"OPERATION FORWARD TOGETHER": Bush's bullshit offensive |
The truth about the power and stability of the mannequin Iraqi government is clear whenever we see any of its officials make public appearances, which are never conducted in public. These leaders see less daylight than Juneau in January. They’re always speaking with their backs to the wall of one catacomb or another. This is because whether or not George W. Bush shows up for visits shorter than the time it takes you or me to renew a driver’s license, the situation over there is desperate.A startling piece of leaked administration nonfiction corroborates this. US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad signed, if not wrote, a memo that documented that the situation is grave, which is also the likely destination for more and more Iraqis and occupiers. Let’s stop kidding ourselves; a full-fledged civil war was bound to occur when Saddam Hussein was removed from power in an unnatural nation made up of what would have been at least three countries if not for Britain’s imperial designs on the oil beneath its 1920 sands.
For now, the Kurds are happy to watch Shias and Sunnis kill each other and any American troops who happen to follow orders into a free-fire zone laden with IEDs and suicide- and car-bombers. According to the Khalilzad memo, the new Iraqi government that so enthuses Bush is “irrelevant.” The memo states that “even local mukhtars have been displaced or co-opted by militias.” Baghdad is now negotiated one block at a time, and the morgue, with an increasing number of execution-style victims, is now SRO.
When Bush brags about all the native police and security forces the United States have “stood up so that we can stand down,” he is explaining how he’s supplying both camps in this vicious struggle. Basically he put up a sign that said “free guns,” and then told us that it would help stabilize the country. All the while, lurid details come out about events like the Haditha massacre, further enraging locals and fortifying anti-occupation recruitment.
As I write this, an e-mail has arrived with James Hider’s shocking Times of London account of how Baghdad is ready to “fall” and how the 889,000 Iraqis who have fled the country may only be the “start” of a mass exodus. This partly explains why North Korea’s bottle-rocket Fourth of July display received only a few news cycles of attention. Gosh, what’s a charter member of the Axis of Evil got to do to get noticed these days?
No bang, no whimper necessary
Bush has made us all bit players in his two-term historical novel, War and Fleece. The unintentional moral of the story? When someone starts a war for fictional reasons, other people will find good reasons to start and/or continue the violence. Israel, a nation notorious for becoming what it resists, is embarking on a full-scale war of its own. The Israelis responded to the Hezbollah militia’s tit for rat-a-tat-tat invitation by retaliating for what they describe as the “kidnapping” of soldiers in a war zone and several instances of shelling Israeli neighborhoods. Post- 9/11 George W. Bush must be beaming with pride watching his number-one ally in the region react to assaults on innocent people by massacring innocent people throughout Gaza and Lebanon. American airwaves have been bombarded with talk of how Israel has no other choice but to punish these (and this is the word I’ve heard most often) “animals.” Well, sign me up for PETA because I don’t believe anyone, not even an animal, should be subjected to what Hezbollah and Israel have wrought.
