By Chris Floyd - June 20, 2003.
"The rule of law is dead.
" And yes, it's true that Bushist Party
bosses in Baghdad have announced plans to start "privatizing"
the county's assets.
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They were digging mass graves in Iraq last week.
No, not the mass graves that
George W. Bush now reflexively invokes to justify his murder of up
to 10,000 innocent Iraqi civilians and the needless deaths of more
than 200 American soldiers in the aggressive war he launched on the
basis of proven lies and outright fabrications. Those mass graves,
containing victims of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, were dug years
ago, back when powerful U.S. officials like Dick Cheney, Colin
Powell and Paul Wolfowitz were pursuing "closer ties" to the Saddam
regime at the signed, insistent order of another president named
George Bush.
They were also being dug all
over Iraq when Donald Rumsfeld was eagerly pressing Saddamite flesh
as Ronald Reagan's special envoy, restoring diplomatic ties with the
CIA-supported killer. Oh, to have been a fly on that wall as
Rumsfeld squinted tenderly into Saddam's beady eyes and pledged to
lavish him with American money to build his war machine, American
technology to fuel his internal repression and American military
intelligence for his poison gassing of Iranian troops and missile
attacks on Iranian civilians. How many thousands of lives were
sacrificed in that moment of explosive power-guy passion! It must
have been a real bodice-ripper.
We're now told that those mass
graves are bad mass graves, although they were perfectly acceptable
at the time. (Then again, fashions change, don't they? Remember when
presidential deceit was an impeachable offense? When military
aggression was a war crime? Ah, those silly fads of yesteryear.) But
the new mass graves being dug in Iraq today -- for the innocent
collaterals killed during the American military sweeps last week --
are good mass graves, you see, because the aged farmers, retarded
teenagers, young fathers and fleeing women now being shoveled into
fetid desert pits were killed by the bombs and bullets of
liberation!
Yes, we know that Bush's viceroy in
Iraq, the preppy-monikered L. Paul Bremer III, has forbidden the
liberated Iraqi people from using their liberty to verbally oppose
the occupation of their land by a foreign power. Stifling dissent by
force of arms might seem a counterintuitive expression of freedom,
but it chimes perfectly with the Bush Regime's masterful use of Zen
paradox in statecraft. After all, this is the same crew that
introduced the American people to such mind-bending concepts as
loser-take-all democracy, charity for the rich, and prosperity
through bankruptcy. Do the noble Iraqis deserve any less?
And yes, it's true that Bushist
Party bosses in Baghdad have announced plans to start "privatizing"
the county's assets -- which, as you doubtless recall, are being
"held in trust for the Iraqi people" -- before said Iraqi people can
form a government and make their own decisions about it, Agence
France Presse reports. But is that so wrong? Indeed, hath not the
Leader himself proclaimed, in the official National Security Policy
of the United States, that unbridled crony capitalism is "the single
sustainable model of national success?" Since there is no real
choice, why bother to let the locals decide? [Memo to the Leader:
possible strategy for 2004?]
And so the villagers of Al Hir,
where an entire family was raked to death by machine-gun fire while
they cowered in their wheatfield -- a "mistake," the Pentagon said
-- joined hundreds of other survivors in burying their collateral
dead last week, The New York Times reports. Some of the corpses were
bullet-chewed beyond recognition; others were charred "like burned
meat," Knight-Ridder reports. How many civilians were killed --
sorry, liberated from this mortal coil -- during the full-bore
assault? A Pentagon spokesman put it in the proper perspective: Such
trifles, he said, are "just not significant information."
Equally insignificant,
apparently, are the U.S. soldiers who keep dying, week after week,
in a war whose triumphant "end" was announced nearly two months ago
by the Dear Leader during his million-dollar photo-op on an aircraft
carrier. This week, stung by mounting evidence -- including prewar
reports from the Pentagon's own intelligence service -- that there
were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the war and thus
no casus belli, Bush struck back. The president, whose family
fortune was built in part on profits from the Auschwitz death camp,
denounced his critics as "historical revisionists," Reuters reports.
Wisely ignoring the WMD issue altogether, Bush offered up his last
remaining line of defense: "This is for certain: Saddam Hussein is
no longer a threat to the United States."
Oh, really? Who then is killing
Americans by the dozens in Iraq? The Dear Leader's own spokesmen
tell us it is "Baathist die-hards," who are likely being paid if not
directly supervised by the still-alive, still-free dictator himself.
Saddam, it seems, enjoys considerably more liberty than the
liberated Iraqi people. And he is a much greater threat to Americans
now -- as a free agent, with nothing to lose, operating in secret --
than he ever was as the struggling head of a crippled country
crawling with UN inspectors, Kurdish armies and Allied warplanes
controlling his skies. From 1991 to 2003, not a single American
death can be tied to Saddam Hussein; but in the seven weeks since
Bush declared "mission accomplished," his partisans have killed more
than 40 Americans.
But for Bush, the loss of a
little cannon fodder here and there obviously represents "no threat"
to real Americans: you know, the pious hypocrites who profit from
lies and murder, the well-guarded cowards who gorge themselves on
the "burned meat" in Iraq's mass graves -- past, present and future.
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