|
CounterPunch
March 22,
2003
Baghdad Burns While
Dubya Does Lunch
Who
Dares Critique the Smirking Commander?
By LINDA HEARD
America's great commander George W Bush has surely
to be admired for his amazing sangfroid. If he had any worries
about the impending 'Shock and Awe' campaign, he didn't show
them as he played with his pooch on the White House lawn on the
day the war kicked off. After an intimate dinner with the missus,
the wondrous leader took time out to give the order to attack
Baghdad before delivering his mushy message to the nation.
But unfortunately for him Aunty Beeb,
also known as the BBC, erroneously broadcast Dubya preparing
for his Churchillian moment in history. There he was practicing
his speech totally unaware that the cameras were rolling. As
his mouth moved soundlessly evoking a guppy in an aquarium a
middle-aged ma'am primped his locks, spraying every offending
hair in to place.
Worse, the small man deliberately contorted
his facial features in an effort to convey passivity, emotion
and greatness as though he were looking into a mirror, which
he probably was. The result was an orchestrated pre-written blurb
absent of sincerity or sympathy. Lee Strasburg must be turning
over in his grave.
By the time it was over and my tears
of mirth (and sorrow) had dried it was well past Dubya's bedtime
and determined not to lose any beauty sleep over a silly thing
like a war, he went off to bed. That's the true mark of leadership.
After all, why should he worry when he's got Eritrea in his Coalition
of the Callous?
No doubt, the chilling Rummy Rumsfeld
didn't have to practice to face his audience. He did what he
does best - gleefully warning of the carnage to come. He told
the world that Baghdad was facing an attack of the scope and
scale the world had never seen before, but of course the US has
nothing at all against the Iraqi people, he tells us.
Indeed, why would the Iraqi people grumble
when cruise missiles are devastating the heart of their capital?
Why should they mind when a neo-imperialist occupying force invades
their sovereign integrity? How churlish! Isn't this being done
to free them from that dastardly Saddam who as we have heard
hundreds of times has 'gassed his own people'?
As I write, the Kurds are dreading the
arrival of their old foes the Turks and the bloodbath, which
could ensue. They have been sold to the Turks for US rights to
fly over Turkish territory. This is far from being the first
time that the luckless Kurds have been betrayed by opportunist
US administrations.
The conscripted Shias in southern Iraq
around Basra are being bombarded and urged to come out with their
hands up by hundreds of thousands of propaganda leaflets dropped
with the bombs. The Shia population has long hoped to have a
say in the way its country is run but they haven't a hope in
hell. Their close relations with the Iranian ayatollahs will
rule out their dreams as long as the US is pulling the strings.
The people of Baghdad are hiding in their
bunkers hoping they will still have a home, nay a city, when
it's over. Terrified refugees have fled their homes and are gathering
around the Jordanian border, and Bush has lunch with Cheney.
'Have another breadstick Dick!'
As the plumes of smoke rise over the
ancient Mesopotamian metropolis, Britain's Tony Blair and France's
Jacques Chirac face one another over the dinner table. Chirac
has said that Blair is the rudest person he has ever met; Blair
has been spouting disingenuously that if it wasn't for France
menacing its veto, peace could have been achieved. In earlier
times it could have been pistols at dawn. Today, it may mean
the demise of the entente cordiale and the possible fragmentation
of the European Community.
In purely humanitarian terms, surely
the French proposal of containment would have made far more sense.
War should always be a last resort, especially one with so much
potential for destabilizing other countries, wrecking economies
and widening political divisions worldwide. Did I say 'humanitarian'?
How passe! Humanitarian isn't part of the 'New American Century'.
Instead war has been reduced to a flippant
exercise as a British newspaper recently did with its 'Let's
Roll' on the front page, a disingenuous attempt to link Iraq
with 9-11.
Included in A Clean Break: A New Strategy
for Securing the Realm, our leaders will not shirk from lies
if these serve as a pretext for war. Britain's Blair used his
honest face to good purpose when trying to pass off a plagiarized
paper as intelligence and forged correspondence concerning Iraq's
alleged attempts to purchase uranium. Sadly for him the plagiarisers
and the forgers were less professional in their efforts.
The jingoistic Fox News anchors are already
sporting their flag pins, and the almost 50 per cent of Americans
who believe that Saddam Hussein was involved with September 11
are flying the Star Spangled banner from their balconies. The
patriots are pouring bottles of the finest Bordeaux and Beaujolais
down the drain, while Russian vodka and Chinese beer stays on
the shelves.
As the embedded, or rather entombed,
US/UK government selected reporters are issuing their censored
reports, we are left to seek for the truth and sift through the
lies.
Those reporters who remain in Baghdad
have been warned by the US to leave. Veteran war reporter Kate
Adie said that those journalists using satellite uplink to file
their stories would be fired upon by American pilots.
The American media, which had recently
begun to loosen its nationalistic shackles, is regressing into
being a propaganda arm for its government once again.
I noticed Lou Dobbs, the host of CNN's
Moneyline, successfully intimidating the international philanthropist
George Soros in mid-sentence for daring to criticize his beloved
leader.
Dobbs had previously invited a dubious
duo to warble 'Have you forgotten?' against the emotive background
of crumbling twin towers. On Lou's website, Kofi Annan comes
under attack for daring to suggest that a war without United
Nations approval might be illegal.
British television is little better.
Last Saturday's worldwide anti-war demonstrations warranted hardly
any coverage, the protesting schoolchildren covered with fake
blood and the thousands who have downed tools even less.
They say that the first casualty of war
is truth, and it already looks as though that is going to be
a rare commodity in the weeks and months ahead. If the White
House and Downing Street get their way, we will never know the
true effects of their aggression on the Iraqi people.
We will be shielded from the broken limbs,
the fearful screams, the blood and the gore. We will see what
they want us to see and we will know what they want us to know
and if we find out anything that they don't want us to know,
then we will be called anti-American, pro-Saddam Hussein or crazed
conspiracy theorists.
No. We are destined, instead, to witness
Iraqis dancing in the streets, dispensing candy as the good old
American cavalry arrive to save them from Saddam. The Bush administration
will justify the 'collateral damage' by either finding Iraq's
infamous weapons of mass destruction, or planting them and then
Iraq will get a Karzai clone who will salivate at the idea of
privatizing Iraqi oil.
Even before the war is over, Iraqi diplomats
are being kicked out of their embassies and consulates, their
real estate seized 'for the next Iraqi (puppet) administration'.
Some 1.6 billion dollars of Iraqi funds in the US, which were
frozen after the Gulf War is to be grabbed too 'to help pay for
Iraq's reconstruction'. Arms manufacturers are already laughing
all the way to the bank, while Bush's cronies rub their hands
together waiting for their lucrative post-war contracts to be
implemented.
The human shields, or those who are still
living, will return home to write their memoirs, the peace movements
will be stripped back to the leftist stalwarts and another American
protectorate is born. The New World Order is here...until it
is challenged, as it must surely be.
Yesterday's
Features
Ben Tripp
Blood
for Oil: the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint
Them Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic
Protest for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz-Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- Turkish Delights: a Pre-War Diary by Tariq Ali;
- The Plot to Frame the
Zapatistas: Talkers
and Cowards;
- Drugging Kids: The Plague of Neuroleptics;
- The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal:
a New Investigation.
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|
Take a Bite Out of Phil Knight's Bottom Line: Buy No Sweat Apparel!
Alexander
Cockburn
Moran
and the Dixie Chicks; Hitchens and Horowitz
Peter Linebaugh
Terror
of the Petrolarchs
Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
Cooking
Intelligence for War
Anne Gwynne
Anger and Tears at Israel's Wall of Apartheid
Pablo Mukherjee
Why Certain Liberals Love the War
Adam Lebowitz
The Fire Last Time: Remembering the Tokyo Air Raids
Kurt Nimmo
If You Care About Elizabeth Smart, Why Not the Kids of Iraq?
John Ross
Endgame
in Baghdad: a Human Shield Returns Home to Protest
Fran Shor
The Grunts of Empire
Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
The Muslim World and the West: the Roots of Conflict
Ben Tripp
Support Our Troops...Quick!
Dr. Susan
Block
Bukkake Bombing Crusade
Harvey Wasserman
The Emerging Superpower of Peace
Anthony Gancarski
Elizabeth Smart: the Face of War?
Seymour Melman
In the Grip of the Permanent War Economy
Joe Quandt
Do You Know What War Is?
Adam Engel
Indian Museum
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Richey, Becker, Perelman and Katz
March 8 /
9, 2003
Edward Said
Who's
In Charge?
Bruce Jackson
Elegy
for Two Giraffes and a Zebra
Perry Anderson
The Casuistries of Peace and
War
Joanne Mariner
Patriot
Act II's Attack on Punishment
William Lind
A Warning from Clausewitz on 4th Generation Warfare
Sam Husseini
Why
So Long for Iraq to Comply? Follow the Policy
Forrest Hylton
Business as Usual in Bolivia?
David Lindorff
Race and the Death Penalty in Pennsylvania
Ben Tripp
Is There
a Eurologist in the House?
Anthony Gancarski
W's Personal Jesus
Jon Elmer
An Interview with William Blum
Douglas Valentine
The Clash of the Icons
Norman Madarasz
Radical Politics and the Writer:
Maurice Blanchot
Gordon Solberg
There's
Got to be a Better Way
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Engel, Bernard
Weekend Website
The
White House
February 28,
2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Meet
the New Yorker's Chief Hack: Jeffrey Goldberg
Saul Landau
Now
It's Personal
Michael Neumann
A Plea for Hysteria
Karima Bennoume
The UN: Tool for Peace or War?
The Black
Commentator
The Rev. Sharpton and the Soul of the Democrats
Jennifer Loewenstein
Don't Turn Off the War
Richard Levins
Cuba's Biological Weapons: Why the World Needs More of Them
M. Shahid Alam
Is This a Clash of Civilizations?
Clay Conrad
Juries
and Judges: What's Relevant?
Ben Tripp
Speaking in Tongues: a Guide to Gibberish in the Age of Bush
Eliot Katz
To Declare Preemptive War is to Declare a Bankrupt Imagination
Kurt Nimmo
Paying Through the Nose to Kill Iraqi Kids
Matt Vidal
George W. Bonaparte
Mark Zepezauer
Why the Right Hates America
Mickey Z.
The Anti----War Talk I Never Gave
Jerry Kroth
Jung and the Space Shuttle Revisited
Shyam Oberoi
Chronicle of a War Foretold
Ron Jacobs
What If the Firebombing of Baghdad Were a Nightclub Fire?
Poets' Basement
Eliot Katz and Jim Cohn
Website of
the Weekend
Defense
Tech
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|