Nebojsa mentioned the US govt’s hilariotic idea of sending Mongolian troops to Iraq (below). It’s worth mentioning also that a bin Laden message aired worldwide last year compared Powell & Cheney to Hulagu, so sending a token force of Mongols to Iraq will be a propaganda victory (& no doubt effective recruiting tool) for al Qaeda.
(Explanation for Americans: this is ironic because al Qaeda, not the Iraqi gov’t, attacked the USA on Sep. 11, ’01.)
Was looking for a picture and stumbled across this gem:
Clark for President!
It was the site of a 1948 atrocity. From Ha’aretz:
The attack on April 9, 1948, killed anywhere
from 108 to 254 [Arab] villagers – the number is still
debated – and accelerated Israeli expropriation
of land.
One man’s terrorist and all that…
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…
