Or, We're Looking For a Few Good Homosexual Rapists NEW YORK--Now it's official: American troops occupying Iraq have become virtually indistinguishable from the SS. Like the Germans during World War II, they cordon off and bomb civilian villages to retaliate for guerilla attacks on their convoys. Like the blackshirts who terrorized Europe, America's victims disappear into hellish prisons ruled by sadists and murderers. The U.S. military is short just one item to achieve moral parity with the Nazis: gas chambers.
"Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees" by soldiers, freelance mercenaries and professional torturers under the command of CIA intelligence officers at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, according to an internal government report. The detainees, about 60 percent of them assumed to be innocent by the Americans themselves, were routinely beaten, sodomized "with a chemical light or broomstick," urinated upon, tied to electrified wires and threatened with death, stripped and forced to perform homosexual sex acts on each other and U.S. troops. Don't be fooled by military apologists who insist that these American SS are nothing more than a few bad apples. Seymour Hersh, who has read the army's internal report, quotes Major General Antonio Taguba as saying that U.S.-committed atrocities are "systemic, endemic throughout the command structure...[The soldier-torturers] were being told what to do and told it was OK."
True, most soldiers probably don't condone torture. But all soldiers have been tarnished by it. George W. Bush's new gulag archipelago, a string of concentration camps, military and INS prisons that span the globe from North Carolina to Iraq to Afghanistan to Guantánamo Bay to New York City, has been designed to give torturers the veil of secrecy they require to carry out their hideous acts as well as the tacit understanding that they won't be held accountable. The Red Cross, defense lawyers and relatives of the victims, few of whom are charged with a crime, are denied access to the detainees or even the simple confirmation that they're being held by our government.
Some soldiers, like Sergeant Ivan Frederick II, "questioned some of the things I saw," such as "leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the door." But when he discussed these abuses with his superiors, he says they brushed him off: "This is how military intelligence wants it done."
As proven by the classic psychological experiments of the '50s, people put in a position of total power over another human being find it hard to resist abusing their charges. Prison guards mistreat inmates for a simple reason: they can. Wherever one controls another, sadism is inevitable. However, this tragic truism can be mitigated by creating mechanisms to ensure transparency behind bars. Granting prisoners access to attorneys, journalists and other members of the outside world, unannounced inspections by human rights agencies, recognizing their rights under the Geneva Conventions and rigorous prosecutions of criminal guards can never entirely eliminate abuse, but they're essential to prisons run by democratic societies.
We know about Abu Ghraib only because the inbred psychos who forced nude Iraqi men to pile up in pyramids were dumb enough to snap photographs as mementos of their time liberating the nation from Saddam. It's like the Rodney King video: cops beat up blacks every day, but there usually isn't a camera around.
Abu Ghraib, you can bet your bottom dollar, is merely the tip of the iceberg. Our military is structurally corrupt. Beginning in Afghanistan during the weeks after 9/11, civilian command yielded to the amoral gangster mentality of the arrogant intelligence officers of Army Special Forces and the CIA, who stand accused of massacring thousands of captured Taliban prisoners yet have never faced a real investigation. The new tone of lawlessness comes all the way from the White House, directed by a commander-in-chief who starts illegal wars without justification, strips captured prisoners of their rights under the Geneva Convention and whose smirky fingers-crossed response to the prisoner abuse scandal--"I shared a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated...Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people"--sends a wink and a nudge to our uniformed torturers. Keep it up, boys. Keep those broomsticks busy.
Even our coalition partners are getting the message. British soldiers running a coalition gulag in Basra reported smashing the jaw and teeth of an Iraqi accused of stealing, then dumping the broken body of the accused thief off the back of a moving truck. "They did not know whether he survived," writes The New York Times.
One more Iraqi, it seems, who won't be tossing roses at his liberators.
(Ted Rall is the author of "Wake Up, You're Liberal: How We Can Take America Back From the Right," out this week. Ordering information is available at amazon.com.)
NEW YORK--We shouldn't still be having this conversation.
To anyone possessing a milligram of common sense, it has been obvious from the start--before the start--that invading Iraq would be disastrous. Any American capable of reading between the lines sensed trouble when the Bush Administration's giddy predictions of flower-throwing Iraqis never materialized to greet our advancing columns. Even the silliest Pollyanna must have shuddered a little when it came to light that the war's singular Kodak moment, the toppling of Saddam's statue in Fardus Square, turned out to have been just as phony as the "evidence" recited at Colin Powell's UN speech.
A year later, 630 U.S. soldiers lie dead, young lives sacrificed on the altar of the vainglorious ambitions of an insane cabal of neocon morons hell-bent on transforming the Middle East into an American Raj. Thousands more, some of them so misled by their unelected president that they thought they were avenging September 11, lost their limbs and eyes to bullets and bombs fired by people they expected to be their new best friends. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been murdered by the professional liars illegally occupying the White House in a search for weapons the experts damn well knew Iraq no longer possessed.
The delusional leaders of our occupation army are fond of pointing to signs of progress. Occupation viceroy Paul Bremer likes to rattle off statistics: 2,500 renovated schools, three million vaccinated children, 18,000 reconstruction projects underway, healthcare spending up 30 times, a 29 percent increase in the value of the Iraqi dinar. Hey, it's the least we can do--after all, Iraq wouldn't need new schools or hospitals if we hadn't bombed their old ones. But, in the end, infrastructure doesn't much matter.
There are three categories of civilians in an occupied country: patriots, collaborators and opportunists. In the calculus of hearts and minds, anything short of 100 percent popularity qualifies as total failure. It's an impossible standard, which is why no nation has ever successfully invaded and occupied another in the 20th century. Even if a majority like living under foreign control, a dubious assumption at best, an occupation is nonetheless doomed. As long as one percent of the population spends its evenings blowing up enemy convoys, fence sitters will be scared to collaborate. In Iraq, that one percent--or five, or whatever--shows no sign of letting up.
Read and understand: They hate us simply because we're there. Leave, and the hatred goes away. If you doubt that, visit Hanoi as a tourist.
Exacerbating an impossible situation is the fact that we're playing right into the hands of the insurgency. Last week residents of Fallujah hung the carbonized corpses of ambushed American mercenaries (not, as widely reported, civilians) from a bridge. This week a U.S. army of retribution has surrounded the city to carry out Peggy Noonan's Wall Street Journal cry for vengeance: "It would be good not only for elemental justice but for Iraq and its future if a large force of coalition troops led by U.S. Marines would go into Fallujah, find the young men, arrest them or kill them, and, to make sure the point isn't lost on them, blow up the bridge." The Associated Press reported that a U.S. Apache helicopter gunship, mimicking Israeli tactics on the occupied West Bank, fired missiles into residential neighborhoods.
The Iraqi resistance wants us to retaliate; provoking us into lashing out is why they attack us in the first place. Each act of retaliation kills and injures innocents, proving to the opportunists that we're the monsters the patriots say we are. We're radicalizing the previously moderate segment of the population.
Were there some possible future, even 20 or 30 years from now, wherein enough stability had been achieved to allow us to hand off power to a democratic government that truly represented the interests of all Iraqis, I'd argue that we should tough it out no matter the cost. The chance of that, however, is zero.
"The message to Iraqi citizens," says Bush, "is that they don't have to fear that Americans will cut and run." The Iraqis don't fear our departure; they crave it. Moreover, they count on it.
"We can't leave," Newsweek quotes an officer with a major security firm in Iraq (hmm). "If it takes a million f---ing American lives, we have to stay."
The hell we do. Sooner or later, one way or another, we're leaving--as defeated and bankrupt and demoralized as we were when we fled Saigon. The only question now is: how many more people are we going to kill before we cut and run?
(Ted Rall is the author of "Wake Up, You're Liberal: How We Can Take America Back From the Right," coming in April. Ordering information is available at amazon.com.)
Four years ago, I travelled the length of Iraq, from the hills where St Matthew is buried in the Kurdish north to the heartland of Mesopotamia, and Baghdad, and the Shia south. I have seldom felt as safe in any country. Once, in the Edwardian colonnade of Baghdad's book market, a young man shouted something at me about the hardship his family had been forced to endure under the embargo imposed by America and Britain. What happened next was typical of Iraqis; a passer-by calmed the man, putting his arm around his shoulder, while another was quickly at my side. "Forgive him," he said reassuringly. "We do not connect the people of the west with the actions of their governments. You are welcome."
At one of the melancholy evening auctions where Iraqis come to sell their most intimate possessions out of urgent need, a woman with two infants watched as their pushchairs went for pennies, and a man who had collected doves since he was 15 came with his last bird and its cage; and yet people said to me: "You are welcome." Such grace and dignity were often expressed by those Iraqi exiles who loathed Saddam Hussein and opposed both the economic siege and the Anglo-American assault on their homeland; thousands of these anti-Saddamites marched against the war in London last year, to the chagrin of the warmongers, who never understood the dichotomy of their principled stand.
Were I to undertake the same journey in Iraq today, I might not return alive. Foreign terrorists have ensured that. With the most lethal weapons that billions of dollars can buy, and the threats of their cowboy generals and the panic-stricken brutality of their foot soldiers, more than 120,000 of these invaders have ripped up the fabric of a nation that survived the years of Saddam Hussein, just as they oversaw the destruction of its artefacts. They have brought to Iraq a daily, murderous violence which surpasses that of a tyrant who never promised a fake democracy.
Amnesty International reports that US-led forces have "shot Iraqis dead during demonstrations, tortured and ill-treated prisoners, arrested people arbitrarily and held them indefinitely, demolished houses in acts of revenge and collective punishment".
In Fallujah, US marines, described as "tremendously precise" by their psychopathic spokesman, slaughtered up to 600 people, according to hospital directors. They did it with aircraft and heavy weapons deployed in urban areas, as revenge for the killing of four American mercenaries. Many of the dead of Fallujah were women and children and the elderly. Only the Arab television networks, notably al-Jazeera, have shown the true scale of this crime, while the Anglo-American media continue to channel and amplify the lies of the White House and Downing Street.
"Writing exclusively for the Observer before a make-or-break summit with President George Bush this week," sang Britain's former premier liberal newspaper on 11 April, "[Tony Blair] gave full backing to American tactics in Iraq... saying that the government would not flinch from its 'historic struggle' despite the efforts of 'insurgents and terrorists'."
That this "exclusive" was not presented as parody shows that the propaganda engine that drove the lies of Blair and Bush on weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda links for almost two years is still in service. On BBC news bulletins and Newsnight, Blair's "terrorists" are still currency, a term that is never applied to the principal source and cause of the terrorism, the foreign invaders, who have now killed at least 11,000 civilians, according to Amnesty and others. The overall figure, including conscripts, may be as high as 55,000.
That a nationalist uprising has been under way in Iraq for more than a year, uniting at least 15 major groups, most of them opposed to the old regime, has been suppressed in a mendacious lexicon invented in Washington and London and reported incessantly, CNN-style. "Remnants" and "tribalists" and "fundamentalists" dominate, while Iraq is denied the legacy of a history in which much of the modern world is rooted. The "first-anniversary story" about a laughable poll claiming that half of all Iraqis felt better off now under the occupation is a case in point. The BBC and the rest swallowed it whole. For the truth, I recommend the courageous daily reporting of Jo Wilding, a British human rights observer in Baghdad (www.wildfirejo.blogspot.com).
Even now, as the uprising spreads, there is only cryptic gesturing at the obvious: that this is a war of national liberation and that the enemy is "us". The pro-invasion Sydney Morning Herald is typical. Having expressed "surprise" at the uniting of Shias and Sunnis, the paper's Baghdad correspondent recently described "how GI bullies are making enemies of their Iraqi friends" and how he and his driver had been threatened by Americans. "I'll take you out quick as a flash, motherfucker!" a soldier told the reporter. That this was merely a glimpse of the terror and humiliation that Iraqis have to suffer every day in their own country was not made clear; yet this newspaper has published image after unctuous image of mournful American soldiers, inviting sympathy for an invader who has "taken out" thousands of innocent men, women and children.
What we do routinely in the imperial west, wrote Richard Falk, professor of international relations at Princeton, is propagate "through a self-righteous, one-way moral/legal screen positive images of western values and innocence that are threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence". Thus, western state terrorism is erased, and a tenet of western journalism is to excuse or minimise "our" culpability, however atrocious. Our dead are counted; theirs are not. Our victims are worthy; theirs are not.
This is an old story; there have been many Iraqs, or what Blair calls "historic struggles" waged against "insurgents and terrorists". Take Kenya in the 1950s. The approved version is still cherished in the west - first popularised in the press, then in fiction and movies; and like Iraq, it is a lie. "The task to which we have set our minds," declared the governor of Kenya in 1955, "is to civilise a great mass of human beings who are in a very primitive moral and social state." The slaughter of thousands of nationalists, who were never called nationalists, was British government policy. The myth of the Kenyan uprising was that the Mau Mau brought "demonic terror" to the heroic white settlers. In fact, the Mau Mau killed just 32 Europeans, compared with the estimated 10,000 Kenyans killed by the British, who ran concentration camps where the conditions were so harsh that 402 inmates died in just one month. Torture, flogging and abuse of women and children were commonplace. "The special prisons," wrote the imperial historian V G Kiernan, "were probably as bad as any similar Nazi or Japanese establishments." None of this was reported. The "demonic terror" was all one way: black against white. The racist message was unmistakable.
It was the same in Vietnam. In 1969, the discovery of the American massacre in the village of My Lai was described on the cover of Newsweek as "An American tragedy", not a Vietnamese one. In fact, there were many massacres like My Lai, and almost none of them was reported at the time.
The real tragedy of soldiers policing a colonial occupation is also suppressed. More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam. The same number, according to a veterans' study, killed themselves on their return home. Dr Doug Rokke, director of the US army depleted uranium project following the 1991 Gulf invasion, estimates that more than 10,000 American troops have since died as a result, many from contamination illness. When I asked him how many Iraqis had died, he raised his eyes and shook his head. "Solid uranium was used on shells," he said. "Tens of thousands of Iraqis - men, women and children - were contaminated. Right through the 1990s, at international symposiums, I watched Iraqi officials approach their counterparts from the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence and ask, plead, for help with decontamination. The Iraqis didn't use uranium; it was not their weapon. I watched them put their case, describing the deaths and horrific deformities, and I watched them rebuffed. It was pathetic." During last year's invasion, both American and British forces again used uranium-tipped shells, leaving whole areas so "hot" with radiation that only military survey teams in full protective clothing can approach them. No warning or medical help is given to Iraqi civilians; thousands of children play in these zones. The "coalition" has refused to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to send experts to assess what Rokke describes as "a catastrophe".
When will this catastrophe be properly reported by those meant to keep the record straight? When will the BBC and others investigate the conditions of some 10,000 Iraqis held without charge, many of them tortured, in US concentration camps inside Iraq, and the corralling, with razor wire, of entire Iraqi villages? When will the BBC and others stop referring to "the handover of Iraqi sovereignty" on 30 June, although there will be no such handover? The new regime will be stooges, with each ministry controlled by American officials and with its stooge army and stooge police force run by Americans. A Saddamite law prohibiting trade unions for public sector workers will stay in force. Leading members of Saddam's infamous secret police, the Mukhabarat, will run "state security", directed by the CIA. The US military will have the same "status of forces" agreement that they impose on the host nations of their 750 bases around the world, which in effect leaves them in charge. Iraq will be a US colony, like Haiti. And when will journalists have the professional courage to report the pivotal role that Israel has played in this grand colonial design for the Middle East?
A few weeks ago, Rick Mercier, a young columnist for the Free-lance Star, a small paper in Virginia, did what no other journalist has done this past year. He apologised to his readers for the travesty of the reporting of events leading to the attack on Iraq. "Sorry we let unsubstantiated claims drive our coverage," he wrote. "Sorry we let a band of self-serving Iraqi defectors make fools of us. Sorry we fell for Colin Powell's performance at the United Nations... Maybe we'll do a better job next war."
Well done, Rick Mercier. But listen to the silence of your colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic. No one expects Fox or Wapping or the Daily Telegraph to relent. But what about David Astor's beacon of liberalism, the Observer, which stood against the invasion of Egypt in 1956 and its attendant lies? The Observer not only backed last year's unprovoked, illegal assault on Iraq; it helped create the mendacious atmosphere in which Blair could get away with his crime. The reputation of the Observer, and the fact that it published occasional mitigating material, meant that lies and myths gained legitimacy. A front-page story gave credence to the bogus claim that Iraq was behind the anthrax attacks in the US. And there were those unnamed western "intelligence sources", all those straw men, all those hints, in David Rose's two-page "investigation" headlined "The Iraqi connection", that left readers with the impression that Saddam Hussein might well have had a lot to do with the attacks of 11 September 2001. "There are occasions in history," wrote Rose, "when the use of force is both right and sensible. This is one of them." Tell that to 11,000 dead civilians, Mr Rose.
It is said that British officers in Iraq now describe the "tactics" of their American comrades as "appalling". No, the very nature of a colonial occupation is appalling, as the families of 13 Iraqis killed by British soldiers, who are taking the British government to court, will agree. If the British military brass understand an inkling of their own colonial past, not least the bloody British retreat from Iraq 83 years ago, they will whisper in the ear of the little Wellington-cum-Palmerston in 10 Downing Street: "Get out now, before we are thrown out."
A war founded on illusions, lies and right-wing ideology was bound to founder in blood and fire. Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. He was in contact with al-Qa'ida, he was involved with the crimes against humanity of 11 September. The people of Iraq would greet us with flowers and music. There would be a democracy.
Even the pulling-down of Saddam's statue was a fraud. An American military vehicle tugged the wretched thing down while a crowd of only a few hundred Iraqis watched. Where were the tens of thousands who should have pulled it down themselves, who should have been celebrating their "liberation"?
On the night of 9 April last year, the BBC even managed to find a "commentator" to heap abuse on me and The Independent for using quotation marks around the word "liberation".
In fact, freedom from Saddam's dictatorship in those early days and weeks meant freedom to loot, freedom to burn, freedom to kidnap, freedom to murder. The initial American and British blunder - to allow the mobs to take over Baghdad and other cities - was followed by the arrival of the far more sinister squads of arsonists who systematically destroyed every archive, every government ministry (save for Oil and Interior which were, of course, secured by US troops), Islamic manuscripts, national archives and irreplaceable antiquities. The very cultural identity of Iraq was being annihilated.
Yet still the Iraqis were supposed to rejoice in their "liberation". The occupying power sneered at reports that women were being kidnapped and violated - in fact, the abductions of men as well as women were at the rate of 20 a day and may now be as high as 100 a day - and steadfastly refused to calculate the numbers of Iraqi civilians killed each day by gunmen, thieves and American troops.
Even this week, as the promises and lies and obfuscations fell apart, the American military spokesman was still only able to give military casualties - this when more than 200 Iraqis are reported to have been killed in the US attack on Fallujah.
Over the months, the isolation of the occupation authorities from the Iraqi people they were supposed to care so much about was only paralleled by the vast distance in false hope and self-deceit between the occupying powers in Baghdad and their masters back in Washington.
Paul Bremer, America's proconsul in Iraq, started off by calling the resistance "party remnants", which is exactly what the Russians used to call their Afghan opponents after they invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Then Mr Bremer called them "diehards". Then he called them "dead-enders". And, as the attacks against US forces increased around Fallujah and other Sunni Muslim cities, we were told this area was the "Sunni triangle", even though it is much larger than that implies and has no triangular shape.
So when President Bush made his notorious trip to the Abraham Lincoln to announce the end of all "major military operations" - beneath a banner claiming "Mission Accomplished" - and when attacks against US troops continued to rise, it was time to rewrite the chapter on post-war Iraq. "Foreign fighters" were now in the battle, according to the US Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld. The US media went along with this nonsense, even though not a single al-Qa'ida operative has been arrested in Iraq and of the 8,500 "security detainees" in American hands, only 150 appear to be from outside Iraq. Just 2 per cent.
Then as winter approached and Saddam was caught and the anti-American resistance continued, the occupying powers and their favourite journalists began to warn of civil war, something no Iraqi has ever indulged in and which no Iraqi has ever been heard discussing. Iraq was now to be frightened into submission. What would happen if the Americans and British left? Civil war, of course. And we don't want civil war, do we?
The Shia remained quiescent, their leadership divided between the scholarly and pro-Western Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani and the impetuous but intelligent Muqtada Sadr. They opened their mass graves and mourned those thousands who were tortured and executed by Saddam's butchery and then asked why we used to support Saddam, why it took us 20 years to discover the need to stage our humanitarian invasion.
If the occupation authorities had bothered to study the results of a conference on Iraq held by the Centre for Arab Unity Studies in Beirut recently, they might be forced to acknowledge what they cannot admit: that their opponents are Iraqis and that this is an Iraqi insurgency.
An Iraqi academic, Sulieman Jumeili, who lives in the city of Fallujah, told how he discovered that 80 per cent of all rebels killed were Iraqi Islamist activists. Only 13 per cent of the dead men were primarily nationalists and only 2 per cent had been Baathists.
But we cannot accept these statistics. Because if this is an Iraqi revolt against us, how come they aren't grateful for their liberation? So, after the atrocities in Fallujah just over a week ago when four US mercenaries were killed, mutilated and dragged through the streets, General Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander in Iraq, sanctioned what is preposterously called "Operation Vigilant Resolve". And now that Sadr's thousands of Shia militiamen had joined in the battle against the Americans, General Sanchez had to change the narrative yet again.
No longer were his enemies Saddam "remnants" or even al-Qa'ida; they were now "a small (sic) group of criminals and thugs". The Iraqi people would not be allowed to fall under their sway, General Sanchez said. There was "no place for a renegade militia".
So the marines smashed their way into Fallujah, killing more than 200 Iraqis, including women and children, while using tanks fire and helicopter gunships against gunmen in the Baghdad slums of Sadr City. It took a day or two to understand what new self-delusion had taken over the US military command. They were not facing a country-wide insurgency. They were liberating the Iraqis all over again! So, of course, this will mean a few more "major military operations". Sadr goes on the wanted list for a murder after an arrest warrant that no one told us about when it was mysteriously issued months ago - supposedly by an Iraqi judge - and General Mark Kimmitt, General Sanchez's number two, told us confidently that Sadr's militia will be "destroyed".
And so the bloodbath spreads ever further across Iraq. Kut and Najaf are now outside the control of the occupying powers. And with each new collapse, we are told of new hope. Yesterday, General Sanchez was still talking about his "total confidence" in his troops who were "clear in their purpose", how they were making "progress" in Fallujah and how - these are his actual words, "a new dawn is approaching".
Which is exactly what US commanders were saying exactly a year ago today - when US troops drove into the Iraqi capital and when Washington boasted of victory against the Beast of Baghdad.
When the death of Pat Tillman occurred, I turned to my friend who was watching the news with me and said, "How much you want to bet they start talking about him as a 'hero' in about two hours?" Of course, my friend did not want to make that bet. He'd lose. In this self-critical incapable nation, nothing but a knee-jerk "He's a hero" response is to be expected.
I've been mystified at the absolute nonsense of being in "awe" of Tillman's "sacrifice" that has been the American response. Mystified, but not surprised. True, it's not everyday that you forgo a $3.6 million contract for joining the military. And, not just the regular army, but the elite Army Rangers. You know he was a real Rambo, who wanted to be in the "real" thick of things. I could tell he was that type of macho guy, from his scowling, beefy face on the CNN pictures. Well, he got his wish. Even Rambo got shot in the third movie, but in real life, you die as a result of being shot. They should call Pat Tillman's army life "Rambo 4: Rambo Attempts to Strike Back at His Former Rambo 3 Taliban Friends, and Gets Killed."
But, does that make him a hero? I guess it's a matter of perspective. For people in the United States, who seem to be unable to admit the stupidity of both the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars, such a trade-off in life standards (if not expectancy) is nothing short of heroic. Obviously, the man must be made of "stronger stuff" to have had decided to "serve" his country rather than take from it. It's the old JFK exhortation to citizen service to the nation, and it seems to strike an emotional chord. So, it's understandable why Americans automatically knee-jerk into hero worship.
However, in my neighborhood in Puerto Rico, Tillman would have been called a "pendejo," an idiot. Tillman, in the absurd belief that he was defending or serving his all-powerful country from a seventh-rate, Third World nation devastated by the previous conflicts it had endured, decided to give up a comfortable life to place himself in a combat situation that cost him his life. This was not "Ramon or Tyrone," who joined the military out of financial necessity, or to have a chance at education. This was a "G.I. Joe" guy who got what was coming to him. That was not heroism, it was prophetic idiocy.
Tillman, probably acting out his nationalist-patriotic fantasies forged in years of exposure to Clint Eastwood and Rambo movies, decided to insert himself into a conflict he didn't need to insert himself into. It wasn't like he was defending the East coast from an invasion of a foreign power. THAT would have been heroic and laudable. What he did was make himself useful to a foreign invading army, and he paid for it. It's hard to say I have any sympathy for his death because I don't feel like his "service" was necessary. He wasn't defending me, nor was he defending the Afghani people. He was acting out his macho, patriotic crap and I guess someone with a bigger gun did him in.
Perhaps it's the old, dreamy American thought process that forces them to put sports greats and "larger than life" sacrificial lambs on the pedestal of heroism, no matter what they've done. After all, the American nation has no other role to play but to be the cheerleaders of the home team; a sad role to have to play during conflicts that suffer from severe legitimacy and credibility problems.
Matters are a little clearer for those living outside the American borders. Tillman got himself killed in a country other than his own without having been forced to go over to that country to kill its people. After all, whether we like them or not, the Taliban is more Afghani than we are. Their resistance is more legitimate than our invasion, regardless of the fact that our social values are probably more enlightened than theirs. For that, he shouldn't be hailed as a hero, he should be used as a poster boy for the dangerous consequences of too much "America is #1," frat boy, propaganda bull. It might just make a regular man irrationally drop $3.6 million to go fight in a conflict that was anything but "self-defense." The same could be said of the unusual belief of 50 percent of the American nation that thinks Saddam Hussein was behind Sept. 11. One must indeed stand in awe of the amazing success of the American propaganda machine. It works wonders.
Al-Qaeda won't be defeated in Afghanistan, even if we did kill all their operatives there. Only through careful and logical changing of the underlying conditions that allow for the ideology to foster will Al-Qaeda be defeated. Ask the Israelis if 50 years of blunt force have eradicated the Palestinian resistance. For that reason, Tillman's service, along with that of thousands of American soldiers, has been wrongly utilized. He did die in vain, because in the years to come, we will realize the irrationality of the War on Terror and the American reaction to Sept. 11. The sad part is that we won't realize it before we send more people like Pat Tillman over to their deaths.
Re:Some of Juuko Isohaari's favorite writers and posts
« Reply #5 on: 2004-05-06 15:53:21 »
Joe Dees' flood was a misguided and uncalled-for service to the list.
First, Jei was technically perfectly capable of spamming the list without any help from Joe Dees if he wanted to.
Second, not everyone puts all the articles comprising this flood in the same category, because not everyone draws the line at the same point as Joe Dees does. In other words, you can not argue against Jay or against one article by arguing against another one. That would be a strawman argument.
I register my annoyance with this email flood. The last time Joe Dees did the same thing took us months to stop it.
It's polite to include them, Joe. That way people can compare them and trust you. You remember what mommy said about trusting bad people?
On Thu, 6 May 2004, Joe Dees wrote:
> Op/Ed - Ted Rall > > AN ARMY OF SCUM [...] > Even our coalition partners are getting the message. British soldiers > running a coalition gulag in Basra reported smashing the jaw and teeth > of an Iraqi accused of stealing, then dumping the broken body of the > accused thief off the back of a moving truck. "They did not know whether he > survived," writes The New York Times. > > One more Iraqi, it seems, who won't be tossing roses at his liberators. --- To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
> > Joe Dees' flood was a misguided and uncalled-for service to the list. [...] > I register my annoyance with this email flood. The last time Joe Dees > did the same thing took us months to stop it.
I don't see much point to them myself either, especially as the source URLs seem to have been removed, making their content's integrity questionable, as well and pretty much worthless as a reference.
I always include the sources myself and I don't condone or carry all the opinions in the articles myself. I merely post them for consideration, discussion, for a fact or a point, or for information to relevant lists, acting as the mailman. And there's probably millions of them lying around by now.
I think people in this list generally aspire to "evolve higher", and not lie in their holes. Therefore, I personally welcome any and all posts, but with references to their sources if at all possible.
If you shoot the messenger, in the long run, you'll just get less mail..
It is a general mistake for people to identify the articles and the opinions they represent to their sender/carrier.
If that's all you've got to gripe about, I went back and included source URL's. I was posting them as an extremist parody of your views, but the fact that you seem to associate yourself with them demonstrates that your views are beyond parody, mainly because they are so extreme as to be caricatures themselves.
> If that's all you've got to gripe about, I went back and included source > URL's. I was posting them as an extremist parody of your views, but the > fact that you seem to associate yourself with them demonstrates that > your views are beyond parody, mainly because they are so extreme as to > be caricatures themselves.
I think you're the one being extreme here. I'm always open to mend my opinions when faced with facts. Obviously you are incapable of believing, accepting or even conceiving anything "bad" about America, or the fact that Iraqi's might be fighting Americans simply because of their patriotism. Must be your military career that makes you this blind to all reason and fact?
For example, I recall the last appinted ex-Saddam General to handle Fallujah got sacked because he declared after meeting with the rebels that there were no foreign fighters among them. - Americans named a new one to replace him after that. - He properly blames foreigners, I believe. It's all among the stories I've posted. I'm sure you'll find it if you dig it up.
It's funny how Americans seem to think that having been in the military is something to boast about. Here we all go to military service, and it's all just a part of growing up. Apparently, you can't say the same about it when it comes to Americans.
There have been many bad actions and decisions in US history (the big one being Vietnam, which we never should've taken over from the French), but the Afghan and Iraqi campaigns are not, in my opinion, two of them. I have also already stated that I approved neither of Bush's reactionary domestic social policies nor his fiscal irresponsibility; this disproves and refutes your claim that I cannot conceive of anything bad about the US (by provision of counterfactual evidence). You, however, have never had anything whatsoever good to say about either the US or any of its leaders (at least that I've seen onlist), thus I countercharge you with being constitutionally unable to believe, accept or conceive of anything GOOD about America, and unable to accept the dead-body evidence of Syrian and Iranian infiltration and Baathist dead-enders. I furnish facts which I connect with logic and reason (having been a logic teacher at the university level, I am facile at employing the tools). You rant and rave about the Great Satan and its Smirking Chimp, or post vapid and vacuous screeds excreted by other moonbats who indulge in similar heedless logorrheas, apparently believing that depth of hatred, mental rigor mortis of dogmatism and strength of ad hominems can substitute for a dearth of the aforementioned logic and reason - well, they can't. Rationality is not comprised of emotional intensity and dogmatic enmity. It was discovered that the prior Iraqi Fallujah force head, general Saleh, had, under Saddam, carried out genocidal campaigns against the Kurds. Also, the US knew that he was lying about the presence of Syrian and other foreign fighters in Fallujah because the US military has killed many of them there in the last month, and seen many others that still live (but not for long, I hope). That is why he was replaced by Latief. I enlisted as a choice, and served for a single term. I refused to re-enlist because I did not find such a structured environment to be personally conducive, preferring instead to attend university on my GI bill benefits. However, I am glad that I joined and served that term; it was a definite learning experience. BTW: NO, I am not a paid Zionist (or any other) agent, and YES, your bizarre and nonsensical moonbattery has deteriorated and degraded into paranoia.
> > There have been many bad actions and decisions in US history (the big > one being Vietnam, which we never should've taken over from the French), > but the Afghan and Iraqi campaigns are not, in my opinion, two of them. > I have also already stated that I approved neither of Bush's reactionary > domestic social policies nor his fiscal irresponsibility; this disproves > and refutes your claim that I cannot conceive of anything bad about the > US (by provision of counterfactual evidence). You, however, have never > had anything whatsoever good to say about either the US or any of its
Well, good things to say about the US. Hmms. You guys make good porn.
Your genetic heritage makes you an enterprising people, as well as gullible, and it has also accidentally lead to some good things, I'm sure. Financing for innovative technologies and startups, for example, such as the project that lead to the foundation of the Internet, due to which we are now able to so nicely flame each other.
Good leaders... hmms. Bush has a nice face, but I don't much care for his policies. Does that make him a good leader? Most Americans seem to think so... But I think climate change is a real threat and should be taken seriously. Kyoto Treaty might have done something to ease it.. The temperatures here are a lot hotter nowadays, out of season... I really would prefer it cooler.. it isn't normal to have 27 degrees celcius here at this time of year... only in mid-summer...
Clinton was a lot of entertainment.. Was he a good leader? His policies weren't especially that good. Bombing medicine factories in Sudan to get attention away from a blowjob... duh...
Ronnie Ray-gun... he was a funny guy, but can't say if he was good or not. Didn't really follow up on US politics then, so I reserve judgement. He was a nice actor though.
I'm sure Arnold the Terminator will make a nice president for you some day. He can't be any worse.. And he's originally Austrian, so that makes him practically a European.
> leaders (at least that I've seen onlist), thus I countercharge you with > being constitutionally unable to believe, accept or conceive of anything > GOOD about America, and unable to accept the dead-body evidence of > Syrian and Iranian infiltration and Baathist dead-enders.
There's probably agents of every government on earth there. And I wouldn't be surprised if you found a few martians as well. I hear they're worried the rover will discover their oil next.
And can you really blame them, if your president so much as spells them "You're Next!", if they arrange some trouble to tie down US troops in Iraq, so their time to die wouldn't come just as soon? It's what I would do in their places at least.. Seems pretty logical to me.
Interesting facts about the general you gave though. Can you give an URL for source?
> I furnish facts which I connect with logic and reason (having been a > logic teacher at the university level, I am facile at employing the > tools! ). ... > NO, I am not a paid Zionist (or any other) agent, and YES, your bizarre > and nonsensical moonbattery has deteriorated and degraded into paranoia.
Nice to know. Of course, you would say that, wouldn't you? Hehehehe. --- To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
> > There have been many bad actions and decisions in US history (the big > one being Vietnam, which we never should've taken over from the French), > but the Afghan and Iraqi campaigns are not, in my opinion, two of them. > I have also already stated that I approved neither of Bush's reactionary > domestic social policies nor his fiscal irresponsibility; this disproves > and refutes your claim that I cannot conceive of anything bad about the > US (by provision of counterfactual evidence). You, however, have never > had anything whatsoever good to say about either the US or any of its
Well, good things to say about the US. Hmms. You guys make good porn.
Your genetic heritage makes you an enterprising people, as well as gullible, and it has also accidentally lead to some good things, I'm sure. Financing for innovative technologies and startups, for example, such as the project that lead to the foundation of the Internet, due to which we are now able to so nicely flame each other.
(Joe) You neglected to mention a few things: The saving of Europe thrice (WWI, WWII, Serbia) and soon to be again with Islamofascism The saving of South Korea The collapse of the Soviet Union
Good leaders... hmms. Bush has a nice face, but I don't much care for his policies. Does that make him a good leader? Most Americans seem to think so... But I think climate change is a real threat and should be taken seriously. Kyoto Treaty might have done something to ease it.. The temperatures here are a lot hotter nowadays, out of season... I really would prefer it cooler.. it isn't normal to have 27 degrees celcius here at this time of year... only in mid-summer... > (Joe) The Senate refused to ratify that treaty, and Bush could not implement it in the absence of such ratification. BTW, Europe's countries haven't ratified it, either...he pursues the War on Terror well; if I had confidence that Kerry could do as well on that front, I'd vote for him, because I prefer Kerry's domestic social policies (they're both equally fiscally irresponsible, just in differing ways). But I don't see Kerry pursuing the War on Terror at all. And I know where neglecting that pursuit, as Clinton did, will end (another 9/11, or worse).
Clinton was a lot of entertainment.. Was he a good leader? His policies weren't especially that good. Bombing medicine factories in Sudan to get attention away from a blowjob... duh...
He did good in Bosnia. Not so good in Somalia.
Ronnie Ray-gun... he was a funny guy, but can't say if he was good or not. Didn't really follow up on US politics then, so I reserve judgement. He was a nice actor though.
(Joe) He militarily outspent the Soviet Union (via European Pershing Missile deployments and Star Wars research); they went bankrupt trying to keep up. This led to the demise of the Soviet bloc. OTOH, he sold arms to Iran for hostages, and funnelled the proceeds to right-wing death squads operating in a brutal Central American regional guerilla war (some claim that the funds were increased by using them to buy cocaine, which was then flown by the CIA into the US and sold to US inner-city youth). He also cut and ran in Beirut.
I'm sure Arnold the Terminator will make a nice president for you some day. He can't be any worse.. And he's originally Austrian, so that makes him practically a European.
(Joe) He cannot be a US president because he was born in Austria. Only native-born US citizens can become US presidents - it's in our constitution.
> leaders (at least that I've seen onlist), thus I countercharge you with > being constitutionally unable to believe, accept or conceive of anything > GOOD about America, and unable to accept the dead-body evidence of > Syrian and Iranian infiltration and Baathist dead-enders.
There's probably agents of every government on earth there. And I wouldn't be surprised if you found a few martians as well. I hear they're worried the rover will discover their oil next.
(Joe) The US was getting that oil anyway, by buying it on the open market. It ain't any cheaper now; it's just that the Iraqi people get the money for it, instead of the Saddamite dictatorship and corrupt UN, French and German officials. It was they who were willing to sacrifice the blood of murdered Iraqis for the sake of oil.
And can you really blame them, if your president so much as spells them "You're Next!", if they arrange some trouble to tie down US troops in Iraq, so their time to die wouldn't come just as soon? It's what I would do in their places at least.. Seems pretty logical to me.
(Joe) It's what Syria's Assad and the Iranian mullahs are doing, all right; they fear the model of a successful Iraqi democracy next door would inspire further insurrection in their restless peoples, who are already holding periodical por-democracy protests and riots. The ruling despots would much rather that totalitarianism continue to dominate in Iraq rather than have a democracy take hold there and spread seeds of hope throughout the region.
Interesting facts about the general you gave though. Can you give an URL for source?
> I furnish facts which I connect with logic and reason (having been a > logic teacher at the university level, I am facile at employing the > tools! ). ... > NO, I am not a paid Zionist (or any other) agent, and YES, your bizarre > and nonsensical moonbattery has deteriorated and degraded into paranoia.
Nice to know. Of course, you would say that, wouldn't you? Hehehehe.
Now, Bin Laden, Zawahiri, Zarqawi, Migniyah, Al-Douri, Sadr and Mullah Omar are NOT paranoid, because the US actually IS out to get them...
> On Thu, 6 May 2004, Joe Dees wrote: > > There have been many bad actions and decisions in US history (the big > > one being Vietnam, which we never should've taken over from the French), > > but the Afghan and Iraqi campaigns are not, in my opinion, two of them. > > I have also already stated that I approved neither of Bush's reactionary > > domestic social policies nor his fiscal irresponsibility; this disproves > > and refutes your claim that I cannot conceive of anything bad about the > > US (by provision of counterfactual evidence). You, however, have never > > had anything whatsoever good to say about either the US or any of its > > (Joe) You neglected to mention a few things: The saving of Europe > thrice (WWI, WWII, Serbia) and soon to be again with Islamofascism The > saving of South Korea The collapse of the Soviet Union
Maybe I think we would be better off if America hadn't bombed the shit out of Germany and Europe? Certainly the economy would have been doing much better, now that I think about it. Millions of people would still be alive and we wouldn't have had to pay for all the shit Russians wanted. Yeah, WWII was most likely a disfavor that America did to Europe, from my personal economical point of view.
...
Does listing all these "good things we did to you" make you feel better? Did I hurt your feelings of America by trying to show you the butt-ugly truth? How about you in turn amuse me and list all the good things that my country has done? Shall we then compete on whose dick is bigger, ha?
Seriously, you have some kind of Jesus-fixation on your country that is keeping you away from viewing and looking at the truth objectively. You don't want to break that image of America the Beautiful, so you indulge yourself and live in a fantasy world like most Americans. I expect virians to do better than that. I used to think like you did, a long time ago when I was 15.
> I'm sure Arnold the Terminator will make a nice president for you some > day. He can't be any worse.. And he's originally Austrian, so that makes > him practically a European. > > (Joe) He cannot be a US president because he was born in Austria. Only > native-born US citizens can become US presidents - it's in our > constitution.
Bet you anything they'll change it just in time.
> > leaders (at least that I've seen onlist), thus I countercharge you with > > being constitutionally unable to believe, accept or conceive of anything > > GOOD about America, and unable to accept the dead-body evidence of > > Syrian and Iranian infiltration and Baathist dead-enders. > > There's probably agents of every government on earth there. And > I wouldn't be surprised if you found a few martians as well. I > hear they're worried the rover will discover their oil next. > > (Joe) The US was getting that oil anyway, by buying it on the open > market. It ain't any cheaper now; it's just that the Iraqi people get > the money for it, instead of the Saddamite dictatorship and corrupt UN, > French and German officials. It was they who were willing to sacrifice
You sure know things. It was thanks to Iraq insisting US stay out of the Oil for Food programs, that the Americans didn't get a stake in cashing in on it. As for the corruption, it seems to have benefitted US at the time to let them take the dough. Now it's a handy PR-weapon to batter the UN. None the less, despicable, all the same.
> the blood of murdered Iraqis for the sake of oil. (Joe) It's what > Syria's Assad and the Iranian mullahs are doing, all right; they fear > the model of a successful Iraqi democracy next door would inspire > further insurrection in their restless peoples, who are already holding > periodical por-democracy protests and riots. The ruling despots would > much rather that totalitarianism continue to dominate in Iraq rather > than have a democracy take hold there and spread seeds of hope > throughout the region.
Sponsoring "democracy" groups and whatnot opposition is usual US practice when they want legitimacy to criticize governments, but did it save the Democracy in Iran? No, what they got was the government US installed, which, again, they now want to overthrow, so they now sponsor the democracy groups in Iran. Osama Bin Laden and Taleban were trained to be terrorists by CIA, during the days of Soviet occupation. Even Saddam was America's man they *wanted* in power.
The lesson:
a) Americans are always doing what's good for other countries and their people because they know better than them what they want and need.
or
b) Americans are always doing what's best for themselves and their economy.
Which is right? Which is more likely? What motivates Americans? What motivated them to go to America in the first place? Greed!
A hard lesson taught to Haitis just this year when the US Marines came to fix their error in choosing the wrong government. Well, the French went in there to help them, so it's a tad more fashionable than the other cases.
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