The Life and Death of an Ayatollah...
...one victim among many of an illegal occupation
The Buzzard: George Bush Sr.
I see George Bush Sr., father of the President of the United States and formerly a publicly paid consultant, adviser and front man for The Carlyle Group in South Korea and Saudi Arabia [see below], had lunch with Prince Bandar Bin Sultan Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud at the Bush family's Kennebunkport holiday home this week. The prince, who seems to exert an extraordinary hold on the Family, went on to meet his close friend and former Halliburton CEO, Dick Cheney. That Prince Bandar was meeting these eminent persons when in "out of the ordinary" circumstances, the lights went out in London and the New York Port Authority released 2,000 pages of transcripts recording the last messages to emanate from the doomed twin towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 [thereby drowning the rising chorus of protest at 28 pages focusing on Saudi Arabia's role in those attacks being excised from an 850-page congressional report into the attack], is surely coincidental. In the half-light of what we know to be straight, true and legal about all matters relating to companies such as Bechtel [George Schultz's outfit], Halliburton [Big Dick's] and others, surely replays of doomed voices from yesteryear are more newsworthy than the loss of British and American troops in Iraq, the rapidly escalating guerilla war that will see more American and other countries' troops committed to an illegal occupation following an illegal invasion, and the death today of Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, a leading Iraqi Shia cleric and upwards of 75 Iraqis in an horrific bomb blast? Following hard on the heels of the loss of U.N. special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello in... ah shit, we told you so. However, as Andrew Greeley points out in the Chicago Sun-Times, there is an upside to everything. "Faced with persistent sabotage and an increase in guerrilla violence, the Bush administration faces unpalatable options in Iraq, especially as the country approaches the beginning of the year before the election. Real imperial powers ought not to be distracted by elections. It can send more American troops, either National Guard or Reserve units, or new units drawn from recruits or eventually perhaps from a draft." Ah, yes, the d-r-a-f-t. It's the solution everyone's been waiting for. Why did nobody think of it before?
