Shekoo Shmakoo? Shinu hal tar'baga? Shinu hal ulooj ya mah'flooj?
24.9.05
Truth about Iraqis: Merci beaucoup!
I love it when a fellow Iraqi blogger takes the words out of my mouth and confronts other Iraqi bloggers. Doing one is quite satisfying...doing both is poetry. And Truth About Iraqis manages to do the former many times over. Go check it.
I wonder how long it will take for the Iraqi bloggers who continue to praise the US presence in Iraq to realise that their homes have been stolen from them; that the lives they built for generations amount to naught; that the country which nurtured them is a battlefield created and sustained by a merciless campaign of deceit and false bravado?
Not one American media outlet has reported this. Why? Because it says either 1) the US has been working in collusion with the Iranians or 2) the US has created a catastrophe in the Middle East which will be felt for the next 100 years.
You can blog about music. You can blog about how life was in 1956. You can blog about how sorry you are for the bombings in London, the attacks on Zanzibar. You can blog about being a mistress in Iraq or about how your husband works in the Green Zone.
And the real dirt about the 2 undercover agents in Basra and this whole jailbreak disaster has yet to come out. I bet the plot thickens faster than Monosodium Glutamate on water.
When Iraqi police are turning on Occupation soldiers and vice versa, we are ripe for a...
You say you want a revolution Well, you know We all want to change the world You tell me that it's evolution Well, you know We all want to change the world But when you talk about destruction Don't you know that you can count me out Don't you know it's gonna be all right all right, all right
You say you got a real solution Well, you know We'd all love to see the plan You ask me for a contribution Well, you know We're doing what we can But when you want money for people with minds that hate All I can tell is brother you have to wait Don't you know it's gonna be all right all right, all right Ah ...
In freeing the two Britons, they inadvertently let 150 other prisoners escape, presumably some of them involved in the guerrilla movement. Two Iraqis were killed in related violence.
Then crowds attacked British military vehicles, setting 2 afire with Molotov cocktails.
The entire episode reeks of "dual sovereignty," in which there are two distinct sources of government authority. Social historian Charles Tilly says that dual sovereignty signals a revolutionary situation.
Doo doo, doo doo Doo doo, doo doo...doo'deh doooo...You are now entering the twilight zone. This is not 1920... Yet it is. [high E trumpet wail] But in reality it is 85 years later...what is really a sliver of a speck of time on the reflexively doting psyche of the universe. The womb of civilization is a carcinogenic placenta.
Does this make any sense to you? I'm tempted to piece together the puzzle myself. Instead, I'll head over to my fellow Iraqi bloggers to find out more.
In democracy after a hundred years you have to let your slaves go. After 150 years you have to let your women vote. And at the beginning of democracy there's quite a bit of genocide and ethnic cleansing is quite ok. And that's what's going on now.
Maureen gives a short history of the disaster in the disaster, Michael Brown.
It sounds more like a Vince Vaughn-Owen Wilson flick than the story of a man who was to be responsible for the fate of the Republic during the biggest natural disaster in our history. Brownie was a failed former lawyer with a degree from a semiaccredited law school, as The New Republic put it, when he moved to Colorado in 1991 to judge horse judges for the Arabian Horse Association.
He was put out to pasture under pressure in 2001, leaving him free to join his pal Mr. Allbaugh at an eviscerated FEMA. Mr. Allbaugh decided to leave the top job at FEMA and become a lobbyist with clients like Halliburton when the agency was reorganized under Homeland Security, stripping it of authority. Why not, Mr. Allbaugh thought, just pass this obscure sinecure to his homeboy?
Time magazine reported that Brownie's official bio described his only stint in emergency management as "assistant city manager" in Edmond, Okla. But a city official told Time that the FEMA chief had been "an assistant to the city manager," which was "more like an intern."
Pathetic considering there are actually people out there qualified to perform such jobs. But again, as its the rule more than the exception in the Cheney administration...you musn't be qualified. You must only be a friend, or a friend of a friend in the case of "Brownie".
Whoring out responsibilities of the state to witless lackeys like Brownie is hallmark of the current administration. So, not only if you fail do you receive medals and promotions...but you don't even need half a serving of credentials when serving in a position of prominence.
It's like appointing Elliot Abrams to be the Pentagon policy chief on the Middle East...
Oh, they've actually done that too.
Musical reference:
Jane's Addiction: Idiots Rule (mp3 up later, when my comp. recovery is complete)
WASHINGTON, Sept. 6 - As President Bush battled criticism over the response to Hurricane Katrina, his mother declared it a success for evacuees who "were underprivileged anyway," saying on Monday that many of the poor people she had seen while touring a Houston relocation site were faring better than before the storm hit.
"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas," Barbara Bush said in an interview on Monday with the radio program "Marketplace." "Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality."
"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway," she said, "so this is working very well for them."
Mrs. Bush toured the Astrodome complex with her husband, former President George Bush, as part of an administration campaign throughout the Gulf Coast region to counter criticism of the response to the storm. Former President Bush and former President Bill Clinton are helping raise money for the rebuilding effort.
White House officials did not respond on Tuesday to calls for comment on Mrs. Bush's remarks.
By making sure the polling stations are geared toward making sure votes would be cast for him instead of his challenger, Saddam Mubarak has assured he would win by an unusually weak margin of 88%. This would secure his dictatorship over the Egyptian people for many more years to come.
...polling stations in Cairo visited by Western reporters yesterday were evidently geared towards ensuring voters cast ballots only for President Mubarak rather than Ayman Nour, the liberal lawyer who is the leading opposition candidate.
While supporting dictators has become less popular in the twisted muckery of global politics, Saddam Mubarak has defied the odds of survival and continues to collect bribery from the American government in order to serve at their behest in the name of all those fancy democratic standards this same government purports to stand for.
This Jedi-mind-trick of a dictatorship has baffled the Islamists in Egypt, stifling their rise to power. Ironically enough, these people that claim to be stifling the power of Islamists are also making them stronger, while the moderate Egyptian voices slowly get drowned in the feces of an oppressive regime.
When Persian forces overran Babylonia in 539BC, the inhabitants surrendered peacefully. According to contemporary accounts, Cyrus was greeted as a liberator because of his just policies - and tough attitude to terrorists.
"When I entered Babylon I did not allow anyone to terrorise the land," a text known as the Cyrus Cylinder quotes him as saying. "I strove for peace in Babylon and all other sacred cities. I put an end to the inhabitants' misfortune."
My tv's been out for over a month now and I have been uninterested in fixing it. I have, however, been paying attention to certain video clips online of Americans in New Orleans being candid with their thoughts. And now, the truth assault is bearing down on Bush. His incompetence has never been clearer to Americans and citizens of the world. Iraq has been forgotten more completely than when Katrina hit the gulf coast. And it's difficult not to make certain correlations between disaster-Iraq and disaster-New Orleans.
The beautiful black people of New Orleans, the beautiful brown people of Iraq...
...being treated like animals easily sacrificed. Lives that don't matter...
He would have noticed if the majority of these stricken folks had been white and prosperous. But they weren't. Most were black and poor, and thus, to the George W. Bush administration, still invisible.
