Don' it make you prouder'n shit?
http://tohellwithculture.blogspot.com/
Tonight, we hanged former Iraqi dictator and 40-year CIA asset Saddam Hussein at an undisclosed location apparently outside of the Green Zone in Baghdad.
The major US networks are now falling over themselves trying to figure out whether or not to show the footage of his demise.
No sentient being can feel any good will be achieved by this naked act of horror. Apparently Bush slept soundly in his bed while this dirty work was done but had been thoughtful enough to prepare a statement congratulating the Iraqi people on giving him such a fair trial.
This would be the trial that you and I know almost nothing of due to the draconian reporting parameters our own government placed on it and which the suppine media were only too happy to follow. The same trial that everyone from the American Bar Association to Amnesty International declared a sham and a scandal. And, of course, we are talking about an American President applauding the idea of fair trials while he and his henchmen dedicate an unGodly amount of their own time and resources to eliminating any right to such a thing in America itself.
Yet, even a cursory glance through the file marked "Handy Arabic Dictators Who Will Do Our Bidding" reveals enough dirt to illustrate with perfect clarity just why this thing was kibboshed from the outset.
Saddam, we know now, was A Company Man. Supported by the CIA since the sixties, Saddam lead a coup which Kennedy's people described as "a win for our side." Once he was installed, BP, Bechtel and GE all became major beneficiaries of his US-friendly worldview. He built a huge army which the US and Britain gladly equipped -- knowing full well that his approach to internal dissent was almost exclusively barbarous. In the 80's, Donald Rumsfeld famously visited him and spent useful time in Baghdad beach-heading for US and British business interests which had by now stretched to the supply of chemical and biological weapons materials too.
Saddam was our monster and a very useful one too. With Iran in flux he could be goaded easily in to launching an insanely costly and pointless war that would ensure that Arab fought Arab. And, of course, a decade later he stumbled in to Kuwait having been greenlighted on the notion by US Ambassador April Glaspie whom James Baker had asked to emphasize the US's disinterest in Iraq's border dispute with Kuwait.
I guess that he may have misheard Ms. Glaspie as it later turned out that what the US was really disinterested in was the plight of the Kurds in the north and the Marsh Arabs in the south. George HW Bush urged that these peoples should rise up but then authorized Saddam to fly helicopter gunships within established no-fly zones so that their destruction was swift and merciless.
You see, we weren't finished with Saddam yet. The last thing we needed was a collapsed Iraq. This would have been a strategic disaster and might well have seen the birth of a Supra-Iranian state.
The day drew to a close with the evil of sanctions. Sanctions that all agreed meant almost nothing to Saddam but turned a nation with a huge middle-class in to one of the poorest and most malnourished on the planet.
When asked about a UNICEF/WHO report that put infant deaths caused by the sanctions at approximately 500,000 in a decade, the charming Madeline Albright said that she felt it was "worth it."
We would do well to honor this moment. To look at it closely and deeply. For in the story of Saddam and the thirty year tragedy of Iraq we have a very clear lesson in what is really going on and what we allow in our name.
Saddam was an evil man. But he was indulged and encouraged by those who connive daily in a viciously immoral war on all of us. Saddam did terrible things. But he was a bit player in the bigger production that is deep politics.
You think we're the good guys? That it's the white hats versus the black ones?
I was reminded recently of the little reported scandal of Saddam's mass graves. Or, rather, the almost complete lack of them.
Before the invasion, Human Rights groups had estimated some 500,000 people had been 'vanished' by Saddam and his fearsome security apparatus. Our old friend, Iraqi PM and part time Iranian spy Iyad Allawi said that the number was most likely a million and yet by the middle of 2004 less than 5,000 bodies had been recovered despite a concerted effort by at least two US government supported agencies.
This is how it goes.
We're not winning in Iraq but we're not losing either. The capture of Osama has not been botched, it's simply a success that hasn't occurred yet.
And so on, and so forth.
We are no longer untroubled - we are indifferent. We might exist there; but should we really live there? We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial - I believe we are lost.
by professorpan » Sat Dec 30, 2006 2:20 am 
