Dead People
Don't
Go There
By KURT NIMMO
Naturally,
most Americans dread the prospect of US soldiers coming home in body
bags. It's not something Americans do well, this coming to terms with
engineered mass murder -- and yet large numbers of Americans support Bush
and his decision to invade Iraq.
How many dead GIs will America accept?
"I'm not going there, because I don't know," said Dan Bartlett,
White House communications director.
"The president looks at this knowing that when the commander in
chief talks about the use of force, the American people understand that
it may entail the sacrifices he has spoken of. And the president also
views this in the post-9/11 context, in which failure to act could lead
to the taking of even more lives," explained White House press
secretary, Ari Fleischer.
You know you're in trouble when they start talking about sacrifice. It
usually means a there will be a whole lot more dead people, maybe even a
few you know.
Numbers are abstract. 24 US soldiers killed. No names, no faces. That's
why the Iraqis broadcast images of POWs and the dead bodies of US
soldiers on TV the other day. It's both a propaganda war and a numbers
game.
Even so, Americans don't like to see their dead treated disrespectfully.
Good chance the Iraqis don't like to see their dead treated badly,
either, but apparently the message has not made it to the corporate
media. Images of dead Iraqi soldiers are all over newspapers, television,
and the web.
The "coalition" -- of two and one quarter -- bombed Iraq TV
after it showed the disrespectful video in question, but that will not
staunch the uncomfortable imagery. It leaks all over the place, if you
bother to take a look.
Such images rapidly deconstruct all abstractions the Bushites care to
make.
It suddenly gets personal, emotional. People begin to ask questions, ask
if this invasion is worth it. How many American kids need to die for
Bush, for Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, Bolton, the Kristols and Kagans and
Ledeens? 500? 5,000? 10,000? Somebody said the invasion might cost 12,000
US lives, ten percent of 120,000 troops.
How many dead Iraqi children and grandmothers are acceptable?
How many lives and how much money will this ill-defined and generally
considered illegal invasion cost?
Bush and Ari and Dan Bartlett want to avoid these questions. In fact,
Bush has called such questions "silly" and he refuses to answer
them. If you're worried about your kid in the military, how long he or
she will be in Iraq and what he or she are up against, let it be known
that Bush considers you silly.
Mass murder bothers most people, especially when it involves their loved
ones.
Bush is apparently not human, maybe he's a robot. Sometimes he looks like
a robot. Only robots feel nothing when they issue orders to kill
thousands of innocent humans.
Some people say Saddam's dead, he died from cancer four years ago. But
then it's obvious this whole thing is not about Saddam Hussein. It's
about Iraq and Israel, it's about oil and sending a message to the Arabs.
It's about the will of the Iraqi people who are now resisting invasion
and the theft of their country.
As a Christian (or rather a professed Christian) you'd think mass murder
would creep Bush out, considering the Ten Commandments and all. But then
the Old Testament is chock full of unreasonable violence and murder. The
God Bush listens to struck down all the firstborn in Egypt.
Bush's selected religion -- Christian Zionism -- embraces mass murder in
the name of the so-called Rapture and Second Coming of Christ. In short,
countless numbers of people are required to die for these selfish
Christian Zionists so they can get a free pass to heaven.
It's the Arabs now, but later it will be the Israeli Jews who face
extermination. Naturally, the Israelis exploit this sort of delusional
nonsense and use Christian Zionist support against their implacable
enemies, the Arabs.
Christian Zionists don't care about dead people, especially Palestinian
Arabs, all of who must die for the sake of their schizoid end-of-time
theology fantasies.
"It's a matter of victory and the Iraqi people have got to know
that, you see," explained Bush the other day. "They have got to
know that they will be liberated and Saddam Hussein will be removed no
matter how long it takes."
In other words, if it takes a dozen or more market bombings, or a
medieval siege of Baghdad, it's in the best interest of the Iraqis for
the US to blow them into cluster bomb crisscrossed chunks.
Did Bush even ask the Iraqis if they want to be liberated? No, because
liberation is not the issue here -- the wholesale looting of Iraq is the
issue.
Bush and his neo-con school of global piranhas don't care about the
Iraqis who will die of thirst, starvation, and disease as a result of
this criminal invasion and the eventual medieval siege of Baghdad. It's
the oil and the racist interests of the Israelis that matter, not the
fate of a few million Iraqis.
More practical types envision gushing oil wells, spanking new strip
malls, and a passel of IMF loans designed to loot not only the Iraqis of
their water and natural resources, but also their self respect.
Bush doesn't think like most of us.
Dubya's a lot like his daddy, like Clinton and Nixon and Reagan and all
the others -- mass murder, death squads, genocide, starvation, torture,
fixed elections, none of this cruel and heartless stuff bothers
him.
It's simply another set of pliers in the New World Order toolbox.
I was just following orders, said Adolf Eichmann.
Millions of people were killed on the direct orders of Hitler and his
sadistic Nazi crew. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do and not
look back in order to get things done, or so the Nazis reasoned. Millions
of Germans agreed -- and apparently millions of Americans now agree with
Bush. Some of them even find him admirable.
It helps that Saddam and Osama are now the same person.
It wasn't until the very end that the German people were forced to
confront what the Nazis had done in their name. It will be much the same
for Bush and the Americans.
It's the job of CNN and Fox News to make sure we're not tainted by the
blood-drenched reality of this invasion. Truth must be bottled up, locked
away.
Only one version of events will be allowed -- and that version consists
of the deceptive and cynically self-serving propaganda cranked out by the
Bush White House, the Pentagon, and duly relayed to a gullible public by
the corporate media.
This week both YellowTimes and the English-language version of al-Jazeera
lost their internet presence.
Remember, the US put one of its precision-guided missiles down the
smokestack of an al-Jazeera office in Kabul during the invasion of
Afghanistan.
It has threatened to target the radio and satellite signals of
independent journalists in Iraq, those not "embedded" (or
entombed) in the Pentagon's media charade and pre-packaged lie
factory.
The pictures of dead Brit soldiers shown on Arab TV reportedly outraged
Tony Blair, Bush's sidekick and co-conspirator. Of course, if the images
were of gassed Kurds and the finger was pointed at Saddam, Blair's
outrage would be turned in a different direction.
It's a stage-managed and fake outrage Blair invokes.
Tony Blair, like Bush, has no compassion for the victims of the neo-con
scheme to reorder the world -- beginning with the Middle East. Blair is a
robot, too. He is programmed for murder and devastation. Clinton -- who
bombed both Yugoslavia and Iraq -- taught his protege Tony Blair
well.
More specifically, it's not dead people that irk Blair -- not even dead
Brits, per se -- but rather the reaction of common and mostly decent
British citizens to these horrific images and what they mean.
It's all about how photos and video negatively impact support for the
illegal Bush-Blair invasion of the Iraqi people, a people already
suffering from more than a decade of sadistic and cruel Anglo-American
imposed sanctions. More than 500,000 Iraqi children perished as a direct
result of those sanctions. It's a crime of Hitlerian dimensions.
In Britain, some people are talking about packing Tony off to The Hague.
I support them, with one caveat: George W. Bush must be handcuffed to
Blair when he boards the plane.
It was the UK Sun that reported the death of Private Jessica Lynch, 19, a
US Army supply clerk who joined the US military because she couldn't find
a job in the Bush-Enron economy.
Lynch was one of 12 US soldiers killed by Iraqi soldiers in the ambush of
a supply convoy.
Jessica's cousin, Lorene Cumbridge, told the media for "West
Virginia children in some of the more rural areas, the military is the
one good chance of getting an education and making something of
themselves."
"The path we are taking is not easy, and it may be long," Bush
told several thousand working class and poor kid-soldiers at MacDill Air
Force Base. "Every day has brought us closer to our
objective."
Ah, yes, the all-important objective.
Shall we summarize?
Jessica Lynch died for a) oil and the destruction of an increasingly
euro-based OPEC, 2) the Israelis -- who stand to benefit from this
criminal invasion more than anybody beyond multinational corporations --
and 3) because the Bushites want the world to know in no uncertain terms
that the US will bomb and slaughter "vassals" -- as neo-con
swami Zbigniew Brzezinski calls people in the third world who resist New
World Order gangsterism -- the rest of humanity must understand that we
are indeed a nation of merciless robot killers in hire of Halliburton and
Exxon and the Enrons of the future.
Oh, and let's not forget those 40 million or so Christian Zionists who
demand the Middle East be swept clean of unChristianized Arabs -- and,
eventually, Jews and all other non-believers -- so they can go to Heaven
while the rest of us burn in Hell.
Final price?
Possibly a half million or more innocent Iraqis and a few -- dozen,
hundred, thousand? -- working class kids like Jessica Lynch, not to
mention a few hundred billion dollars.
Bush is doomed to failure, maybe (hopefully) even criminal charges,
because neo-cons such as Richard Perle and Michael Ledeen are unable to
understand a very simple and human behavior pattern -- when attacked,
most people will defend themselves. Ask the Vietnamese peasants who
kicked the ass of the baddest and most deadly military force in the
world.
It's called a home court advantage and Bush doesn't get it.
Some of us knew it would turn out this way, but there's no time to say we
told you so.
We're at a very dangerous intersection in this invasion -- the US is
stalled against the sheer intestinal fortitude and anger of the Iraqi
people, many of whom are resisting the invasion violently.
It's not Saddam they fear at this moment, but the global vampire crew of
Bush and his "thinkers" -- fat-ass wealthy "thinkers"
such as Richard Perle who seem to believe people in the third world,
especially Arabs, can easily be rolled over with clanking tank treads,
their aspirations crushed without much effective resistance.
Once again, history teaches.
Once again, history shows the Richard Perles of the world up for what
they are -- amazingly stupid, arrogant, racist, reckless, and
criminal.
Bush and his Pentagon planners want to avoid bombing Iraq's already
decimated infrastructure -- not because they wish to avoid the human cost
associated with such a brutal act, but rather because bombing Iraq to a
Stone Age condition will make it more difficult to lord over the country,
set up military bases in short order for future invasions in the
neighborhood, and steal the oil. As well, killing too many Iraqis makes
for resentful vassals and uncooperative near-slave laborers.
But then so does occupation, as the Israelis have learned. Instead of
learning from history and understanding human behavior, both the
Americans and the Israelis plod heavily toward defeat. In this way they
are like Afrikaners and other miserable colonialists of the
not-too-distant past.
Iraqis will continue their violent resistance to the criminal invasion.
So the real Shock and Awe phase may now begin in earnest. It's serious
now, infrastructure be damned. The Israelis and Christian Zionists demand
no less than pre-Armageddon devastation.
In other words, more dead people, and a whole lot of them.
As a result, more Iraqis missing a father or mother or brother and sister
will now pick up a gun or a suicide bomb and take out American kids from
West Virginia, Nebraska, and South Dakota. One foot in the quagmire, the
US begins its intractable and predictable descent. The sum total will be
nearly unimaginable suffering and death.
It will be the end of America as we know it.
No doubt, emboldened and driven by a shot list cobbled together by
demented and immoral neo-con overseers, Bush will attack Iran and Syria
next -- in fact, he has already lobbed missiles into both
countries.
Arabs remember the Crusades all too well. Bush's Christian Zionist
philosophy is not lost on them.
They also listen to what the Israelis have to say, especially the crazed
settlers who seem to be running the government there now. Ethnic
cleansing is a casual topic of discussion in Israeli cafes at this very
moment.
For millions of Arabs, this is nothing short of a religious war -- a
high-tech continuation of the Crusades.
Is it logical to conclude that as the US military attacks Kerbala and
Najaf -- towns Shia Muslims consider infinitely holy -- the average
Muslim will effortlessly reach the conclusion that the Crusader infidels
and the Israeli colonizers have finally arrived to eradicate Islam?
It doesn't help when neo-cons start talking about editing the Koran after
they domesticate -- or is it democratize? -- the primitive vassal Arabs
and Iranians.
Did George Bush sincerely believe the Arabs would simply give up and
welcome their self-proclaimed liberators with open arms?
It's the racist elitism of Bush and Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld and
Wolfowitz and the PNAC think tank white paper writers and scriveners in
the Pentagon and so-called intellectuals over at JINSA and AEI that are
cajoling and shoving the American people into protracted and
unsustainable war.
The ultimate result of all this traitorous collusion will be more dead
people.
In the months ahead more and more average Americans will find themselves
distressed by increasing numbers of dead people -- and many of these
usually peace-loving Americans will recognize the names of the dead --
and maybe they will do something decisive, something capable of unseating
the neo-con and Christian Zionist ideologues before they torch the entire
planet with their self-destructive ideas and devious plans.
It may take something more than 500,000 people gathered in New York and
San Francisco and Lisbon and Paris and nearly everywhere else.
It will take direct action from this point forward -- and we know what
that means, as do the men surrounding the George Bush, the
unpresident.
He doesn't want you to go there.
Kurt Nimmo is a regular CounterPunch contributor. Bookmark his
excellent website Another Day in the Empire
http://nimmo.blogspot.com/
