Antiwar.com Blog

James Longley recently traveled to Nasiriyah filming the story of a sheik in Moqtada Sadr’s religious-political movement. This is a narrative of his journey, with a side trip to Al-Garraf, a nearby town.

There is only one full-time doctor working in the medical center that services 150,000 people. There are almost no facilities and the doctor’s role is limited to prescribing medication and administering first aid in emergency cases. All long-term patients are moved to the hospital in neighboring Nasiriyah. Many essential drugs are not available at all. In fact, all the medicines in the Al Garraf medical center pharmacy came from the warehouse in Nasiriyah, and are leftover supply from before the war 9 months ago. No new medicine has been supplied to the city medical center since the U.S. forces entered Iraq, with the exception of a few drug samples given to them by the Italians.

Those I talk with in the medical center agree that conditions there are worse now under U.S. occupation than during the UN sanctions against Iraq. “At least before we had some drugs coming in through the Oil For Food Program.” says Qablan.

The largest employer in Al Garraf was a carpet factory not far from the medical center. It even made carpets for Saddam’s palaces. Now all the equipment has been removed to prevent theft and the structure stands idle. “It would only take about $10,000 to get this place running again.” says Qablan, “But now nobody is certain who has the right to buy or sell the factory, because it was previously owned and operated by the state. It can only be decided after a legitimate government has been elected. Until then we will have to wait.”

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He was apparently just first among equals back in 1991, when the U.S. government deliberately destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure:

Among the justifications offered now [shortly after Gulf War I], particularly by the Air Force in recent briefings, is that Iraqi civilians were not blameless for Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. “The definition of innocents gets to be a little bit unclear,” said a senior Air Force officer, noting that many Iraqis supported the invasion of Kuwait. “They do live there, and ultimately the people have some control over what goes on in their country.”

This passage is quoted in a recent James Bovard essay on the murderous economic/diplomatic war that filled the space between the two invasions. Chew on this: The definition of innocents gets to be a little bit unclear. Americans and Britons: How different are your governments’ foreign policies from those of Osama bin Laden? Go ahead and send the hate mail, but give an honest minute’s reflection to the question first.

I am not linking to this horrific article to discuss the politics of the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, fifty-nine years years ago today. I am linking to it to illustrate that war is always the most terrible method nations can resort to in settling their differences. It doesn’t matter which side you are on; death and suffering don’t play favorites. As so many have repeated this past year: war is the ultimate failure of humanity.

Toward the end of World War II, as Allied planes rained death and destruction over Germany, the old Saxon city of Dresden lay like an island of tranquillity amid desolation. Famous as a cultural center and possessing no military value, Dresden had been spared the terror that descended from the skies over the rest of the country.

Dresden was a hospital city for wounded soldiers. Not one military unit, not one anti-aircraft battery was deployed in the city. Together with the 600,000 refugees from Breslau, Dresden was filled with nearly 1.2 million people…

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was in Dresden when it was bombed in 1945. Returning home to Indianapolis after the war, Vonnegut began writing short stories for magazines. Finally, in 1969, he tackled the subject of war, recounting his experiences as a POW in Dresden, forced to dig corpses from the rubble. The resulting novel was Slaughterhouse Five. “Yes, by your people, may I say,” he insists. “You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

The WWII Dresden Holocaust – ‘A Single Column Of Flame’

Got a number of emails re “Why There’s No Left Left (Part II).”

Eugene Koontz pointed out that 2 of the links in the post were broken. Here they are again: “Why There’s No Left Left [Part I]” and “Cash or Charge?”

Thanks Mr. Koontz!

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Thant Tessman writes:

“Minor note: The article about government debt linked to in the blog entry [“Tuition warfare“] says: ‘The government can spend more money than it takes in because it has the power to borrow money on the open market.’ This is not the whole story. The government would not be able to borrow the kind of money it does to finance the wars we’ve seen throughout U.S. history without the banks (through the mechanisms of the Federal Reserve and fractional-reserve banking) effectively printing money to buy that government debt. I’m sure this is something most of the contributors to Antiwar.com already know. I only mention it because this point never seems to get the attention it deserves.”

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B. Sirius writes:

“Let’s see, if we were citizens of a foreign country, Brazil for example, they would just forgive the national debt. When you have a population as collectively dumb as we are, folks just bend over and grab their ankles.”

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And Cam Hardy writes:

“I’m a regular reader of Antiwar.com, and generally your Mad Max-style libertarianism doesn’t get in the way of quality reporting and commentary. However, the blog entry ‘Why There’s No Left Left Part II’ was ridiculous. If there truly was ‘no Left left,’ the antiwar movement would be an irrelevant bunch of pseudo-intellects blogging about the need for roads to be privatized.”

Good eye for exaggeration, M. Hardy! “Why There’s Little Left Left” would have been more accurate. Also, Nixon did win in a landslide a few decades ago so maybe “Why There’s So Little Left” would have been better yet.

The story of Geoge W. Bush’s rise to wealth and the people who helped him, well worth the time it takes to read this 26-page article from Harpers Magazine originally written back in Feb 2000 by Joe Concson and Kevin P. Phillips while Bush was a candidate for the presidency. As an aside, it is interesting to note that among the military records just released documenting that 1st Lt. George W. Bush was relieved of flying status for not taking a required physical examination, further down the same page, Maj. James R. Bath was also relieved of flying status for the same reason shortly afterward. Mr. Bath appears in Bush business dealings spoken of in this article, and also was involved in the financial affairs of the bin Laden family. More on Mr. Bath later.

NOTES ON A NATIVE SON

And why the wishy-washy Kerry isn’t likely to win.

Read an excerpt of Myths of Rich and Poor.”

Or buy the book (and help out Antiwar.com)!

Read “Why There’s No Left Left” Part I.

To which a reader replies suggesting that the rise in the US standard of living is due to personal debt: “Cash or Charge?.”

But more ominous than personal debt is the government’s debt, which some analysts claim is approaching $100,000 per American (not per taxpayer, per man, woman and child) if Social Security obligations are included. How is a nation of people living paycheck to paycheck gonna pay down $100K per person? Not to worry, the same birdbrains and thieves who brought us the expensive, dangerous and (some of us would say) unethical everything-but-neutrality, fund’em-then-bomb’em foreign policy are hard at work, uh…