Antiwar.com Blog

If you were a rebel in Fallujah, and you knew this:

An armoured column of about 1,000 soldiers from the 1st Battalion 16th Infantry Regiment reached the outskirts of Karma today, a small village six kilometres north of Fallujah.

They were attempting to clear food delivery routes from Baghdad to US bases to the west, said an AFP correspondent at the scene.

An attempt to clear the route last week met with fierce fighting that left 100 insurgents and one US soldier dead, according to the coalition.

US bases west of Baghdad started rationing food from Sunday because of dwindling supplies caused by insurgent attacks.

And you knew their convoys were moving like this, and big reconstruction contractors like this were pulling out, just how much credibility would you give to people who go from rhetoric like this, to whining like this:

A US Marine general warned yesterday that insurgents in the powderkeg Iraqi city of Fallujah had only days to turn in their weapons, and said that had been handed over so far was a load of “junk”.
[…]
Asked how long the insurgents had to hand over their weapons, Conway said: “days, not weeks”.

Submit or Die! And you have…um….less than a week to turn in weapons that aren’t all rusted pieces of junk. So says the mighty American Marines.

Why, I’m shocked, just shocked! The warbots are making a lot of hay over the oil-for-food scam in which UN officials and Saddam Hussein skimmed billions from the program, but I still have to ask: Why did the humanitarian disaster happen? As I pointed out in an article on sanctions back in September, the excess deaths during the sanctions period were measured against the 1980s–when Saddam Hussein was in power, waging war against Iran, stealing from the commonweal, and generally being an a**hole. What changed in the 1990s? A massive invasion, continual bombing, and sanctions.

As I have also pointed out before, Saddam and his sons were living it up as the citizenry starved, but the citizens weren’t starving before the invasion, bombing, and sanctions. Imagine that some foreign power devastated the productive capacity of the U.S., blockaded our ports, and only allowed in what they deemed to be subsistence levels of food and medicine. Now, if Dubya, Cheney, and co. skimmed half the goodies to continue living in the style to which they are accustomed, we would all call them “a**holes.” But the primary blame for the ensuing catastrophe would fall on the invading, bombing, and blockading power for so reducing the availability of necessities as to put the citizenry in such a position in the first place.

Ryan,
So you’re not going to distort and fabricate anymore? Sounds credible to me. But why do so many of the comments above sound and look exactly the same, with no return addresses?

Oh, and you’ve still yet to answer my initial post. Lie, distort, evade: you’ve learned a lot from the president.

Maybe I’ll link to you again in a few months, scare you up some readers. Bye for now.

Best,
Matt

You’ll notice that Mr. Tasty Manatees has altered, fabricated, and deleted at will on the comments board I talked about here. He also removed his warning about this Orwellian practice. Several readers have written to inform me of his alterations and deletions, but the funniest comment was this:

After watching the speed at which opinions that differ from his own get removed,
I’d have to say his appreciation of free speech rivals that of a Hussein or a
Bremer.

Oh well, I say keep him busy!

Marine commanders say some rebel fighters are turning in weapons as promised. But most of the weapons don’t work.

Did they say they had to turn in their good stuff?

Peace efforts in this besieged city ran into trouble Wednesday as guerrillas mounted a heavy attack on Marines in a battle that killed 20 insurgents, and Marines said almost all the weapons turned in so far in a crucial disarmament were in such bad shape they were already useless.

In response, Marines halted the return of some of the 70,000 residents — more than a third of Fallujah’s population — who fled during this month’s bloody fighting. Crowds massed behind concertina wire, with women and crying children pressing forward demanding to be let in. Nearby trucks were stacked high with the families’ belongings.

About 10 families re-entered the city in the morning before Marines announced to some 600 Iraqis waiting at the checkpoint that no more would be allowed in.
[…]
Marine commanders said some weapons were handed over during the day, but 95 percent were in such bad shape they were useless. They would not say how many weapons were turned in.

“These may be early indications that the insurgents may not be living up to the requirements of the agreement,” Marine Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne said earlier in the day, when Marines reported no weapons had been surrendered.

I’m so surprised. I thought everyone in Fallujah would rush to disarm themselves.

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UPDATE

This is too funny. A guy who calls himself “Conservative Observer” says that the rebels turning in their useless weapons is like “the annual no-questions, gun buy-backs the Democrats have forced on so many city governments in the US.” It just gets funnier from there.

Apparently John Kerry does meet the most important qualification to be President.