WHAT DO WE EXPECT?

It’s all propaganda anyway. Over and over we are told how brutal and inhuman our enemy in Iraq is. Of course, we’re told that! What would we expect, that we would praise those who have killed and wounded our servicemen, those brave, naive young men and women Bush has sent over there to a foreign land to die in a war he shouldn’t have started?

If some of us ever quit thinking we were fighting the “bad guy” that would be the end of Bush’s presidency. Also, now that 51% of us have accepted full responsibility for the deaths of our soldiers, that 51% has got a stake in justifying Bush’s and their war. The rest of us can still have easy consciences. The blood is not on our hands.

But the real issue of this blog entry is the simplistic bad guy idea. How would you fight if you were facing overwhelming, Goliath size power and nearly all you had were the equivalent of David’s slingshot and stones? Of course you’d be forced to fight as dirty and underhanded as necessary to overcome superior firepower and overwhelming force. Imagine rifles and hand held rockets versus helicopter gun ships and tanks.

We are without doubt the big bad guy on the schoolyard of Iraq, so our enemies must fight with dirty tactics. They have no other means to win. Bush put them in that situation, not daring to send our troops armed with only rifles and machine guns against men equally armed with rifles and machine guns. Why give the little guy a fair chance to defeat us? So we have no grounds to complain about the tactics of the jihadists; they’re doing what they must do to have any chance of success. We can no more expect them to fight a fair fight than we are.


RIBBONS SMIBBONS!

Most all my life, I’ve been driving a car with an invisible yellow ribbon on it in support of all our troops all the time. I drove one with an invisible yellow ribbon even when we weren’t fighting a war. I’ve been driving three and four cylinder cars and being patriotic and conserving our natural resources since the mid-Sixties when I first learned about non-renewable resources. I’ve been doing my bit for the war effort all along, just like the people on the home front did in World War II when gas was rationed. I’d like to see gas rationing now and listen to the patriotic ones roar with frustration when they can’t fill their tanks. So you gas hog driving, unpatriotic, mindless pump pimps in your SUVs—get a gas saver and wear a real ribbon.


WHO’S CONSPIRACY OBSESSED?

from Newsweek, November 29, 2004, p. 36:

“...many Iraqis accuse the Americans of reckless disregard for civilian lives. A conspiracy-obsessed form of logic has taken over, and every bit of information is evidence of something sinister on the part of the foreign occupiers. Some Iraqis even accuse the Americans of having a ‘hidden hand’ in the CARE director’s death. Baghdad schoolteacher Mona Kareem, 47, suspects that the Americans orchestrated the murder as a way of both discrediting the insurgents and keeping the Iraqi people dependent on U.S. assistance. ‘Killing [Hassan] results in harming the reputation of the resistance and Iraqis in general,’ Kareem argues. ‘[It] makes all humanitarian organizations think twice before coming into the country, not to mention investment companies.’ The bottom line: ‘Less services and more unemployed people, and an open field for the Americans and Iraqi government to do whatever they want.’ Such a line of reasoning might leave Americans scratching their heads, but it seems utterly sensible to many Iraqis.”

Who’s scratching what head? Mona Kareem’s logic is impeccable, given the Republican history of dirty tricks going back to Nixon and the ones which defeated John Kerry, from the straightforward lies of the Swifties to the Republican planting of a story about Bush’s guard service that blew up in Dan Rather’s face. The Kareem woman could be right. The naiveté of Republican voters, exposed by the way they bought the Bushite lies about just about everything during the campaign, could very well lead Republican leadership to think they can get away with almost any deception in Iraq.
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“Sex is the most fun you can have without smiling.” —Unknown