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June
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June
26, 2003
Sweet Land of Liberty
Mass Graves
and Burned Meat in Bush's New Iraq
By CHRIS FLOYD
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 American 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 the burly beloved with American money to build his
war machine, American technology to fuel his internal repression,
American honor to secure him credit and diplomatic backing abroad,
and American military intelligence for his poison gassing of
Iranian troops and missile attacks on Iranian civilians. How
many thousands of innocent lives were sacrificed in that moment
of explosive power-guy passion! It must have been one steamy
love scene, 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 do 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 recently forbidden
the liberated Iraqi people from using their liberty to verbally
oppose the occupation of their land by a foreign power. He then
arbitrarily canceled elections in Najaf which would have been
the first free local vote in Iraq for decades--not restricted
to a list of "acceptable" candidates chosen by the
occupiers, as in "elections" elsewhere around the country,
but a ballot open to all parties. Not only did Bremer quash the
vote, he sent American troops to "storm the offices of an
obscure local party" and arrest the nascent democrats for--you
guessed it--opposing the occupation of their land by a foreign
power, the New York Times reports.
Now, canceling elections and stifling
dissent by force of arms might seem a counterintuitive expression
of political 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?
Besides, "liberation without liberty"
reflects the Dear Leader's own unique philosophy of governance,
expressed so eloquently before his judicially-assisted apotheosis
in 2000 when, piqued by a satirical website that dared to cast
aspersions on his looming greatness, he cried, "There ought
to be limits to freedom!" In this, at least, he is a man
of his word.
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, AFP reports. But is that so wrong? "Privatization
is the right direction for 21st century Iraq," declared
Tim Carney, the Bush satrap "advising" the Iraqi ministry
of metals and minerals. 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: a 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 ravaged 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 all in the proper perspective: such trifles, he said, are
"just not significant information."
Equally insignificant, apparently, are
the American 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
pre-war 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 Bathist "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.
Chris Floyd
is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular contributor
to CounterPunch. He can be reached at: cfloyd72@hotmail.com
Weekend
Edition Features
Alexander
Cockburn
My Life as a Rabbi
William
A. Cook
The Scourge of Hopelessness
Standard
Schaefer
The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
Ron Jacobs
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Harry
Browne
The Pitstop Ploughshares
Lawrence
Magnuson
WMD: The Most Dangerous Game
Harold
Gould
Saddam and the WMD Mystery
David Krieger
10 Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Avia
Pasternak
The Unholy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
CounterPunch
Summer Reading:
Our Favorite Novels
Todd Chretien
Return to Sender: Todd Gitlin, the Duke of Condescension
Maria
Tomchick
Danny Goldberg's Imaginary Kids
Adam Engel
The Fat Man in Little Boy
Poets'
Basement
Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
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