Month: September 2003

I’m not sure if Christopher Hitchens has written a tribute to Edward Said yet. The Alex Cockburn article spotlighted on Antiwar.com today makes reference to Hitchens’ recent ambush of Said. This essay from last week picks the ambush apart.

This Wesley Clark speech from May 2001 is one of the most disjointed, muddleheaded things I’ve ever read. It’s also pretty enlightening. Gen. Clark not only wants the U.S. to keep pestering all the countries we currently pester, he’d like us to adopt Africa and work a little of our “honest broker” magic on the Indians and Pakistanis. God help us.

(Link courtesy of the Liberty & Power blog, which you should also be reading. Don’t make me tell you again.)

I usually like Chris Floyd, but this ignorant crap pissed me off.

“In other words, the looters won’t have to plow so much as a dime of their swag back into the local economy; every last cent wrung from the bludgeoned Iraqi people will flow into corporate coffers and private pockets in London, Paris, Tokyo, Riyadh, New York, Moscow, Kennebunkport and Crawford. Taxes will be minimal, tariffs almost nonexistent, and there will be none of the pesky rules and regulations that occasionally hamper unfettered corporate gobbling in more unenlightened states — like, say, the United States and Britain.”

No, in other words, you communist scumbag — it’s a free market! The reason you even have a computer to bitch about the Bushies on and the reason you wear clothes you don’t sew yourself and eat food you don’t grow yourself and live in a house you didn’t build yourself. The corporate thieves in the West (hell, everywhere) are in power because of the state, not despite it — they couldn’t exist without its sanction and protection against competition.

Microsoft and Halliburton aside, are you telling me that if I have five grand in my pocket and I want to open a kabob stand in central Tikrit that is a sole proprietorship and send all the profits back home to momma, that that is evil — that it’s LOOTING!? My partner recently came back from a business trip in Dubai, and he said that in UAE, to open a business it has to be owned 49% by a UAE citizen. So you have to pay some sick amount of money to get a signature, and THEN the work begins to make your business profitable. All the raghead had to do was be born in UAE to citizens and BLING — he gets a chunk of your ass. THAT is looting. All they’re talking about in Iraq is NOT requiring this. Sounds like a little patch of semi-freedom in a land ruled by “ex-“Trots. And the fact that it applies to everything BUT oil should make the “no blood for oil!” hippies happy — right? RIGHT? Nooooo, because they don’t hate war, they hate PROFIT. They hate the market, especially when it’s FREE.

*gasp*

phew.

And you know what, it’s not just the outright commies. The whiny greenteeth bleated their share of hidden protests. That is, the body of the article simply recorded the facts and some half-truths (“The initiative bore all the hallmarks of Washington’s ascendant neoconservative lobby, complete with tax cuts and trade tariff rollbacks.” — sorry, Andy, but that’s a hallmark of anyone who doesn’t advocate socialism. The difference between me and the neocons, however, is that they advocate these things so that there will be an economy for them to tax and thereby get funding to remake the world in Israel’s image, where I merely hate all States and wish they and everyone who runs them would die. Oh, and trade is good.), while the headline exposed their filthy bias toward state control of the economy. “America puts Iraq up for sale” and the Telegraph had in the link before you see the article “Iraq for Sale.” Inside the article the first line is “Iraq was put up for auction…” Which just goes to show, Tories are really somewhat to the left of American Democrats…

“The accused and his ancestors have been riding our backs for 80 years,” says the opinion of a Croatian judge who convicted a local Serb of ‘war crimes’.
According to the Croatian weekly “Feral Tribune,” when ruling in the case on June 30, Judge Branko Milanovic went into a tirade about how the “accused and his ancestors” – i.e. the Serbs in general – are “seeking to conquer the areas the Turks had once reached, and the accused and his ancestors along with them.”
Not sure what history books Milanovic was raised on, but history not written by fascist nuts indicates that Serbs migrated from their Ottoman-occupied lands to avoid persecution, and were granted yeoman farms in Ottoman-depopulated Hapsburg lands (in today’s Croatia) in exchange for military service. The very name of the formerly Serbian-majority areas, Krajina, means “frontier” – military frontier, to be exact. Troops raised from these areas were called Die Grenzer.(Frontiersmen).
For the halfwit judge to claim that Serbs destroyed Croats on behalf of the Ottomans – while in reality they fought the Ottomans to defend the Croats safely ensconced behind the Frontier – is incongruous. No news whether the judge was penalized, or his verdict overturned. The defendant, Svetozar Karan, is probably still in prison. Continue reading “A Croatian Judge’s “History””

A recently linked-to article in Stars and Stripes proudly proclaims that a Mongolian contingent has finished U.S. peacekeepr training and is ready to deploy to Iraq.
This surely ranks as one of the worst ideas ever – save for invading Iraq to begin with, of course. Why?
History. Continue reading “Mongolians in Iraq? What the…?”

A reader directed me to an article that shows the wounded count I keep at Antiwar.com may be “way off base.” From the Army Public Affairs:

As of Sept. 16, Landstuhl[U.S. base in Germany] has treated approximately 6,000 service members from Operation Iraqi Freedom and 1,800 patients from Operation Enduring Freedom.

Note that this is a gov’t website. Now, add this account of casualties that arrive in the US:

“Since the war has started, I [ Lieutenant-Colonel Allen DeLane, who is in charge of the airlift of the wounded into Andrews air base] can’t give you an exact number because that’s classified information, but I can say to you over 4,000 have stayed here at Andrews, and that number doubles when you count the people that come here to Andrews and then we send them to other places like Walter Reed and Bethesda, which are in this area also.”

If these two numbers are valid (and disjoint sets), then the “real” total number of wounded is upwards of 10,000. I gather that some, or perhaps even a lot of these casualties are those who fall ill, trip on a stick or suffer from other “non-combat” injuries. Nonetheless, the total will still be higher than any official release.

The current count of wounded (see top right corner of the blog page) is 1507. This number is based on my own running tally of injuries coupled with the official CentCom and DOD releases. Perhaps I should distinguish between “Maximum Wounded” and “Minimum Wounded.” Thoughts?