_________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
[Joe is hereby put on probation indefinitely for polluting the list. -ed.]
> [Joe Dees] We've taken the Palace! > > [Mermaid]Do you feel like a man again? > > [Joe Dees]I always did. Do you feel like a crowpie lunch? > > [Mermaid]Depends. What is a crowpie lunch? > When one eats crow, it means that they eat their own words. This war is NOT a quagmire, massive numbers of Iraqi civilians have NOT been killed, coalition losses have NOT been heavy, foreign terrorists HAVE been killed fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with the Iraqi army, and chemical weapons HAVE been found. > _________________________________________________________________ > Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. > http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail > > --- > To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to > <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
Re:virus: Yee-Haa!
« Reply #6 on: 2003-04-07 13:50:57 »
[Joe Dees] We've taken the Palace!
[Mermaid]Do you feel like a man again?
[Joe Dees]I always did. Do you feel like a crowpie lunch?
[Mermaid]Depends. What is a crowpie lunch?
[Joe Dees]When one eats crow, it means that they eat their own words. This war is NOT a quagmire, massive numbers of Iraqi civilians have NOT been killed, coalition losses have NOT been heavy, foreign terrorists HAVE been killed fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with the Iraqi army, and chemical weapons HAVE been found.
[Mermaid]Why should I eat my own words when all I did was to ask you if you have started feeling manly again after you yee-haa'd.."We've taken the Palace." BTW, dont you have your own corner in the BBS to shit your way to glory?
[Mermaid]Regardless of the truth in your assertions(You lie.), you seem to be keen on your warmongering. You have effectively killed all sane discussion about this war and clogged the bbs and mailing list. You have silenced people...unchecked with little regard or respect for authority...with your mad rants.
[Mermaid]Instead of eating 'crowpie'(popular yee-haa cuisine, it seems), I'd like to take back my own words that supported your right to express your opinions. Since you have no opinions and only the warmongering skills of a memebot, I wish you, a vile human who rejoices in destruction and death of others, would disappear.
[Mermaid]I propose, against everything that I believe and hold sacred, a vote to decide about presence of Joe Dees in CoV.
Re:virus: Yee-Haa!
« Reply #8 on: 2003-04-10 20:35:30 »
[Mermaid]Regardless of the truth in your assertions(You lie.), you seem to be keen on your warmongering. You have effectively killed all sane discussion about this war and clogged the bbs and mailing list. You have silenced people...unchecked with little regard or respect for authority...with your mad rants.
[Hermit] No need for anyone but the belligerent jingoists to eat crow (Refer "We said it would be a nightmare, and yes, that's exactly what it is", infra) - even so, on that score, we have to credit McPees with consistency on his belligerence, even when his inconsistancy regarding everything else is rather blatant*. Remember how he identified with "Meanwhile somewhere in Florida"? way back on 2002-09-19? Now we know why.
[Mermaid] Instead of eating 'crowpie'(popular yee-haa cuisine, it seems), I'd like to take back my own words that supported your right to express your opinions. Since you have no opinions and only the warmongering skills of a memebot, I wish you, a vile human who rejoices in destruction and death of others, would disappear.
[Mermaid]I propose, against everything that I believe and hold sacred, a vote to decide about presence of Joe Dees in CoV.
[Hermit] Seconded (minus the comments - we have no obligation to provide Joe Dees with a forum for his demented rantings or to ignore his on-going, deliberate "scorched earth" policy on the BBS). We said it would be a nightmare And yes, that's exactly what it is
Source: Working For Change Authors: Alexander Cockburn Dated: 2003-04-10
Baghdad's hospitals admit a hundred casualties an hour and have run out of anesthetics. Surgeons try to numb up mangled children with short-term pain-killers, but even these are in dwindling supply. Iraqi families who fled into the desert face 100-degree temperatures and no water. U.S. tanks inflict mayhem and slaughter in Baghdad's streets.
From Umm Qasr and the Faw peninsula, through Basra to Baghdad, it's a scene of devastation, with every bridge and guard post adorned with civilian cars riddled with bullets by jumpy U.S. soldiers. There's no "fog of war" where the disaster of daily life in Iraq (what's now swaddled in that virtuous bureaucratic phrase "humanitarian crisis") is concerned. Reports confirm what all sane forecasts predicted of a U.S. attack: It is a catastrophe for the Iraqi people, particularly the poor.
A few days ago, the BBC featured a vivid interview with Patrick Nicholson of the British charity Catholic Agency For Overseas Development (CAFOD). He's just returned from Umm Qasr, where he found the humanitarian effort in the British-occupied area to be a "shambles." "From the TV pictures of Umm Qasr, I had been led to believe it was a town under control, where the needs of the people were being met. The town is not under control. It's like the Wild West. And even the most major humanitarian concern, water, is not being adequately administered.
"Everywhere I went, the local people asked me for water. I went into the two rooms occupied by a family of 14, they were drinking from an oil drum half full of stagnant, dirty water. It was water I certainly would not have drunk. The little girl was very malnourished, skeletal, and in my experience as an aid worker I would say she had less than a week to live."
Given this, plus the sort of horrors reported from near Al Hillah about Iraqi civilians sliced to ribbons by U.S. cluster bombs, can one imagine that an Iraqi puppet government is going to be greeted with cheers and bunting by Iraqis? Take Kenan Makiya, based at Harvard and one of the more prominent people in Ahmed Chalabi's group of exiles, the Iraqi National Congress.
On March 24, Makiya described his emotions at the news that Baghdad was being bombed: "The bombs have begun to fall on Baghdad … those bombs are music to my ears … the explosion of a JDAM can sound beautiful." Probably more beautiful when contemplated from the sanctuary of Harvard Yard than in the maternity hospital in Baghdad a U.S. missile hit last week.
"My friends in the opposition," Makiya went on, "are gathering in Kurdistan with the Iraqi National Congress and in Kuwait with Jay Garner's office. [The retired US general, intended as postwar Iraq's proconsul, noted for the public vehemence of his support for Israel.] I should be there with them, but I am told I have to stay. I am needed here, to keep touch with Washington. I cannot stand it. All I have to think about is whether or not the U.S. government is going to once again betray the Iraqi opposition."
Makiya is right to be apprehensive. It was he who personally assured George Bush before the U.S./U.K. attack that the invaders would be greeted with cheers and roses. The U.S. high command has no doubt adjusted its estimate of exactly how closely people like Chalabi and Makiya are attuned to the sentiments of the people of Iraq, who probably do not appreciate the scenario Makiya recently shared with the American Enterprise Board (at a symposium) of a "federal, non-Arab demilitarized Iraq." Such a federal Iraqi government, Makiya went on, "cannot be thought of any longer, in any politically meaningful sense of the word, as an Arab entity."
Assessing the surprising extent of resistance, the U.S. ultra-hawks are now circulating the idea that Iraq is a "deeply sick" society, not yet ready for "western-style democracy," which will require purgation through lengthy occupation, with all appropriate theft or exploitation of Iraq's assets. Assuming the demise of Saddam's regime, Iraqi national resistance will probably be led by Dawa, which is the Shi'ite resistance group, by the Iraqi Communist Party and perhaps the pro-Syrian elements of the Ba'ath Party, which has retained through years of repression a surprising amount of strength.
How long will U.S. occupation last, given lethal assaults of the sort that killed over 200 U.S. Marines in Lebanon in the Reagan years, prompting rapid withdrawal? From across the border, the Iranians will be pretty good at this sort of game, and of course will be eager to speed U.S. departure. So a flickering U.S. casualty rate (note the disclosure last week of 175 casualties among U.S. special operations forces, post 9/11), as now occurring in Afghanistan, could prompt a Bring the Troops Home call from Democratic contenders such as John Kerry, currently too prudent to do anything but wag the flag.
The future? Most assuredly, the continuation of existing nightmare for ordinary Iraqis for years to come. For a sense of perspective read the grand speeches of the British who entered Mesopotamia in 1917, only to face a concerted uprising by Shi'a, Sunni and Kurds three years later.
*Of course, the phenotype for his memeplex is also nothing if not inconsistent except in one or two little details, like the following, first posted on 2002-09-13. Apparently, "The Reason" for the illegal actions taken by the USA and UK is still missing.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Movers and shakers have moved on to the next 'disaster' By Mark Steyn (Filed: 12/04/2003)
On to the next quagmire! Don't get mired in the bog of yesterday's conventional wisdom, when the movers and shakers have already moved on to new disasters. America may have won the war but it's already losing the peace! Here's your at-a-glance guide to what the experts who got everything wrong last week will be getting wrong next week:
1) "Iraq's slide into violent anarchy" (Guardian, April 11). Say what you like about Saddam, but he ran a tight ship and you didn't have to nail down your nest of tables: since the Brits took over, Basra's property crime is heading in an alarmingly Cheltenhamesque direction. MBITRW (Meanwhile Back In The Real World): A year from now, Basra will have a lower crime rate than most London boroughs.
2) "The head of the World Food Programme has warned that Iraq could spiral into a massive humanitarian disaster" (Australian, April 11). MBITRW: No such disaster will occur, any more than it did during the mythical "brutal Afghan winter" and its attendant humanitarian scaremongering. ("The UN Children's Fund has estimated that as many as 100,000 Afghan children could die of cold, disease and hunger." They didn't.)
3) "Iraqis Now Waiting for Americans to Leave" (AP, April 10). MBITRW: There will be terrible acts of suicide-bomber depravity in the months ahead, but no widespread resentment at or resistance of the Western military presence.
4) "If Saddam is not found dead, or caught alive, it will be the worst of all possible closures for the war against Iraq. Bin Laden himself continues to elude capture" (Roland Flamini, UPI) MBITRW: Obviously, it would be preferable if the late Saddam's future media appearances were confined to guest-hosting Good Morning, Hell! with Osama. But if he's reduced to bin Laden's current schedule - mailing in bi-monthly audio cassettes of Islamist boilerplate - what's the difference? Even if he'd escaped to Syria, he'd be spending the rest of his days as a Bedouin goat-herd. Right now, Boy Assad is doing his best not to attract Rummy's attention.
5) "Iraq was a new country cobbled together from several former Ottoman provinces, its lines drawn by the Europeans" (Mark Mazower, Independent, April 7). It's a phony state, you can never make a go of it. MBITRW: There's nothing in the least bit "cobbled" about it. The three Ottoman vilayets of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra have been bound together by geography and trade for millennia. As a coherent jurisdiction, it makes more sense than, say, Belgium. As long as you respect its inherently confederal nature, it'll work fine: think St Kitts and Nevis writ large.
6) "Turkey is concerned that a Kurdish capture of Kirkuk could help bankroll moves to establish an independent Kurdistan" (AFP, April 9). MBITRW: Nothing to worry about. The Kurds are the only part of the indigenous population that were part of the liberation force from the start. They're not going anywhere now. They'll settle for being Scotland or Quebec rather than Pakistan.
7) "Rather than reforming the Muslim world, the conquest of Iraq will inflame it" (Jeffrey Simpson, Toronto Globe and Mail, April 10). MBITRW: Effective immediately, Palestinian suicide bombers are no longer subsidised by Baghdad; in Jordan, the Saddamite boot is off the Hashemite windpipe; Syria is under notice to behave. Despite the best efforts of Western doom-mongers to rouse the Arab street, its attitude will remain: start the jihad without me.
8) "Looting is always unsavoury. Let's hope the Americans don't pilfer the oil" (Brenda Linane, Age of Melbourne, April 11). MBITRW: The pilfering of Iraq's oil has just ended. Saddam parcelled his country's wealth out to those companies willing to cosy up to him. The oil business will now be opened up to competitive tender. The only North American politician with a personal stake in any of this is not Bush, Cheney or any of their Texan oilpatch pals, but the Prime Minister of Canada, whose daughter is married to TotalFinaElf's biggest shareholder. The liberation of Iraq is a victory for real markets over French cronyism.
9) "Weapons of Mass Destruction. Remember them? Not a single one has yet been found" (Bill Neely, ITV, April 10). MBITRW: Actually, I almost wish this one were true. Anything that turns up now will be assumed to have been planted. If I were Washington, I'd consider burying anything I found. After all, an America that feels no need to bother faking justifications for invasion would be far more alarming to most Europeans. Instead, horrible things will turn up, but will never be "conclusive" enough for the French, who've got all the receipts anyway.
10) America is already losing the peace. MBITRW: In a year's time, Iraq will be, at a bare minimum, the least badly governed state in the Arab world and, at best, pleasant, civilised and thriving. In short: not a bad three weeks' work.
Saddle up your fork and bib, Carlita Ignoramus Nostradamus!
Author
Logged
