Remember
Ali Abbas,
the cute little tyke whose arms were blown off by his American
"liberators"? He's calling down
vengeance on the heads of his tormentors:
"Ali
Abbas, the 13-year-old boy who lost both his arms and much
of his family in the bombing of Iraq, says he hopes the pilot
responsible will be 'burned as I am burned.' Images of Ali
crying in pain in a Baghdad hospital drew international attention.
British doctors have since fitted him with artificial arms.
"'I
keep asking myself why they are bombing Iraqi people. What
have we done to them?' said Ali in a television interview
due to be broadcast last night. 'I hoped the pilot who hit
our house would be burned as I am burned and my family were
burned.'"
An
eye for an eye is a moral principle not limited to the Judeo-Christian
tradition. And he knows who his real enemies are:
"The
youngster criticized Britain for its part in the war. 'When
I was in the hospital [Britons] sent me letters, but they
still helped the Americans,' he said."
How
many little Alis are we breeding in Iraq? Will they one day
wreak their vengeance in acts of terror
yet undreamed of?
Ali's
revenge is just a matter of time, and, if we interpret "the
pilot" responsible for his mutilation in a metaphorical or
symbolic sense, then we don't have long to wait. Because the
President of the United States is getting burned in Iraq every
day, along with the military forces he commands, by those geniuses over at
the American Enterprise Institute, and their neocon amen
corner in the administration, who told him that American troops
would be greeted as "liberators,"
that it would be a "cakewalk,"
and that the entry of our troops into Baghdad was like
the march into Paris in the summer of 1944.
Then
why are the Iraqis responding as if it's the
summer of 1940 – and they're the French Resistance?
Let's
look at a typical day in
the life of this empire we've suddenly acquired, October
14, 2003, and see if that's what we want to be doing for the
next fifty or so years.
A
car bomb went off outside the Turkish Embassy, killing
two and injuring at least a dozen, the day after Turkey's
parliament voted to send "peacekeepers" to Iraq. It was the
third such attack in a week. The proposed deployment of
10,000 Turkish troops in Iraq couldn't have provoked the Iraqis
more if it had been designed to: even the
U.S.-appointed "Iraqi Governing Council" opposes this crazed
idea. All Iraqi ethnic groups, but for the Turkmen, are
united
in their opposition to Turkish troops as occupiers, but
the Kurds are particularly perturbed, and with good reason:
Ankara's war on the Kurds
inside Turkey is a longstanding atrocity, one that has been
ignored in the West – except insofar as it involved Saddam Hussein.
The
Iraqi dictator and the Turkish military, objectively acting
in tandem, kept
the Kurds in check as long as the Ba'athist regime lasted.
But the U.S. invasion has tipped the balance of power in favor
of the Kurds – and the Turks, facing an ongoing Kurdish insurgency
within their own borders, want to tip it the other way. The
Americans, like the Romans, now turn to mercenaries to police
their empire.
Modern
Turkey has long harbored expansionist designs, and the "transformation"
of the Middle East by U.S. policymakers has given Ankara an
opening. The "Pan-Turkic"
ideology of the 1908 revolution, led by the legendary Ataturk
(a.k.a. Mustapha Kemal), was based on a radical irredentism
that envisioned the restoration of Turkish rule in the Caucasus,
the Crimea, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Siberia,
Turkestan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan – and, on the
European side of the Bosporus: Bulgaria, Western Thrace, Yugoslavia,
Cyprus, and the Aegean islands. This expansionist tendency
was held in abeyance, prior to the invasion, but could be
potentially unleashed
by Turkey's willingness to take casualties in place of the
Americans.
The
invasion of Iraq had to mean its disintegration as a nation:
it was only the Ba'athist ideology of Iraqi nationalism that
kept the country together. In addition to the Turkish incursion,
and its explosive consequences, this was a day that saw a
major outbreak
of fighting between rival Shi'ite factions in Karbala,
where followers of Muqtada al-Sadr
took over the shrine of Imam al-Hussein
from fighters loyal to Grand
Ayatollah Ali Hussein al-Sistani. Casualty figures are
rapidly changing, but at least 10 were killed, according to
reports, and more than a dozen wounded.
In
a separate incident, an American soldier of the 3rd Armored
Cavalry Regiment was found dead
Monday night in the Euphrates River near Hadithah: the cause
of death is unclear.
Reports
are also just now coming in of 7 attacks over the weekend
and into Monday, in which 3 U.S. soldiers were
killed and 11 others wounded. And in other news, we learn
that Iraq's oil minister, Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum,
survived an
assassination attempt in Baghdad. He was traveling through
Baghdad with a deputy on the Governing Council in a seven-car
convoy. And that's just the attacks we know about. Setting
the tone for a day of unfolding disaster, MSNBC reports:
"Gunfire
rattled in the streets of Baghdad near the Palestine Hotel
before dawn Tuesday, sending police rushing to the scene.
The cause was unclear, and it was not known whether anyone
was hurt."
Twenty-four
hours in the lifespan of the Empire – and never a dull moment.
Is this what we want?
I'm
watching General Barry McCaffrey on MSNBC right now – it's
time for my afternoon Buchanan
& Press break! – and he's saying that he envisions
a 2-to-5 year process of Iraqi-ization,
and a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq and
Kuwait. But the other guest, Senator Thomas Craig, Republican of Wyoming,
didn't seem too happy with that prospect, and said he thought
we could put the Iraqis in charge and get out.
It's
interesting that we're hearing calls for a withdrawal, albeit
muted, coming not from Democrats but from conservative Republicans
like Senator Craig, who are looking for an exit strategy.
All the Democratic candidates for President, except the minor
ones, are calling for "nation-building" in Iraq: Dean, Kerry,
Clark, and Lieberman all support the continued presence of
U.S. troops. This is seen as a Republican war, yet the Democrats
– with the exception of Dean – all supported it, and voted
for it, handing the President a blank check. They're whining
now that he's written in the sum of $87 billion, but that's
just nitpicking: both parties agree on the policy.
Yet
Americans do not agree: according to a recent Newsweek poll,
the majority, 49 percent, disapprove of Bush's war. Americans
are evenly split on our new foreign policy of perpetual bellicosity:
45 percent approve while 44 percent do not.
Who
represents the dissenters?
They
are locked out of the political system, ignored by both major
political parties, and without a voice in Washington. But
that is a dangerously elitist policy to pursue, one that could
easily provoke a populist revolt. Think of the recent upsurge
in California, where voters recalled a sitting governor and
went outside the political establishment for new leadership
– and then imagine it on a national scale. Lacking a national
recall mechanism to rein in the out-of-control clique at the
helm of our foreign policy, however, the rising opposition
to this rotten war has no legitimate outlet – until the pressure
bursts the bounds of legitimacy.
That's
what they call a revolution.
NOTES
IN THE MARGIN
Monday's
column on the "form letters" sent out in the names of
individual U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq, extolling the
alleged achievements of the occupation, generated a lot of
interest, including a note from Antiwar.com columnist Nebojsa Malic, who pointed
out that this is merely a repeat of a stunt pulled by the
Republicans in January, where they generated email form letters
sent to practically every newspaper in the country that started
out:
"When
it comes to the economy, President Bush is demonstrating genuine
leadership …"
Slate
reports that this spamming of propaganda – known to the
cyber-cognoscenti as spam-aganda – succeeded: the letter,
appearing under different names, saw print in nearly 50 newspapers,
including the Financial Times and the Boston Globe.
Habitual
liars don't care how many times they're caught because they
just can't help themselves. They're addicted to lying, they
get high from it.
–
Justin Raimondo
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