though I wonder whether it is a given that collateral casualties are greater when relying on smart-bombs than they would be with more protracted ground combat.
Tartarin
I know. I too am uniquely alarmed by not only these people, but the social and cultural factors which they utilize (eg, nationalism and xenophobia). It's a despicable combination of forces and it IS authoritarian in its coloration.
There was a wonderfully sophisticated statement about democracy from a West Wing episode. In that show, the administration is liberal democrat and as well-intentioned as we might hope an administration ought to be. When a key election fell to the opposition, one administration figure was bemoaning the loss and it's seriousness to their hopes and programs. A second character responded, "Democracy means that sometimes the wrong guys win."
I think we can safely assume that the present RNC would not agree with this statement.
An ethically run democratic election always means the right person wins.
It also always means that some people are unhappy with that result.
(This is a very different thing than the wrong person winning.)
and the reason for the electoral college was?
How do y'all get your avatars to move???
Uhhhhhhh Snood, you've been seeing moving avatars? For how long?
!!!! I always knew Snood was nuts!
dyslexia wrote:and the reason for the electoral college was?
I think you know the answer, but if you don't, it sounds like a good idea for a new topic.
Snood - I don't know about some of the talented techies, but I have a couple sites that have avatars and gifs with action. If you're interested, I can let you have the info. Although, if you go to google and type in animated atavars or animated gifs, you'll hit some sites.
Anything but Spike Jones in that hat.
Denzel, removing his shirt.......?
Sofia wrote:Anything but Spike Jones in that hat.
Denzel, removing his shirt.......?
Did he change his name from Lee?
Tatarin - I'm deeply offended. Stupid, maybe. But not crazy.
Definitely Denzel removing his shirt, please. Snood, you're not in Texas if you're not nuts. Ergo...
Dang.
My bad.
Hey, if its worth any points, I was certain you knew the secret of the moving avatars...
blatham wrote:Craven
I think war is the most despicable of human activities, planned and perpetrated by individuals who are completely insulated from personal risk and whose children almost always are too. Scowcroft was right - Richard Perle ought to have been in the first wave of foot soldiers.
These people gain from war - they gain financially, or in ego gratification, or in temporary social stature. In the prosecution of war, they don't look tired or regretful or horrified the way Churchill often seemed. Instead, we see them ebullient and chest-puffed. They ARE Sadaams and Mussolinis, but in Western three piece suits. Amost to a man, they have lived lives of enormous wealth and priviledge. There are no plumbers or bakers in this crowd.
While I agree that war is awful and generally undesirable, I doubt that one could rationalize the notion that it is the MOST despicable of human activities. That would imply that there is no such thing as a just war. Was France right in signing an armistice with Hitler? Should Britain have continued the fight after the fall of France, or should it have capitulated?
The fact is that Winston Churchill was hardly regretful about the necessity for war, whether to preserve the independent existence of Great Britain or merely to extend the empire. Indeed he was the principal advocate and planner for the ill-fated Galipoli campaign of WWI.
My objection to Blatham's views is that he assumes the necessities that; the intent of the U.S. government is objectively wrong; the motives of its leaders are equally wrong on a human level; the public utterances of its spokesmen are uniformly deceitful; its execution of the recent war was carelessly wasteful of Iraqi lives; its motives in allowing reporters unprecedented continuous access to combat units were to hide and deceive; etc.
On the other hand he also assumes the necessities that; his views are objectively correct; his subjective motives and those of the leaders of other governments which opposed the war are free of human foibles and frailties; newsmen freed from the shackles of the U.S. government would deliver complete, accurate, and objective reports of the conflict; other available means of carrying out the war could predictably lower the cost in human lives; and so on.
The profound bias here should be self-evident. It goes beyond the facts and beyond reason. Of course there are elements of truth in nearly all of his accusations. However the critical reader should recognize that his conclusions flow directly from his basic beliefs, and not from either the facts or a balanced view of history.
