Liberation

Iraqis enjoy freedom, Putsch-style

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

04/30/03

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/VRWC/liberation.htm

Boy, we’re just liberating the hell out of the Iraqi people, aren’t we?

In addition to the liberations we had two weeks ago, we liberated a bunch more people in a town called Fallujah over the past two days. On the first day, we liberated either 13 (the US military count) or 17 (what the local hospital claimed). The US media, always willing to sacrifice accuracy for the sake of sounding authoritative, split the difference and declared the toll to be 15.

In addition to those liberated, an additional 75 were reminded that you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

Then the next day, two more got liberated, apparently for complaining about the liberation exercises of the day before, and 15 more were given omelet recipes.

If we keep liberating at this rate, we can quit worrying about an Islamic revolution because we’ll have done genocided the whole lot of them.

You know, you can’t just go around shooting into crowds of civilians. It’ll cause talk. Someone should remind the Gomer Pyles over there that this probably isn’t a good policy in the long run.

Accounts differ, of course. Accounts always differ. The Army claims the crowd fired first, and the crowd says the Army just opened up without cause.

Apparently nobody in this army has ever heard of the phrase "warning shots." When you have a crowd of 200 people, and you open up, killing over a dozen and injuring 75, it’s obvious that you aren’t wasting time and letting any of the crowd escape by firing into the air. Even in Iraq, it’s a pretty unusual crowd that doesn’t scatter if gunfire breaks out. Even in the previous incidents in Mosul a fortnight ago (16 dead, some 20 injured) the army at least claimed to have fired in the air to scatter the crowd, and then assumed anyone left standing in the square blinking stupidly around at all the open space around them must be a terrorist, and shot to liberate.

At least now the American press is reporting this stuff. The fact that Putsch declared the war to be over meant that right wingers couldn’t pull their usual blackmail tactic of accusing anyone who said anything embarrassing about the attack of committing treason.

Dozens of newspapers are openly accusing Putsch of lying about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which, despite Putsch’s promises that he knew exactly what Iraq had and where they had them, haven’t turned up. Russia’s Vladimir Putin openly mocked visiting Tony Blair over that issue, having taken quite a bit of abuse from the Americans for expressing doubts about said weapons before the war. Blair himself desperately promised parliament yesterday that they would turn up, but didn’t try explaining why they weren’t where Putsch claimed to know they were.

A pity they couldn’t work up the courage to ask questions BEFORE the war. At least 5,000 lives might have been saved.

So, on top of the utter embarrassment of having the casus belli blow up on them, they have a media that is scrambling belatedly for a little respectability and responsibility, and isn’t in the least bit interested in standing alongside the administration and proudly declaring, "Oh, all right – we lied too."

Nor can there be any doubt that George deliberately and maliciously lied, not only to the American people, but to the few allies he could convince to follow him along his path to an invasion of Iraq. He claimed that they knew exactly where these weapons were, and given how urgent it was to find these weapons and tell the legions of doubters that they were wrong all along – both from the viewpoint of political gain and for the sake of America’s credibility – the lack of any such finding becomes ever more embarrassing. Tony Blair assured parliament that the weapons would turn up, and the tone of desperation in his voice was unmistakable. He stands to lose everything if it turns out that Putsch lied, and he knows it.

For America, the costs are huge. Much of the world already had decided that this government had no intention of honorable and peaceful behavior, and as time goes on, even America’s supporters are beginning to turn and wonder just how widespread and blatant American lies were. Could America be trusted? After her behavior of the past two years, the answer to an increasing number of nations was "no."

The Romans didn’t have to give a damn if anyone trusted them or not. Nor did the British, or other empires, and they didn’t. But they didn’t have to face weapons of mass destruction, held by nations and terrorists alike. Nuclear weapons are the six-guns of the 21^st century, the equalizer that allows North Korea to stand up to America. Biotoxins and chemical weapons are literally the poison pill that makes engagement unpalatable to America.

There’s already evidence that many countries and groups are scrambling to get such weapons for the explicit purpose of staving off American aggression. So much for containment.

I don’t think this tactic of crowd control in which troops gun down large numbers of people is going to endear us to the Iraqis, or much of anyone else. Outside the flood of propaganda that envelops Americans, there is still such a thing as honest moral outrage, and right wingers will be shocked to learn that mass murder, even if committed by American troops, is considered a more serious crime than a presidential blow job.

But the right wingers, never well-grounded in reality and utterly amoral, are gleefully proclaiming that the issue of whether Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and was therefore a threat never was that important, that they went into Iraq to "liberate" the Iraqi people. The president lied and attacked another country without cause, but that’s ok in the eyes of these moral derelicts of the right. America did it because America is good and other people are evil, and that’s justification enough.

Bad enough that morons like that are allowed to run loose without a leash. But they are running this country.

Liberating it, as it were.