Don't Mention The War
19/03/2013 11:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
izmeinaThe silence is almost deafening. It is strange how the local media considered a certain anniversary worthy of attention only in the last week or so when back in 2011 some three months before September, there was so much talk about the Twin Towers and 9/11 in general
Back in 2002 and early 2003 there was no escape from the drama in Iraq and now you have to go pretty much sniffing the story out on the mainstream media. But there are notable exceptions (Robert Fisk is still the voice in the Wilderness that no one listens to until some twenty years later)
Having followed events in that bit of the world ever since the 1979 Valentine’s Day arrival of a certain Ayatollah, it’s been rather a roller coaster ride. But the six months or so leading up to the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003 (with the then Australian prime minister not just grovelling along but baying for blood with the worst of them) must have been the most amazing example ever of Doublethink, double standards or maybe just plain old fashioned hypocrisy
Izzie is old enough to remember the 1979 US embassy hostage saga in Teheran and how the Iranians waited until the very day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration to hand over the hostages. Then there was the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and their eventual departure with their tails between their legs, the opportunistic war with Iran that went on for years and years. No one in the West seemed to mind Saddam Hussein back then and Robert Fisk was one of the few journalists reporting on the train loads of Iranian child soldiers poisoned by Iraqi mustard gas. Those days Iran was The Great Satan and the enemy of our enemy is our friend and all that sort of stuff. Not to mention there was a buck to be made selling weapons to these wankers. There’d be the odd little two line snippet in some tiny corner in the middle of the paper about the war or every day life in either Iran or Iraq. One such innocuous story claimed that you need to have a licence to own a type writer in Iraq. Even back in those days this serpent was cynical enough to realize the real meaning of that statement. A type writer was a big deal and a deadly weapon in the hands of the opposition in the days before mobile phones and the internet
But Saddam Hussein got too big for his boots and went invading western allies like Kuwait. Suddenly invading your neighbours was a bad bad thing that had to be punished. The rules have changed again since then.
The USA and allies put Saddam Hussein back in his box back then and we guess he would have stayed there if they did not need a new Great Satan since no one in the Bush administration was going to nuke Saudi Arabia for supplying the 19 hijackers who blew up all those planes and buildings and killed all those people back in September 2011
(Izzie is normally a nice reasonable sensible serpent but nuking Saudi Arabia or Pakistan back to the Stone Age is a cause worthy of unleashing the inner Beast. I’d even put a few coins in the collection tin)
Before long the goblins of Washington became incapable of uttering a sentence without including both Al Quaida and Saddam Hussein always stuck together like a pair of Siamese Twins. Tell a big lie long enough and loud enough and people will start to believe it
Then amazingly they discovered all those awful things that took place during the Iran Iraq war. Saddam is evil because he ‘has weapons of mass destruction’ and he tortures people. Meanwhile they all continued to wine and dine and grovel up to Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and that Assad guy in Syria and invite them both to the best parties.
Poor old Secretary of State Colin Powell sold his soul and made a complete idiot of himself with those pathetic powerpoint presentations at the United Nations. The stories of pipes, trucks and yellowcake got crazier and more desperate. Even some government officials seemed to be squirming with embarrassment and the handful who called out this bullshit were given hell. Valerie Plame anyone?
These people were also calling out that agent Chalabi’s ‘positive proof’ as a piece of crap. But they would have better luck convincing a conference of Creationists about the Joys of Evolution.
No one messes with Georgie Boy when he’s in one of those born again “Don’t confuse me with the facts - my mind is made up” moods.
What chance has a banana got of being acquitted when a monkey holds court? Every time the Iraqi government complied with one of the seemingly impossible American demands then they would then come up with another one. The true proof that the weapons were not there or not in working order was very simple even before the invasion. If the Americans really believed Saddam had them then they never would have invaded because he most certainly would have used them. No one ever dreams of invading Israel or North Korea and Iran is getting a bit iffy these days too.
It was so amazing that the nation to first use nuclear weapons in war was the one ranting loudest about the possibility of anyone else possessing weapons of mass destruction
Oh the neo cons and their mob so so like to claim that they acted in good faith but were misled by erroneous intelligence at the time. They may muse about the joys of 20/20 hindsight that the cynics such as this serpent have the good luck to possess. That too is a complete crock of crap. They were so desperate to justify their position that they simply created their own reality when the one out there did not conform to their expectations.
But just when one thought they could not sink any lower in the cesspit of hypocrisy they once again excelled themselves. Within a few weeks of the invasion the televisions screens were filled with images of those awful prisons where Saddam Hussein tortured people
Within a year the stories of the hooded faces, attack dogs and pyramids of prisoners were all over the papers. This was at first dismissed as Iraqi propaganda, then it was a few bad apples, then it was desperate times call for desperate measures and before we knew it Donald Rumsfield and his mate Alberto Gonzales and a bunch of brown nosed lawyers were justifying torture and suggesting that it should even be legalized. Half of Hollywood seemed to agree. This must have been one of the fastest U turns in the history of politics.
If the invasion of Iraq was the lashing out of an enraged superpower bent on revenge after the humiliating attacks on its heartland then it failed miserably. It could not bring back a single one of the several thousand killed in 2001 but just multiplied the carnage a hundred fold and all against a nation whose only connection to those events was wishful thinking
If even one percent of the families of the 200,000 or more Iraqis killed in the ten years since the invasion decide to seek revenge then the USA is in for some serious payback indeed. And as is ever the case those who pay the price will never be those who actually had the blood on their hands
But maybe it is a bloodless revenge that the Iraqis will have. The US government trashed their land, their society and all sorts of infrastructure. They financed this grand adventure by giving tax cuts to all those Hummer drivers and putting the war on the credit card. I’m reminded of the social commentator P J Rourke who got taken on a grand tour of one of the US air bases in the middle east. He made a wonderfully snarky and absolutely insightful remark along the lines “If we had known that it would have cost so much to steal Iraqi oil we would have been better off just buying it”
Maybe ten years from now GWB, Rumsfield, Chaney, Tony Blair and John Howard will be in the dock at the Hague on war crimes charges. But it’s not a just world and the Hague is only for the herrings. The sharks and piranhas just swim around the world freely doing business as usual
Back in 2002 and early 2003 there was no escape from the drama in Iraq and now you have to go pretty much sniffing the story out on the mainstream media. But there are notable exceptions (Robert Fisk is still the voice in the Wilderness that no one listens to until some twenty years later)
Having followed events in that bit of the world ever since the 1979 Valentine’s Day arrival of a certain Ayatollah, it’s been rather a roller coaster ride. But the six months or so leading up to the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003 (with the then Australian prime minister not just grovelling along but baying for blood with the worst of them) must have been the most amazing example ever of Doublethink, double standards or maybe just plain old fashioned hypocrisy
Izzie is old enough to remember the 1979 US embassy hostage saga in Teheran and how the Iranians waited until the very day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration to hand over the hostages. Then there was the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and their eventual departure with their tails between their legs, the opportunistic war with Iran that went on for years and years. No one in the West seemed to mind Saddam Hussein back then and Robert Fisk was one of the few journalists reporting on the train loads of Iranian child soldiers poisoned by Iraqi mustard gas. Those days Iran was The Great Satan and the enemy of our enemy is our friend and all that sort of stuff. Not to mention there was a buck to be made selling weapons to these wankers. There’d be the odd little two line snippet in some tiny corner in the middle of the paper about the war or every day life in either Iran or Iraq. One such innocuous story claimed that you need to have a licence to own a type writer in Iraq. Even back in those days this serpent was cynical enough to realize the real meaning of that statement. A type writer was a big deal and a deadly weapon in the hands of the opposition in the days before mobile phones and the internet
But Saddam Hussein got too big for his boots and went invading western allies like Kuwait. Suddenly invading your neighbours was a bad bad thing that had to be punished. The rules have changed again since then.
The USA and allies put Saddam Hussein back in his box back then and we guess he would have stayed there if they did not need a new Great Satan since no one in the Bush administration was going to nuke Saudi Arabia for supplying the 19 hijackers who blew up all those planes and buildings and killed all those people back in September 2011
(Izzie is normally a nice reasonable sensible serpent but nuking Saudi Arabia or Pakistan back to the Stone Age is a cause worthy of unleashing the inner Beast. I’d even put a few coins in the collection tin)
Before long the goblins of Washington became incapable of uttering a sentence without including both Al Quaida and Saddam Hussein always stuck together like a pair of Siamese Twins. Tell a big lie long enough and loud enough and people will start to believe it
Then amazingly they discovered all those awful things that took place during the Iran Iraq war. Saddam is evil because he ‘has weapons of mass destruction’ and he tortures people. Meanwhile they all continued to wine and dine and grovel up to Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and that Assad guy in Syria and invite them both to the best parties.
Poor old Secretary of State Colin Powell sold his soul and made a complete idiot of himself with those pathetic powerpoint presentations at the United Nations. The stories of pipes, trucks and yellowcake got crazier and more desperate. Even some government officials seemed to be squirming with embarrassment and the handful who called out this bullshit were given hell. Valerie Plame anyone?
These people were also calling out that agent Chalabi’s ‘positive proof’ as a piece of crap. But they would have better luck convincing a conference of Creationists about the Joys of Evolution.
No one messes with Georgie Boy when he’s in one of those born again “Don’t confuse me with the facts - my mind is made up” moods.
What chance has a banana got of being acquitted when a monkey holds court? Every time the Iraqi government complied with one of the seemingly impossible American demands then they would then come up with another one. The true proof that the weapons were not there or not in working order was very simple even before the invasion. If the Americans really believed Saddam had them then they never would have invaded because he most certainly would have used them. No one ever dreams of invading Israel or North Korea and Iran is getting a bit iffy these days too.
It was so amazing that the nation to first use nuclear weapons in war was the one ranting loudest about the possibility of anyone else possessing weapons of mass destruction
Oh the neo cons and their mob so so like to claim that they acted in good faith but were misled by erroneous intelligence at the time. They may muse about the joys of 20/20 hindsight that the cynics such as this serpent have the good luck to possess. That too is a complete crock of crap. They were so desperate to justify their position that they simply created their own reality when the one out there did not conform to their expectations.
But just when one thought they could not sink any lower in the cesspit of hypocrisy they once again excelled themselves. Within a few weeks of the invasion the televisions screens were filled with images of those awful prisons where Saddam Hussein tortured people
Within a year the stories of the hooded faces, attack dogs and pyramids of prisoners were all over the papers. This was at first dismissed as Iraqi propaganda, then it was a few bad apples, then it was desperate times call for desperate measures and before we knew it Donald Rumsfield and his mate Alberto Gonzales and a bunch of brown nosed lawyers were justifying torture and suggesting that it should even be legalized. Half of Hollywood seemed to agree. This must have been one of the fastest U turns in the history of politics.
If the invasion of Iraq was the lashing out of an enraged superpower bent on revenge after the humiliating attacks on its heartland then it failed miserably. It could not bring back a single one of the several thousand killed in 2001 but just multiplied the carnage a hundred fold and all against a nation whose only connection to those events was wishful thinking
If even one percent of the families of the 200,000 or more Iraqis killed in the ten years since the invasion decide to seek revenge then the USA is in for some serious payback indeed. And as is ever the case those who pay the price will never be those who actually had the blood on their hands
But maybe it is a bloodless revenge that the Iraqis will have. The US government trashed their land, their society and all sorts of infrastructure. They financed this grand adventure by giving tax cuts to all those Hummer drivers and putting the war on the credit card. I’m reminded of the social commentator P J Rourke who got taken on a grand tour of one of the US air bases in the middle east. He made a wonderfully snarky and absolutely insightful remark along the lines “If we had known that it would have cost so much to steal Iraqi oil we would have been better off just buying it”
Maybe ten years from now GWB, Rumsfield, Chaney, Tony Blair and John Howard will be in the dock at the Hague on war crimes charges. But it’s not a just world and the Hague is only for the herrings. The sharks and piranhas just swim around the world freely doing business as usual
