[Mb-civic] Defeat is victory. Death is life

Tue Feb 28 03:31:57 PST 2006

Verdun 
pile them high at epree and verdun
i am the grass
cover them over and let me work
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: ean at sbcglobal.net 
  To: ean at sbcglobal.net 
  Sent: Monday, February 27, 2006 11:08 PM
  Subject: [Mb-civic] Defeat is victory. Death is life

  http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12083.htm
  Defeat is victory. Death is life

  By Robert Fisk

  02/26/06 "The Independent" -- -- Everyone in the Middle East rewrites
  history, but never before have we had a US administration so wilfully,
  dishonestly and ruthlessly reinterpreting tragedy as success, defeat as
  victory, death as life - helped, I have to add, by the compliant American
  press. I'm reminded not so much of Vietnam as of the British and French
  commanders of the First World War who repeatedly lied about military
  victory over the Kaiser as they pushed hundreds of thousands of their men
  through the butchers' shops of the Somme, Verdun and Gallipoli. The only
  difference now is that we are pushing hundreds of thousands of Arabs
  though the butchers' shops - and don't even care.

  Last week's visit to Beirut by one of the blindest of George Bush's bats -
  his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice - was indicative of the cruelty
  that now pervades Washington. She brazenly talked about the burgeoning
  "democracies" of the Middle East while utterly ignoring the bloodbaths in
  Iraq and the growing sectarian tensions of Lebanon, Egypt and Saudi
  Arabia. Perhaps the key to her indifference can be found in her evidence
  to the Senate Committee on International Affairs where she denounced Iran
  as "the greatest strategic challenge" facing the US in the region, because
  Iran uses policies that "contradict the nature of the kind of Middle East
  sought by the United States".

  As Bouthaina Shaaban, one of the brightest of Syria's not always very
  bright team of government ministers, noted: "What is the nature of the
  kind of Middle East sought by the United States? Should Middle East states
  adapt themselves to that nature, designed oceans away?" As Maureen Dowd,
  the best and only really worthwhile columnist on the boring New York
  Times, observed this month, Bush "believes in self-determination only if
  he's doing the determining ... The Bushies are more obsessed with snooping
  on Americans than fathoming how other cultures think and react." And
  conniving with rogue regimes, too, Dowd might have added.

  Take Donald Rumsfeld, the reprehensible man who helped to kick off the
  "shock and awe" mess that has now trapped more than 100,000 Americans in
  the wastes of Iraq. He's been taking a leisurely trip around North Africa
  to consult some of America's nastiest dictators, among them President Zine
  el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, the man with the largest secret service in
  the Arab world and whose policemen have perfected the best method of
  gleaning information from suspected "terrorists": to hold them down and
  stuff bleach-soaked rags into their mouths until they have almost drowned.

  The Tunisians learned this from the somewhat cruder methods of the
  Algerians next door whose government death squads slaughtered quite a few
  of the 150,000 victims of the recent war against the Islamists. The
  Algerian lads - and I've interviewed a few of them after their nightmares
  persuaded them to seek asylum in London - would strap their naked victims
  to a ladder and, if the "chiffon" torture didn't work, they'd push a tube
  down the victim's throat and turn on a water tap until the prisoner
  swelled up like a balloon. There was a special department (at the
  Chateauneuf police station, in case Donald Rumsfeld wants to know) for
  torturing women, who were inevitably raped before being dispatched by an
  execution squad.

  All this I mention because Rumsfeld's also been cosying up to the
  Algerians. On a visit to Algiers this month, he announced that "the United
  States and Algeria have a multifaceted relationship. It involves political
  and economic as well as military-to-military co-operation. And we very
  much value the co-operation we are receiving in counter-terrorism..." Yes,
  I imagine the "chiffon" technique is easy to learn, the abuse of
  prisoners, too - just like Abu Ghraib, for example, which now seems to
  have been the fault of journalists rather than America's thugs.

  Rumsfeld's latest pronouncements have included a defence of the Pentagon's
  system of buying favourable news stories in Iraq with bribes -
  "non-traditional means to provide accurate information" was his fantasy
  description of this latest attempt to obscure the collapse of the American
  regime in Baghdad - and an attack on our reporting of the Abu Ghraib
  tortures. "Consider for a moment the vast quantity of column inches and
  hours of television devoted to the detainee abuse [sic] at Abu Ghraib.
  Compare that to the volume of coverage and condemnation associated with,
  say, the discovery of Saddam Hussein's mass graves, which were filled with
  hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis."

  Let's expose this whopping lie. We were exposing Saddam's vile regime,
  especially his use of gas, as long ago as 1983. I was refused a visa to
  Iraq by Saddam's satraps for exposing their vile tortures at - Abu Ghraib.
  And what was Donald Rumsfeld doing? Visiting Baghdad, grovelling before
  Saddam, to whom he did not mention the murders and mass graves, which he
  knew about, and pleading with the Beast of Baghdad to reopen the US
  embassy in Iraq.

  With the usual press courtiers in tow, Rumsfeld has no problems, witness
  George Melloan's recent interview with the Beast of Washington in his
  Boeing 737: "He generously spares me time for a chat about defence
  strategy. Bright sunlight streams in and lights his face ... Sitting
  across from him at a desk high above the clouds, one wonders if the
  ability of this modern Jove to call down lightning on transgressors will
  be equal to the tasks ahead."

  And so myth-making and tragedy go hand in hand. Iraq's monumental
  catastrophe has become routine, shapeless, an incipient "civil war". Note
  how the American framework of disaster is now being portrayed as an Iraqi
  vs Iraqi war, as if the huge and brutal US occupation has nothing to do
  with the appalling violence in Iraq. They blow up each other's mosques?
  They just don't want to get on. We told them to have a non-sectarian
  government and they refused. That, I suspect, will be the get-out line
  when the next deluge overwhelms the Americans in Iraq.

  Winston Churchill, when the Iraqis staged their insurgency against British
  rule in 1920, called Iraq "an ungrateful volcano". But let's just sit back
  and enjoy the view. Democracy is coming to the Middle East. People are
  enjoying more liberties. History doesn't matter, only the future. And the
  future for the people of the Middle East is becoming darker and bloodier
  by the day. I guess it just depends whether "Jove" is up to his job when
  all that bright sunlight streams in and lights his face.

  © 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

  ***

  -- 
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  "A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
  former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

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