Can you guess who said this?

After criticizing Israel's assault on Lebanon, he told assembled Western officials: "Just get your hands off Iraq and the Iraqi people and Muslim countries, and everything will be all right," and
"What has been done in Iraq is a kind of butchery of the Iraqi people."


Another report of the remarks included these telling statements.

"If a reconciliation project is going to work it has to talk to all the people," he said. "It must go through our Iraqi beliefs and perceptions. What we need is reconciliation between Iraqis only, there can be no third party."

To underscore his distaste for US forces in Iraq, he related an anecdote about how US soldiers keep people waiting in lines at checkpoints for hours because they insist on resting their bomb-sniffing dogs.

"The sleep of American dogs is more important than people being stopped in the street for hours," he said, evoking chuckles among Iraqi delegates.

The author of these statements? Speaker of the Iraqi's parliament, that's who.


Could it be that our puppets are beginning to pull their own strings?

Call me stupid

but there was a lot in this essay about money that I didn't know.

Our fearless leader

or should I say stupid leader?

Drown them in blood

Okay, I've decided: I want all of them--the Iraqi "army" and "police," the Iraqi insurgents and "terrorists," its civilians and innocents, the Sunnis and Shias and Turkomans and Kurds--all of them to die. I want the Israelis and Hamas and Hizbollahs (sp?) and Iranians and Syrians and Lebanese to die. I want the Egyptians and Saudis and Afghanis to die, as well as all Indians and Pakistanis and Chinese and Koreans (North and South) and Indonesians and Phillipinos and--you've got my drift. (Lately, I include in the list the Venezuelans, the Chileans, the Bolivians and Brazilians and Cubans, maybe the Mexicans, too.)

Wouldn't it be wonderful if there were no people on Earth, no nations, that didn't oppose the US version of the world? We'd be free to suck oil from wherever we wanted, to cut down timber, net all the fish, mine all the minerals, exploit all the workers. We could drive our SUVs at whatever speed we wanted, borrow all the money we needed, buy anything we desired.

Yup. That's what I want. Maybe then I can stop blogging. I'll be too busy buying and spending and speeding.

A query

I'd like my (numerous) readers to tell me of one thing--one thing--that's improving (a) in America, and (b) on Earth. Just asking.

My thoughts on Al Gore's candidacy for President

are captured precisely here.

The sad story of Mr. Wilson

This AP story of a Ramadi man is touching, tragic. "Destroying a village [in this case a city] in order to save it," just like in VietNam.

In the middle of the piece is an illuminating quote. After telling of Mr. Wilson's plight (and, presumably, the thousands of other Iraqis who've abandoned the city), the writer says, "In the vast scale of suffering and displacement the country has experienced, Mr. Wilson's departure is the tiniest of blips. But it's a vivid symbol of the hardships faced by the U.S.-led coalition and the elected Iraqi government in restoring peace and quiet for the countless other Mr. Wilsons of Iraq."

Hardships faced by the coalition?

Condi's free pass

Our Secretary of State was asleep at the switch during pre-9/11 when she was, supposedly, our security chief; she was the mouthpiece for Bush in the Iraq warmup (recall her "mushroom cloud" reference?), and since then has been a main shill for Bush's failed policies, including in this outrageous appearance on TV. Note how she continues to conflate the madness in the Middle East with 9/11, hoping that the sheeplike American media and citizenry will continue to endure Bush's "policies" in Iraq and his blind support of Israel as part of his "war on terror." Indeed, her terming of criticism of those policies as "grotesque" is grotesque.

It's time we called her the militaristic whore she is, an evil force in our international relations, and stop giving her allowances because of her race/gender. If you think I'm off base here, just consider how her recent words would be treated by the media--especially the liberal media--if uttered by Rummie or Cheney. There's be a howl of protest. But when spoken by Condi, they raise barely a ripple.

This could get interesting, verrry interesting

The prosecution (by us, not them) of the Marines who're charged with rape/murder of that teenager and her family. The Bushies are hoping like crazy that they can fry all of the accuseds to show how just America is. But they can't get DNA from the victim's body because under Islam the exhumation of a dead body isn't permissible. So, the Army prosecution (the only prosecution that our occupancy laws allows) may misfire.

Wouldn't that be the Ritz? The Muslims rise up in outrage when the rape-murdering Marines are given a light sentence (or are acquitted) because of a "technicality," when all Iraqis know--absolutely, they know--that the Marines are guilty and should pay the ultimate price.

We reap what we sow. Madness.

It's a madhouse, a goddam madhouse

During the "clamp down" of Baghdad, a group of militants who, according to a witness, were driving military vehicles, kidnapped the Iraqi Olympic committee, its body guards and various visitors who were filming the meeting.

Yup--you read that correctly. A total of more than fifty people kidnapped in the heart of curfew-closed Baghdad by armed men wearing uniforms. Or something like that. Nobody knows why, nobody knows who. And I sure wanna know--with all of our, and Iraqi, forces closing down the city: How?

Update: Some of the captives were released, but scores are still being held by the gunmen. Still--nobody knows whazzup. The word anarchy applies, so does chaos. And it's still only the middle of the summer.

I wonder how the US public would react

if this quote from the Army Chief of Staff about the current status of US involvement in Iraq was widely known.

"The challenge … is becoming more complex, and it's going to continue to be. That's why I'll tell you I think we're closer to the beginning than we are to the end of all this."

Yup, there's no light at the end of the tunnel, there's no insurgency in its "last throes," there's only an ongoing "long, hard slog" on which we've just begun to engage.

Have a nice summer.

I grind my teeth

when I read articles like this, showing the agonizing futility of our "mission" in Iraq, and our wretched incompetence in working toward it. For the last two years, at least--since all other fabricated justifications for our waste of lives and treasure in Iraq evaporated--our stated task has been to create a sound local force to secure the nation. And now we learn that all we've done is arm sects of Muslims who, of course, have decades of scores to settle.

Stay the course? What course?

Proxy wars

During the Cold War, there were plenty of these. Now we have an even more insidious form, where the purpose is merely to deflect attention from the US policies and activities in the world. Bush is remaining silent, allowing the carnage to develop between historic adversaries in the region. This is a perfect situation for Bush. He can stand back and allow CNN and Faux News cover this new war, so that our ongoing misery in Iraq falls back into the back pages and Bush once again becomes a war president.

Problem: With "traditional Democrats" (Hillary, Biden and, yes, Lieberman) supporting Israel blindly, always, they'll parrot Bush's hands-off policy. So the same schism within the Democratic party that has split it over Iraq's misery will continue, empowering the Republicans to claim they're on the side of the "angels," namely the long-enshrined Israelis.

Newsspeak

Straight out of Orwell. Note in this official Centom press release that the person whom they call a "terrorist" throughout the release was engaged in a firefight with "coalition forces" when he was killed. No terror involved, no murder of civilians, just armed resistance to the occupying forces. That's not a terrorist under any definition--except the Pentagon's. And that' s precisely how words get used, their meaning distorted, to fit the government's agenda.

An army of computer geeks

So, the wash-out rate of Army enlistees has declined dramatically, because boot camp demands have been lessened. No more miles-long marches, no more DI tirades. Instead of physically fit soldiers, we'll now be defended by nerds. Makes sense to me.

Occupation, bigtime

It's time for Americans to understand--deeply, coherently--what the US role in Iraq is. We're a victorious invading army, able to control by fiat the governance of the country, the absolute dictators of the policies enforced by the leaders we installed. When we frown on amnesty for Iraqis who killed our troops, such amnesty disappears. When we suggest no pullout time for our forces, no such time is announced. And now, when our troops rape and murder Iraqi civilians, we demand immunity for them--and the Iraqi government accedes to our demands, seeking only to view the proceedings by which the malefactors are "brought to justice."

The U.S. finds itself in a grotesquely impenetrable state. We stay because we cannot quit. We remain because no one has the courage to ask us to leave. And we have no place to go, no other place.

Welcome to America, world.

Worse than VietNam

In VietNam, we did battle with two different groups: South Vietnamese who opposed our puppet regime and sought to take over the country on their own; and North Vietnamese who supplied the former with materiel and troops. In Iraq, on the other hand, we're doing battle with Sunni insurgents, foreign fighters and now--with fury--Shia followers of various leaders who are in power in the Iraqi parliament, including the Medhi army that controls much of Baghdad. No wonder our troops are coming home bewildered. They have no clue whom or why they're killing in Iraq.

It's no surprise to me

that, as a recent Gallup poll has found, "Suggestions that the United States engage in some type of gradual withdrawal [from Iraq] increase significantly as educational level increases." I'm not talking about bigotry here, just education, because of the dumbing-down effect of most news sources. A similar poll would, I have no doubt, correlate educational level to news sources, to show that the lower the education the more likely to receive news from formulaic sources, like TV networks and news agencies.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Embedded, or in bed with?

This reporter from Newsweek Magazine tells of a new US military practice: screening reporters who are allowed to accompany troops into the field. Seems that now, in order to be an embedded reporter, you must not have written articles that the Pentagon doesn't approve of.

Well, Whaddaya know

I do believe I made it onto their lists. (I attended at least one of the protests in front of the Santa Barbara courthouse--see last line of the article.)