A Bloody Charade

[tusaki]

I was looking at the headlines of google news and saw headlines like "millions brave bombs to vote", "this is democracy", so I got suspicious (I get that sometimes) and clicked on the link which returns a full list of headlines about the same happening. And it turns out my suspicion was right: all 'allies-based'-s newspapers (UK, US) were reporting the same piece of news, based on the same source. The voice of other, independent newspapers, was less cheerful. Have a look at the following article:

"A Bloody Charade" by Robert Fisk of the Sunday Independent, a South-African newspaper.

.... Then a fierce gun battle broke out in the very centre of Baghdad between Americans and insurgents. Too late again. The gunmen got away. Fantasy attacks before a fantasy election. Many Iraqis do not know the names of the candidates, let alone their policies. But there will be democracy in Iraq. The media boys and girls will be expected to play along with this. "Transition of power", says the hourly logo on CNN's live coverage of the election, though the poll is for a parliament to write a constitution, and the men who will form a majority within it will have no power. They have no control over their own oil, no authority over the streets of Baghdad, let alone the rest of the country, no workable army or loyal police force. Their only power is that of the American military and its 150 000 soldiers whom we could all see on the main intersections of Baghdad yesterday. The big television networks have been given a list of five polling stations where they will be "allowed" to film. Close inspection of the list shows that four of the five are in Shi'ite Muslim areas - where the polling will probably be high - and one in an upmarket Sunni area, where it will be moderate. The majority Shi'as, oppressed under Hussein, are expected to take a majority in the polling at the expense of the formerly dominant Sunnis. The reality is that much of Iraq has become a free-fire zone Every working-class Sunni polling station will be out of bounds to the press. I wonder if the television lads will tell us that today when they show voters "flocking" to the polls. In the Karada district, we found three truckloads of youths on Saturday, all brandishing Iraqi flags, all - like the unemployed who have been sticking posters to Baghdad's walls - paid by the government to "advertise" the election. And there was a cameraman from Iraqi state television, of course, which is controlled by Iyad Allawi's "interim" government. ...

Interesting light on the situation, and as politics have shown time and time again, in all probability a more accurate one. Still, I remain hopeful, that in time true democracy will grow from these chaotic beginnings. Because when has democracy ever started without chaos and turmoil? And it remains an irrefutable fact that Iraq is better of without a dictator like Saddam. The only question which I still have is whether Iraq, the nation created at the whim of western powers, should have existed in this form to begin with.

[giuliano]

iraq has been run in one form or another by the british and americans since the 1920s, with a brief interlude between 1973, when the ba'ath party nationalised the oil industry (booting the westerners out), and 1991, when they imposed their will over her again. in 2003 they gave up on the charade and just took over altogether.

no doubt when the troops eventually move out, the IMF will move in

[jose]

So we have gone from WMD's that can hit us in 45 minuetes, the smoking gun mushroom cloud, to removeing THAT dictator, 'US trained and funded"to free and fair elections,just like we had in the good old USA a while back.
well i for one don't believe the hype of these people

[Scribbler1]

I find it interesting that there is almost no mention of the STATED reasons for the invasion of Iraq have been made and the entire focus of the right is the elections and freeing Iraqis. I noticed this subtle shift had begun even BEFORE the administration officially acknowledged the non-exiestence of WMD.
I don't find it too difficult to believe a lot of the "true believers" HONESTLY don't recall the WMD, "mushroom cloud" and other scary stories we heard and honestly believe it was ALWAYS about freeing the poor Iraqis.

[bishop]

true believers... heh, i guess that's one way to put it.

is it possible that there's a bunch of people in the country who simply could care less what the reason was for invading? people who, in my view, simply wanted to flex our military's muscle and make the world afraid of our power..

[Scribbler1]

All that and more, Bishop. I figure there are more than two sides to THIS coin. People who want to kick ANYBODY'S ass for whatever reason that's convenient, people who never want to kick anybody's ass for ANY reason, people who support the president without necessarily understanding what he is up to, people who believe they DO understand and want him stopped and people (like me) who understand the necessity of war but would like a little more thought put into WHEN we send our troops into harms way.
Too bad we can't narrow that field down to two positions.

[RickSp]

Quote by: Scribbler1 I don't find it too difficult to believe a lot of the "true believers" HONESTLY don't recall the WMD, "mushroom cloud" and other scary stories we heard and honestly believe it was ALWAYS about freeing the poor Iraqis.

I suspect that the true believers think of it all as one continuum. They still think that the WMD exist and is being hidden somewhere. Saddam was such an inhuman monster that sooner or later he would have developed WMD, (which he had but hid.) All the claims about Saddam are true even the ones which cannot be proven. That is why they are true believers. Everything can be taken on faith.

[bishop]

oh, i hear ya.. initially, i felt that iraq was a necessary venture. me being naive, i believed the b.s. that the administration spewed out about wmd's. but right after we took baghdad, i noticed the lack of post-war planning and eventually lost faith in the wmd argument. definitely was a sign of my age, and a mistake that i don't intend to make again.

i remember all the twits with the "nuke 'em all" posters attached to their cars/trucks after 9/11.. then later on after we invaded, there was the "let's flatten fallujah!" crows (who could've been part of the previous group). i was never a member of that group in the slightest, i simply wanted the country to be safe from wmd's in the wrong hands. never thought we'd be lied to like we were. since i'm a former believer, i have some trouble understanding why others who i once agreed with continue to refuse to accept the obvious and/or to apologize for bush's mistakes.

[Scribbler1]

A sure sign of higher brain function is the ability to change ones mind.

The sad thing is, like liberals, conservatives have a lot on the ball and are right more than they are wrong about many things. (am I showing that I lean conservative?) The two things that annoy me most is when some jackass ultra right winger (like a couple of late, UNlamented members) says he is a conservative. The other is when someone blindly holds to Bush's party line in the face of so much damning evidence to the point that anything else he has to say is drowned out by the partisan bullshit.

[bishop]

i first lost faith in bush because of his deficit spending. any man/woman who can balance a budget gets big kudos from me. (this includes clinton) i seperated iraq from my growing disdain of bush.

the words conservative and liberal are so incredibly meaningless nowadays. is it conservative to engage in deficit spending to the tune of several hundred billion dollars a year? plus, to spend the majority of that money on non-defense items like bush's medicare plan.. bush likes to call himself a conservative, but he sure acts like a liberal with his hefty spending programs, and with illegal immigrants.

[Scribbler1]

Quote by: bishop i first lost faith in bush because of his deficit spending. any man/woman who can balance a budget gets big kudos from me. (this includes clinton) i seperated iraq from my growing disdain of bush.

Unfortunately I can't seperate the man from the actions. As hard as I try, I can't forget what the man himself said to take us to war, and then change the whole reason for going. There is NO way to justify going to war on a lie, bad intel or just plain stupidity. I cannot accept it and the statements made prior to the invasion will not go away.

the words conservative and liberal are so incredibly meaningless nowadays. is it conservative to engage in deficit spending to the tune of several hundred billion dollars a year? plus, to spend the majority of that money on non-defense items like bush's medicare plan.. bush likes to call himself a conservative, but he sure acts like a liberal with his hefty spending programs, and with illegal immigrants.

I agree. I ONLY use the terms as labels and not to explain any ideology or actions. What they have gotten to is what any group wants to call itself. Bush is a conservative because he says he is and nothing more.
If Barry Goldwater, who was arguably the definition of conservative was able to see what Bush calls conservative there would be such a huge smoking hole in Arizona we would think it had been a nuclear attack. But it would just be poor Barry's head exploding. Or maybe the friction caused by excessive spinning in his grave.

[bishop]

Unfortunately I can't seperate the man from the actions.

what i meant was that i began to dislike bush before the invasion because of his deficit spending, but i still believed his pre-war statements about wmd's.. after the war, though, is an entirely different story. i too am very upset about his pre-war comments, especially since i bought into them and trusted him. when you realize you're lied to, you either do what i did and get very mad (in my case, i ended up getting banned from the previous forum i posted at), or you do what "they" do and stick your head deeper up your ass - concocting whatever lame excuse/apology you can (or just repeat the ones given by "conservative" pundits). denial is a typical defense mechanism for the ego.

about these so-called conservaitves.. they've even perverted saint reagan's legacy.. reagan was definitely a supply-sider, but he wasn't nearly as fervent about it as kemp was. plus, reagan enacted several tax increases and was a strong advocate for balanced budgets (even though he couldn't reign in democratic spending and wouldn't yield on military spending). all of a sudden, though, the bush crowd doesn't give a rat's ass about the deficit. if you listen to what they all say, the deficit supposedly doesn't even matter! it is amazing how something that clearly defies basic logic is so widely accepted.. for that reason, i look at these remaining bushistas as tantamount to being cultists.

[jose]

The original at.
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/nytimes/...Y+VIETNAM+VOTE

snip; "United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting. According to reports from Saigon, 83 percent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong. A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam." -- Peter Grose, 'U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote,' The New York Times,  Sept 4, 1967, page 2.

more at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story...403103,00.html