by The Guests of 604
Today the halls of 604 are abuzz with just one topic — this morning's execution of Saddam Hussein. Some of the stories under debate...
Josh Marshall: I just find [the execution] embarrassing. This is what we're reduced to, what the president has reduced us to. This is the best we can do. Hang Saddam Hussein because there's nothing else this president can get right.
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Robert Fisk: Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest war crime he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and a half souls? And who sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled Saddam's weird trial, forbade any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against him.
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Kevin Hayden: Some Guy Who’s Not Osama Bin Laden Was Hanged Tonight.
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Jessie Jackson: Saddam's heinous crimes against humanity can never be diminished, but he was our ally while he was doing it... Saddam as a war trophy only deepens the catastrophe to which we are indelibly linked.
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And various news sources reported that "U.S. President George W. Bush...slept through Saddam Hussein's hanging."
That's news? When Bush is reported to be awake — that will be news.
by Saddam Hussein
 So who knew? It turns out Paradise is in the Blogosphere. Good. While I wait for my 72 virgin delights to get here, I can post a line or two to my many adoring followers.
Don't cry for me, Iraq. I am fine — for someone who was just handed his red ticket to the gate of heaven, where I had my neck stretched beyond all human endurance. By Shi'ite barbarians. But that is past, now. I would rather be a dead and martyred Saddam than a live George Bush, who surely is the mother of all morons.
Except for all those who voted for him. Twice.
But now that I'm dead, I have a confession to make. Between you, me, and the palm tree, I feel a little betrayed by America. I guess I'm a little hurt. In the 80s, I was America's friend. She knew all about that little thing in Dujail back in 82, which eventually sent me to this place. But back then she couldn't stay angry with me. Ours was the kind of very special relationship that doesn't allow something like that to come between us.
And yes, how she huffed and puffed about the gassing of the Kurds, but it was all for show. In fact, I remember a very nice note the Assistant Secretary of State wrote six months after Halabjah:
The US-Iraqi relationship is...important to our long-term political and economic objectives in the Gulf and beyond. Iraq emerges from the war [with Iran] as a major economic and military power. Its oil reserves are second to those of Saudi Arabia. It is a disciplined, purposeful, and ruthless regime, led by a dictator who is feared and respected by his own people and others.
What sweet things to say. I was on Cloud Nine.
A little later, another state department memo scolded a few goody-two-shoes Americans who wanted to break it off with me. But the memo made it clear there would be unpleasant consequences for doing so:
US business firms would be excluded from doing business in Iraq [when it is] expected to boom as reconstruction begins — to the benefit of competitors in Europe and elsewhere.
Yes, the Americans and I understood each other intimately. We were the two arcs that complete the wheel.
Until that hell-hound she-bitch whore April Glaspie ruined everything.
I poured my heart out to that woman about Kuwait. I did everything but show her the invasion plans. She said nothing — only that the president "wanted better and deeper relations with Iraq." And then:
But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.
Yes! Those words are the diplomatic equivalent of a wink and a nod. In fact, I swear the woman actually winked and nodded. But maybe she was just making a pass at Tariq.
I believed I had an understanding with America, and I yearned to invade Kuwait. So I did. But the next thing I know, America turned her back on me. Saddam became a cheater and a brute. A girl named Nayirah told the world that Iraqi soldiers were looting Kuwaitii hospitals, throwing sick babies on the floor like so much firewood to steal the incubators they lay in. Nayirah may have been just a PR invention, but she was a deadly one. It was the beginning of the end for Saddam.
And the end came just before six o'clock this morning.
by Anthony Ioven
 And they say John Kerry is a flip-flopper (well he is, but still):
[E]ven the most jaded observers are bound to raise an eyebrow over our embrace of the Somalian warlords, whose disarmament and capture was our announced goal the last time we intervened. That failed effort, you’ll recall, was dubbed "Operation Restore Hope."
Now we are back, albeit semi-covertly — using Ethiopia, a major recipient of American arms and technical support, as our proxy — in a new project that ought to be named Operation Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here. In the post-9/11 Bizarro World alternate universe that our leaders and policymakers seemed to have slipped into, the Bad Guys have become the Good Guys, and the formerly fiendish Somalian warlords are now part of the "anti-terrorism coalition" that the U.S. is assembling in the region.
There's something about the American character that seems to need an enemy. In the post-Cold War era, Islam is it.
by Anthony Ioven
 Barbara Ehrenreich is a leading chronicler of one of America's dirty little secrets — class. Here are some quotes of note from a speech she gave at FAIR's 20th anniversary bash:
[The NYT article] starts by saying that welfare reform was, quote, so successful, that there's no longer any debate about it. There's no longer any debate about it because they won't let those of us who are critical of it speak in the media...
[Marriage] is the Bush administration's anti-poverty program. They'd — you might be surprised to know they have an anti-poverty program, and it is marriage — for women...
The truth is that most women, face it, end up marrying men of more or less their same social class. Which means if you’re a woman in poverty, you're probably looking at blue collar guys, and that's a demographic that has seen their wages sink, for three decades now. Which once led me to sit down and try to calculate how many blue collar men does a woman would have to marry to lift her out of poverty, and it's quite a large number...
But I think the real issue here is the mainstream media's, corporate media’s theory of poverty, which they can't help but come back to, is that it is a character failure. It is manifested by laziness, or promiscuity, or addiction, or something...
For evolutionary reasons that we don't yet understand, if you're a male, you're 10 times more likely to be a columnist for The New York Times.
As for the general notion...that women are gentler and...less aggressive than men, I have one response to anybody who makes that argument, which is, let's step outside and settle this in the street.
Now that's class.
by Anthony Ioven
 I had to read the headline in this morning's Boston Globe twice before I believed what I was seeing:
Military considers recruiting foreigners
Could this be true? The nation that likes to bill itself as the World's Only Superpower is considering opening military recruiting offices in other countries to entice young people to fight George Bush's bogus War on Terror?
This is one hell of a post-Christmas trial balloon.
Deep in the article was a piece of information that shattered one of my few remaining illusions about America. I always took for granted that our military consisted entirely of US citizens. Not true:
There are currently about 30,000 noncitizens who serve in the US armed forces, making up about 2 percent of the active-duty force... About 100 noncitizens have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The current rules allow noncitizens who are legally residing in the US to enlist. If the military gets its way, they will literally import fighters from abroad.
But don't call these foreign recruits mercenaries. No sir. These imports would have "significantly different motives than the usual soldier of fortune." Instead of money, they would gladly fight and die in our wars "in return for one of the world's most precious commodities — US citizenship."
Someone ought to tell this band of hermanos to think twice. When a nation can't get enough of its own citizens to fight its government's wars, it may be on its way down.
by Anthony Ioven
No one will be singing Carols about this Palestinian mother's story:
"What would happen if the Virgin Mary came to Bethlehem today? She would endure what I have endured"...
[T]he road [to the hospital] had been blocked by Israeli soldiers, who said nobody was allowed to pass until morning. "Obviously, we told them we couldn't wait until the morning. I was bleeding very heavily on the back seat. One of the soldiers looked down at the blood and laughed. I still wake up in the night hearing that laugh.
The foreign press has reported this kind of incident at Israeli checkpoints for years. But the US media prefers more meaningful stories, like Scott and Laci, or Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction.
BTW, Fadia Jemal had twins in that back seat. One lived, one died.
by Anthony Ioven
Another bright idea gone horribly wrong.
Fair warning to guys in the cold states.
by Anthony Ioven
 Alan Dershowitz and others continue to batter Jimmy Carter for the unforgivable crime of calling attention to years of Palestinian suffering at the hands of the Israelis.
Too clever to be seen firing off the cheap shots himself, Dershowitz lets others sling his mud for him:
Carter's book has been condemned as "moronic" (Slate), "anti-historical" (The Washington Post), "laughable" (San Francisco Chronicle), and riddled with errors and bias in reviews across the country.
And Dershowitz was just getting warmed up. Reading this, I wondered whether he would dare unleash the accusation of last resort, the bunker-buster of character assassinations — Jew-hater. I had to wait just four paragraphs:
[Carter] has accepted money and an award from Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan , saying in 2001: "This award has special significance for me because it is named for my personal friend, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan." This is the same Zayed, the long-time ruler of the United Arab Emirates, whose $2.5 million gift to the Harvard Divinity School was returned in 2004 due to Zayed's rampant Jew-hatred.
Classic guilt-by-association. I don't blame Carter for refusing to debate a man capable of hurling such ugly innuendo.
And as long as America is kept entertained by the name-calling and all our other mindless amusements, it's easy for us to look away from the decades of misery and injustice:
The bleakness of life for Palestinians, especially in the Gaza Strip, is a mystery only to us...
And as Gaza descends into civil war, with Hamas and Fatah factions carrying out gun battles in the streets, Ha'aretz reporter Amira Hass bitterly notes, "The experiment was a success: The Palestinians are killing each other. They are behaving as expected at the end of the extended experiment called 'what happens when you imprison 1.3 million human beings in an enclosed space like battery hens.'"
The treatment of the Palestinians is one of the great crimes of our lifetime. And we're squarely on the wrong side of it.
by Anthony Ioven
 The Iraq war is lost. The best we can hope for is years more of bloody resistance to a brutal occupation, with each day churning out more and more corpses. More gruesome injuries. More ruined lives. And for what?
The closest thing to a plan the president has offered for getting us out of the killing fields is a simplistic fantasy — As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.
Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah:
America was a superpower, and it was inconceivable that it could lose a war to a third-rate nation...So the White House conceived an elaborate strategy that would mask the fact of an American defeat. The US would slowly withdraw its combat troops over a period of several years, while the mission of those who remained would change from fighting the North Vietnamese and Vietcong to training the South Vietnamese to carry on the fight on their own. At the same time, we would give the South Vietnamese a series of performance ultimatums which, if unmet, would trigger a total withdrawal and let us blame the South Vietnamese for the debacle that would follow. This strategy was called "Vietnamization." Implementing it cost at least 10,000 additional American and countless more Vietnamese lives, plus billions of dollars.
Ten thousand American soldiers died to mask what virtually everyone knew to be a cynical "public relations campaign," one that placed a higher value on a president's reputation and pride than on human lives. Along with the bombing of civilians in Hanoi, the manufactured events in the Gulf of Tonkin, Agent Orange, My Lai, and all the other lies and atrocities of that war, the sham of Vietnamization ranks among the worst of it.
And now, incredibly, it's happening again.
by Anthony Ioven
While the Made-in-America civil war in Iraq continues to flow along its bloody course, another civil war is threatening to explode nearby among the Palestinians.
Withholding much-needed aid to the democratically-elected Palestinian government, simply because we don't approve of the government that the Palestinian people democratically elected, is at the core of this conflict. Looks like this is another notch we can proudly scratch into the weapon of mass destruction we laughingly call our foreign policy.
Heckuva job, Georgie.
by The Guests of 604
 Dr. Les Roberts of John Hopkins University, addressing a Congressional briefing on the civilian death toll in Iraq since 2003, and how the administration and the media have underreported the terrible human cost of our invasion:
Can the press pretend they've done even a credible job of reporting in Iraq...? As a nation of information excellence, it is, I think, beneath our dignity and, I hope, not in keeping with the compassion of the American people to have US government officials consistently downplaying the number of dead in Iraq by a factor of ten and fifteen.
Then again, we Americans never lost any sleep over the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children who died as a result of punishing US-led sanctions in the 90s.
No doubt future generations will wonder how the "good" Americans, like the "good" Germans over half a century ago, could have let it happen.
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And while we're on the subject, It's Not Just Bush: We're Accountable Too:
Replacing those in power won't help if the power structure itself doesn't change. And that means addressing how our own actions maintain this dysfunctional system.
Not bloody likely. We're much too stuck on ourselves to admit that fundamental change is needed.
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Cost of an elementary school teacher, $46,990.
Cost of a police officer, $47,270.
Cost of a registered nurse, $56,880.
Cost of a pitcher who has never pitched a game in the major leagues, priceless.
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UpdateAmerica.com
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December's Posts
Blues in the Night
Blackhawk Down - and Forgotten
Quotable Ehrenreich
Soldiers of Misfortune
Merry Christmas
Guilty: Pregnant While Palestinian
Kids - Don't Try This at Home
A Truth That Can't Be Told
'A Rigged Game from the Start'
'Things Fall Apart'
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