I get up very early on the weekends - it's just a force of habit.
I thought it might be interesting to raise consciousness by looking at Iraq from the past, specifically one year ago exactly.
What was going on? What did the media think would happen in Iraq?
From
here:
As for Saddam himself, U.S. officials said it was still unclear whether he was dead or alive after Monday's strike on a building where he was believed to have been meeting with officials.
"He's either dead, or he's incapacitated, or he's healthy and cowering in some tunnel someplace, trying to avoid being caught," said U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
What actually happened is that the United States dropped a serious bomb on a restaurant in Baghdad and it killed dozens of people, many of them people who made the fatal mistake of eating in public that day. Secretary Rumsfeld's cryptic statements are worse than none at all. Watch, I can do the same: "Either we'll kill all the bad guys in Fallujah or else they will live to kill us". Sick.
From here:
U.S. Marines may have found weapons-grade plutonium in a massive underground facility discovered beneath Iraq's Al Tuwaitha nuclear complex, Fox News confirmed Friday.
Coalition forces are investigating a stash of radioactive material found at the site south of Baghdad, an embedded reporter, Carl Prine of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, first told Fox News on Thursday.
U.S. defense officials on Friday confirmed that preliminary field tests did in fact indicate the material could be plutonium.
Well we all know that the "preliminary tests" were wrong. Fatally wrong. A war with nearly 1000 non-Iraqis killed and ten times that domestically. How many Iraqis today have a relative killed by the United States? How about injured by American troops? How many Iraqis know someone whose house has been invaded and ransacked during a search in the middle of the night? All this hatred over supposedly illegal weapons (shouldn't they all be banned?) and a year ago the "justification" seemed to be forthcoming. But it wasn't.
From here:
Russia's ambassador to Iraq, Vladimir Titorenko, has accused American troops of shooting at his convoy Sunday outside Baghdad, wounding at least four people, one seriously.
U.S. Ambassador Alexander Vershbow told Echo of Moscow radio yesterday that the Russians altered their plans without informing American officials. It was still unclear who was responsible for the shooting, American officials said.
Yes and let's remember the Chinese Embassy was "accidentally bombed" during the Kosovo war as well. How strange that American troops accidentally fire on people who their bosses have such high-level disagreements with. Nowadays, it isn't hard to find Bush supporters saying that the Russian government opposed the Iraqi war and occupation because of "kickbacks" and "greed". I guess "Halliburton" must be a Russian word then.
From here:
"I hear a lot of talk here about how we're going to impose this leader or that leader. Forget it," Bush said at a news conference yesterday with Blair outside Belfast. "Iraqis are plenty capable of running Iraq, and that is precisely what is going to happen."
Blair said the U.S.-British role is merely to help in the transition from years of dictatorship to self-rule.
"This new Iraq that will emerge is not to be run either by us or, indeed, by the U.N. That is a false choice," Blair said. "It will run by the Iraqi people."
Addressing reporters in the gilded throne room of an 18th-century castle, Bush and Blair offered personal assessments of the war -- all positive.
The two leaders also said they would cede power in Iraq as soon as possible; involve Iraqi citizens from the outset in the creation of a transitional government; and give a "vital role" to the United Nations in reconstruction.
Meeting for the third time in three weeks, Bush and Blair offered few details about the exact U.N. role or the makeup of the interim governing authority. Bush said his word should be good enough.
"Evidently, there's some skepticism here in Europe about whether or not I mean what I say.
So far, all of the Iraqi "leaders" have been appointed directly by Blair and Bush, not the Iraqi people. Ceding the power "as soon as possible" has not come soon enough. And notice Bush's arrogance, speaking from a gilded palace, saying that his "word is good enough". I guess that "word" wasn't very good when it came to UN participation in the reconstruction of Iraq. Where are all those blue helmets now anyway? Isn't it true that the UN has no office anywhere inside Iraq right now because of security concerns? Yes it is.
And finally, from here:
Coalition troops have now taken control of the previously disputed cities of Basra, Najaf, Nasiriyah and Karbala, and have partial control in a dozen cities along their 300-plus-mile supply line to the south.
Commanders hope dominance over ever-larger areas of the capital will push Iraqis to the "tipping point" -- persuading them to give up the fight and clearing the way for U.S. ground forces to make a final push through Saddam's stronghold and the cities of the north.
The irony of course is that "coalition forces" are now losing control over those areas - to FREE Iraqis. Saddam is in jail. Iraqis are fighting for Iraq. Of course, at the time of that article, President Bush was just two weeks away from declaring the end to major combat. I wonder if helicopters getting shot down, hundreds of civilians dead, dozens of soldiers being killed and seriously injured, if all of that constitutes "major combat".
I know Bush is on vacation right now in Texas so he will never read this. But goddamn you sir.
Peace
-Soj