[lbo-talk] Dial Tone Iraq

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Mon May 24 15:17:22 PDT 2004


Well, I watched Zinni on 60 Minutes last night and he said essentially what I implied he would miss---the war was a bad idea. One interesting point was when Zinni basically outlined exactly the same things that Senator Fritz Hollings said, i.e. the neocons did it all with Israel upper most in their minds, and then named them as Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams, and Perle---tagging it as the worst kept secret in Washington.

I actually preferred Andy Rooney last night who was sounding apocalyptic over something beside name brand Frosted Flakes.

I have to wonder if Zinni, Scowcroft, Schwarzkopf, Clark and Shinseki have no problem standing up to say the war in Iraq is bullshit, why is our hero and great conscience of Vietnam, John Kerry so shy? Does he really think a few votes from the perplexed bubbas will make a difference? Or is he afraid of being labeled an anti-Semite?

I don't get it. If the country is in the middle of two criminal wars, planned and executed with massive incompetence, followed by occupations saturated in bloody war crimes orchestrated in blatant violations of US and international law and rules of war, and the whole god damned mess has already gone down the toilet and we are staring at the bubbles---well fucking Duh---how about a few words of `concern' from our opposition candidate?

One wonders if all that doesn't sufficiently raise `concern', then just exactly what does it take?

Carl Remick posted a NYT quote: ``There's a terrible sense of dread filtering across America at the moment...[that] grows out of the suspicion that we all may be passengers in a vehicle that has made a radically wrong turn and is barreling along a dark road, with its headlights off and with someone behind the wheel who may not know how to drive...''

Well, it won't take long before that public dread is linked up to the complete absence of any alternative. John Kerry's coy mumbling about the UN and Iraq has already become irrelevant.

The Bush team is getting their UN Security Council resolution fraud up and running to submit for a vote, and will use it their `exit' strategy while they `stay' the `course'. Bush will no doubt unveil it tonight as his UN plan to `save' Iraq. His systemic round up and torture war on terror has already been spun into a guard training problem of prisoner abuse.

While grumbling about this last night, I was thinking about an interesting but rarely noted feature about bad times. In bad times, time itself seems to accelerate. Events seem to occur at a faster pace as if being pushed along their aberrant paths by multiplying forces.

We have been in speed up mode now for four years, gaining an explosive momentum with 9/11 which was just short of three years ago, followed by another added explosive push with the invasion of Iraq last year.

Seems like a century ago to me.

Meanwhile, I will guess that the UN Security Council will pass the US resolution perhaps hoping that the US will stop this Iraq insanity. But they will be mistaken and prolong it. If the US Security Council supports the resolution it will only legitimize the US invasion and occupation ex post facto, and virtually guaranty the continuance of the US military occupation herein after labeled a UN sanctioned security force, now under UN imprinteur. The UN with no input at all on its composition, will then have a fraudulent Iraq delegation to seat. Yet another new series of facts on the ground will then have been created. As this international legal pretext and fraud becomes a `fact', all Iraqi resistance to the US occupation will be transformed into terrorism pure and simple, against a legitimate government. The US will `hand over' its Abu Ghraib War on Terror to `Iraq' authorities, making their `success' at handling their new job of oppressing their own people the litmus test for US withdrawal. This little sequence bares remarkable resemblance to the Israeli demand the PLO crush its own people for the sake of Israel.

On the domestic political front all of Kerry's UN mumblings will be trumped by Bush accomplished facts. There will be zero daylight between them. Haggling over the nuance of UN details will become equivalent to arguing over which tax cuts go to which rich. Bush v. Kerry debates on Iraq will become a dial tone.

But the good part about the speed up of time is that if I am wrong about all this, that is forgotten as fast as the events change and make these speculations irrelevant.

The odd thing about current events at this point is they are not driven by the ridiculous in-fighting of US anti-war groups, by the brain dead US public, the apparently clue-less media, the Bush administration, the US military or the UN, but by the lowly, nameless, and almost voiceless Iraqis resistance. If they can keep up the state of siege, and by their actions put the lie to all US pretense, then none of the above speculations can unfold without question.

C



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