by StarmanSkye » Sat Apr 15, 2006 4:16 pm
GC said:<br>"It would have been better to have respected Iraqis and their culture, to have stood back and dealt with them fairly, to have offered them a better deal for their oil than the French, Russians and Germans did in the months before the invasion. It would have been better to have trained thousands of Americans to speak Iraqi, to offer to go in and work to enhance their cultural places so that the world could have flocked to that part of the world to share in our communal history.<br><br>"Most of all, it would have been shrewd to the utmost degree to have worked on a settlement of the Israeli/Palestinian dispute...to have put pressure on Israel to find a long range settlement. To have enforced the borders and International law to protect the rights of all Arabs in the ME."<br>***<br>Well and truly spoken -- It amazes me, well, maybe more accurately 'disgusts' is the better word, that there's like NO thinking or talking in the 'public forum' about what alternative strategems there are or might have been to resolving disputes and disagreements with Iraq --and now Iran-- other than the 'military option' -- even the posturing about 'Diplomacy' is mostly a smokescreen. <br><br>It's a crisis of true leadership and creativity, a poverty of imagination and cowardice of initiative, perhaps indicative of how abuse of power and our subverted institutions are symptoms of our diseased and dysfunctional American society under a military psyop Command-and-Control mindset.<br><br>Iraq's piecemeal dissolution, it's 'erasure' of history through the 'accident' of widespread and systematic, even planned and organized looting (recall reports of well-coordinated professional theives who hit the National Museum, knowing exactly where the biggest treasures were and how to get them, arriving and departing in an armed convoy of busses while US troops merely looked on?), the destruction and dismantling of basic civil society institutions, the 'failure' of hospital and school reconstruction through squandering and mismanagement of funds and diversion of resources (contractors just abandoning their unfinished projects with apparently no breach-of-contract penalties, like Wha? Less than 1/4 of hospitals fully restored and functioning as contracted), and the targetted assassination and brain-drain of professionals fleeing the failed state -- Good GOD, Iraq was a model of progressive, modern development in the Middle East in the early 80s, and now it's fragmenting under civil war, with some 1000 people being killed daily, dumped in rivers and ditches and mass-graves -- The Baghdad morgue alone recieves an average of 85 bodies a day --<br><br>--quote--<br>Another group, the People's Kifah, involved hundreds of academics and volunteers in a survey conducted in coordination with "grave-diggers across Iraq." The group said it also "obtained information from hospitals and spoke <br>to thousands of witnesses who saw incidents in which Iraqi civilians were killed by U.S. fire." <br><br>The project was abandoned after one of the researchers was captured by Kurdish militiamen and handed over to U.S. forces. He was never seen again. But in less than two months' work, the group documented about 37,000 violent <br>civilian deaths up to October 2003. <br><br>The Baghdad central morgue alone accounts for roughly 30,000 bodies annually. That is besides the large number of bodies taken to morgues in cities such as Basra, Mosul, Ramadi, Kirkuk, Irbil, Najaf and Karbala. <br>--unquote--<br>From: InterPress Service - Apr 15, 2006 <br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=32896">www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=32896</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> <br>Baghdad Morgue Overflowing Daily <br>by Dahr Jamail and Arkan Hamed <br><br>The incident detail above stands out, about a member of The People's Kifah which was tabulating civilian deaths from US military incidents who was captured by Kurds and released to US officials, never to be seen again ...<br><br>America's long, ignominious history with Death Squads has never been adequately investigated, and apparently continues under various guises and covers. Other reports indicate Mossad assassination squads may be involved in targetting Iraqi academics and scientists -- part of what might be seen as undermining Iraq's future.<br><br>Starman<br><br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>