Mugging the World...

U.S. and Israel Form Unholy Alliance

Middle-Eastern and Asian Fragmentation Key to U.S. Global Strategy

[April 2003]

"...something is going terribly wrong in Baghdad and something is going on which demands that serious questions be asked of the United States government."

Robert Fisk


Bush seeks global conflict, fragmentation, and domination of Middle East and Asia.

Some things are too hot to touch | The human mind can only stand so much | You can't win with a losing hand

Bob Dylan | Things Have Changed

Weighed down by an awful awareness of willing blindness, I watched supposedly right-thinking, sensible people around the globe ignoring the unfolding horror of Iraq's and, by the extension, the world's 'sacking'. Little was being said of irreplaceable Mesopotamian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian and other artefacts and archaeological wonders being destroyed or burnt at Baghdad's National Museum of Iraq and National Library. Archives spanning the ages were disappearing and Iraq's complex infrastructure, servicing 26 million people, was being trashed. The Bush Gang, a culturally deprived horde of low-rent pimps, drug lords and whoremongers dripping with the blood of innocents, was mugging the world before my eyes. On the blogs, with the exception of the usual suspects, nada. People were contemplating their virtual navels, ignoring the horrendous crime being carried out in their name.

In January of last year, I wrote an open letter to my long-lost brother in poetic madness, the hopelessly insane romantic, Marek J. I wrote it to thank him for offering to buy me a new PC. While waiting for FedEx to drop off the 3GHz laptop I will use instead of my trusty 486, my one-time innocence testifies to partial sight and bears reposting. Here, in part, is my letter to the panic Mole manic Pole:

Marek, thank you for your generosity. I intend setting up an offshore bank account to take full advantage of your concern for my well-being, but it may take some time. Please bear with me. I bank with Tropicana in Lagos (I started doing a bit of financial consulting on the side for the much-loved Abacha family, benefactors to the Nigerian people, who called on me personally in July last year) and I thought I would have no difficulty in arranging things to our mutual pecuniary benefit. However, I did not count on the FBI, CIA, NSA, sundry oil company representatives, several out-of-work US Secretaries of State, one ex-British prime Minister, and two Men in Black.

The nut of it is that these high-powered heavies from the US have been hanging around outside the doors of the bank for weeks now, harassing innocent customers. Among the heavies was a guy who insisted he was from the AA, but he looked like a drunk to me rather than a respectable representative of a Western security agency. I set a bunch of street kids onto him and he soon disappeared beneath a seething mass of small black bodies. He was last seen naked, trying to catch the last bus to Kano. I hope he made it in time for the riots. The Men in Black immediately gave the urchins scholarships to the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, where they will learn to behave like gentlemen.

Apparently this desire to interrogate innocent strangers in the interests of their continued freedom has something to do with overly advantaged, Koran-waving Saudis using the United States air transport system to kick over a couple of castles in the air above lower Manhattan and flatten a building called the Pentagram in Washington. The wanton destruction queered the pitch (to thugs now controlling access to Caspian Sea gas) of their superiors in a multinational gun-running outfit going by the name of The Carlyle Group, which hangs out at 300 Pennsylvania Avenue. The Carlyle Group is, ostensibly, run by former employees of the World Bank and Securities Exchange Commission, but it is known to be home some of the world's most heinous gangsters, including the likes of Frank Carlucci, George Bush Sr., James Baker, John Major, Fidel Ramos, Anand Panyarachun, and Karl Otto Pohl.

Apparently the building demolition jobs on the Eastern seaboard resulted from a spat between Dubya and a former boyhood buddy, the aforementioned Osama bin Laden, whose family also has significant interests in the Carlyle Group. Dubya, stressed to the gills by an incident wherein he was attacked by a pretzel after referring to some of his closest friends as "Pakkies", is still pissed off at Osama's reluctance to allow friends in the Carlyle group, including his family, to route a pipeline through Afghanistan and into the South Asian market. As Dubya's latest lover, 'Big Dick' Cheney, a former Secretary for Defense and CEO of Houston-based Halliburton, the worlds largest oil services company said jokingly in 1998, "...the Good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would normally not choose to go. But, we go where the business is."

Indeed.

Dubya has always been one to stick close to the money. Unfortunately, things do not always work out as intended and the poor fool is now in dire need of additional income. Friends who had given him close on $2m for furthering their interests in Pennsylvania are in trouble and things are not looking good. What with Halliburton and one-time energy supremo Enron both operating out of Houston, it seems like a hell of a place in which to do business. Osama has fucked things up for Dubya and many other high-profile energy industry high rollers and they are out to get him. Hence the presence of their heavies at the doors of the offshore finance house of my choice. These guys carry big guns, larger wallets, and recruitment forms for the US Special Forces. They ask customers inconsiderate questions about personal matters that should be of no concern to them.

I believe they have Mr Abdullah Habib, the manager of the Tropicana, a devout Muslim and my personal friend, locked in the vault. There is no money in there. Abacha took it.

I did not foresee the horror of Iraq in that post. As my friend Bob Dylan says, "Things have changed." Yes, they have but, unfortunately for Bob [who I see as something of a prophet], the song remains the same. George W. Bush's live-in lover, Big Dick Cheney, said:

"...the Good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would normally not choose to go. But, we go where the business is."

Unfortunately for all of us, this is as true today as it was when he said it. I should have foreseen the dark undertow leeching Iraq of life and a future from a billion dollars away. We can always count on Big Dick to continue raping the planet for fun and profit. He does it with the charm of a flesh-eating zombie. And he does it for the good of all mankind. In other words, he does it for us. He does it in our name. Not in my name? It's a nice slogan but I spit on it. Like it or not, the upending of history as we know it, the trashing of the Cradle of Civilisation, and the desecration of our global future by a gang of red-necked, oil-guzzling thugs and their willing partner, Israel [hotly pursued by out-manoeuvred, European vested interests], is being carried out in your name. The United States of America, in the guise of global policeman and arbiter of all that is right, good, and just, is smashing the Middle East to pieces. It seeks a fragmented, tribal Arab world a thousand years removed from an OPEC-powered, pan-Arabic bloc. Maintaining order is always difficult. Managing chaos is easier, especially when you control the wealth.


U.S. policy is to smash and fragment Iraq.

Forget nascent democracies, human rights, and an urge to rid the world of despots. Forget liberation, the protection of Iraq's interests, and a desire to get out of Iraq as fast as possible. The Americans want the Middle East and, by God and your good graces, they're going to take the whole fucking shebang. Don't expect them to relinquish it anytime soon. Other states will follow in the next few years and the Palestinians, well, fuck the Palestinians. After Ariel's played his part in Syria, he'll take care of the Palestinians. Sharon has a mind like a mortuary, is an internationally renowned homicidal maniac and war criminal, heads up the all-purpose butcher's brothel and charnel house disguised as the Israeli parliament, from where he dispatches his ruthless death squads, dressed in the garb of the so-called Israeli Defense Force [IDF].

Fuck me? Fuck you. As if Sabra and Shatilla and the ongoing carnage and wanton slaughter in the Occupied Territories weren't bad enough, this week we gaze on the bone-shattered, blood-spattered memories of Qana. You'll not glean this reality from your duplicitous mainstream, blood-sucking sham network media. Get it on the Internet. Get used to it and do something about it. "Not in my name" indeed. Amid reports of routine torture by U.S. security agnecies, such slogans are banners of rich expedience. The devious psyches of overly well-fed intellects will go a long way to avoid committing themselves to strong statements or action opposing the likes of Big Dick, Little Bush and The Devil's Outrider, Ariel "Fuck You" Sharon.

There is a particularly insidious little school of tea-party thought among wannabe liberals that says those opposing Israeli-supported U.S. aggression should offer the invaders alternatives to their chosen course of recent action. We should outline the means whereby George W. Bush, a deviant with a chocolate-chip morality, a cornflake Christianity and the culture of a bunker buster, can extricate himself [and us] from the quagmire into which he has led us. Implicit in this perverted little piece of blowback rhetoric is the assumption that the sick bastards pulling down the pillars of the Temple had 'good' and 'noble' reason to invade Iraq, a Third World, impoverished country led by cheap gangsters whose malice turns physical far more quickly than does that of anally retentive, repressed Western psycho-deviants.

I don't doubt they had reason, but don't try to sell me on the hoary notion of it being 'good'. Let's look at the situation as it now stands. Paid to sell their country and their people down the rivers that nurtured our collective histories, the Iraqi civil and military leadership, those running its civil service, scientists, academics, secret police, intelligence agencies, torture and death squads, and the myriad apparatchiks who made a meaningful contribution to the perpetuation of Hussein's power - in other words, tens of thousands of people, have DISAPPEARED. Yes. Bar four or five hosers and perpetual losers as well as several thousand Ba'athists press-ganged into terrorising civilians, poof! Offering no resistance, they vanished into the thin, desert air. Planes were grounded, weapons weren't used, bridges and oil wells were left intact and POWs were served up on a plate.

The trillion-dollar American military and intelligence machine that allowed a crazed populace to root around every nook and cranny containing anything of value in Iraq [destroying all that was left to the protection of the invaders], cannot tell us to where Saddam's demented coterie of mass-murderers have relocated. The extraordinarily vicious trashing of Baghdad and other cities [far worse than pillage seen in recent European and African wars and in contradiction to Islamic principles] constitutes a gross violation of the Geneva Convention protocols so beloved of Rumsfeld since a couple of dead marines were shown parading in front of television cameras. It should have triggered alarm bells. More, with U.S. prisoners of war being returned in extraordinarily good health, why is their pampered status as guests of a collapsing regime not being questioned? Spirited away to Germany, they were debriefed before being flown to a muzzled heroes welcome in Texas. Do not expect much in the way of intelligence from them. Or from the hollow halls of Rumsfeld's head for that matter.

Why were the lives of millions of civilians and the histories or our civilisations left unprotected? Because U.S. marines were too busy guarding looters and bussing arsonists into central Baghdad to raze government buildings. A long occupation demands the destruction of infrastructure and, by God, that infrastructure was to be destroyed. IslamOnline.net quotes an Iraqi lawyer telling al-Jazeera, "This is an Islamic country, and its people could not behave in such a way. American forces are involved in encouraging such pillaging." As for Saddam's missing government, the international media is full of ideas. They're in hiding. States of choice include Belarus, Syria, Russia, France, and the United States. Detailed theses of less-than-dubious value posit credible hypotheses of a duplicity mind-numbing in its cynicism. It bespeaks a demoniacal cunning staggering even for the rot-brained, cancerous cabal now dividing Iraq into three warring states and running the U.S. economy and its people into the ground and infinite penury.


Israel's role and interests in the Middle East are pivotal to the U.S. global agenda.

The catalyst tying the loose strands of perplexity surrounding the missing government and encouraged looting besetting Iraq is found in a Pravda article, Behind the Scenes of the Iraq War, alleging Israel's guiding hand in the destruction of modern Iraq. Before you throw your hands up in Holy Horror and kick your machine to a blue-screen death, hear me out. Under the dubious authorship of Harun Yahya, this particular article is likely to be panned. However, its sense and thrust cannot be scoffed or wished away. Nor can countless voices echoing the same refrain while shedding new light on Israel's role in the atomisation of the Middle East.

Israel sees Iraq's ancient cultures clashing with its desire to have the run of the region. Yahya's thesis is backed by a 1982 Ha'aretz article by military correspondent Ze'ev Schiff, calling for "the dissolution of Iraq into a Shi'ite state, a Sunni state and the separation of the Kurdish part." A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s, authored by journalist and former Israeli Foreign Ministry official Oded Yinon, sketched the possible break up of Iraq into three states around Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. Veteran Israeli peace activist and former Knesset member, Uri Avnery, says Yinon's ideas inspired Ariel Sharon.

"[Sharon's] head was full of grand designs for restructuring the Middle East, the creation of an Israeli 'security zone' from Pakistan to Central Africa, the overthrow of regimes and installing others in their stead, moving a whole people [the Palestinians] and so forth."

Yahya's article details Mossad's active pursuit of the break-up of Iraq and other neighbouring countries, its role in driving America's subsequent wars in the region, and the now familiar plans put forward for Iraq's invasion by the Project for the New American Century [PNAC] back in 1997. Turkey's Cengiz Randar highlights the role played by the Jewish Institute for Security Affairs [JINSA] in formulating Richard Perle's much-touted strategy of 'Total War' and the 'Clash of Civilisations' theory, which call for the overthrow of governments in the region and the imposition of 'democracies'. Perle, a man with the face of a blood-soaked gargoyle and a co-founder of the PNAC, sees tribal 'democracies' or fragmentation spurred by the U.S. and Israel exploiting ideological, ethnic and sectarian differences in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt and Iran.

Don't believe it? The PNAC's Feith and Perle worked on a plan for restructuring the Middle East, re-establishing the Hashemite kingdom in Iraq and using 'pre-emption' against Syria for Likud Rottweiler Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996. Chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and co-author of the report, A Clean Break, prepared by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, a right-wing Israeli think tank with ties to Netanyahu, Perle states:

"Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq - an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right."

Yahya argues that Israeli regional objectives play a greater role than oil in the break up of Iraq. I certainly don't buy into that one lock, stock and barrel. The smashing of Iraq and the annexation of its oil reserves serve complementary Israeli and U.S. ambitions. The one is as important to the U.S. as the other is to Israel. Whether Israel wants the region as its playground or not is beside the point. The point is that the two increasingly inseparable allies are prepared to take on Islam to achieve their objectives. They are now doing so in a way that would make Josef Stalin blush.

Rather than face a certain annihilation, Iraq's leadership bought into the only avenues of escape publicly offered them by Rumsfeld and Bush. Bush, operating from the hellhole of an infinitely dense mind, gave Saddam 48 hours to leave town as Rumsfeld, using three detachments of 'human shields' and other operatives, made contact with and urged top levels of the Iraqi government and military, most notably, the Republican Guard, to defect. They skipped the country with face-saving grace, a war of token resistance, and the assistance of their ousters. Stripped by duplicity and devious agreement of any means to defend themselves, the Iraqi people were lambs led to a slaughter in a charade played out by blood-crazed butchers, amphetamine-stoked goons keen to blow any A-rab to a pink mist and Nirvana.

"Well, okay, so it happened. It's history. Let's not dwell on dark times. Who really gives a shit? Eh? No, we want the reasons you war protestors continue to protest and denigrate the freedom delivered the long-suffering people of Iraq. We want an alternative vision." You had no vision to begin with, Bubba. Why the fuck should I give you one? Wake up and smell the sick sweetness of rotting flesh. You were blind, blinded, and blind-sided. You were led, dumb and willing, to quiet collusion and complicity in a carnage that will reverberate down the annals of history and change forever the way we view each other and the future. Let's get the obvious shit out of the way. Politics does not brook altruism. It's a fundamental fucking law understood by anybody with half a brain and an IQ above 10. Politics is about gaining and retaining power. That's all there is to it. Simple, eh? Remember it. How does one go about it? Let's look to Israel again, the fears of Iraqi scientists, and the assassination squads sent in to murder some 500 identified by the U.S.

Maariv, an Israeli newspaper, reports a retired French general, interviewed by French TV's Channel 5, alleging that 150 Israeli commandos, working from within U.S. military units, are charged with killing 500 scientists identified as having worked on chemical and biological weapons for Hussein's government. The scientists were all slated to be interviewed by Hans Blix's UNMOVIC inspectors. The 'exercise' has been undertaken to eliminate Iraq's capabilities to develop chemical, biological and nuclear armaments. An e-mail from the scientists, pleading for assistance from the international community, was copied to IslamOnline.net on April 11. In the e-mail, allegations of the U.S. military transporting looters to Mosul University back the assertion that rampant destruction of property is taking place under U.S. military supervision. The scientists further allege arbitrary detention by U.S. troops working from lists naming individuals and demands that they hand over all academic and research papers in their possession. Several have been approached by the CIA with offers of work elsewhere.

So much for Saddam's ugly regime and Israel's non-complicity in this most underhand obliteration of a sovereign state. The mealy-mouthed dross and syrupy pronouncements of a deep commitment to human rights and everything else that makes us dance in fields of dreams and draw up noble documents of meaningless intent was just so much shite pumped out by dangerous psychotics with a blackhole sense of humour and disseminated by a complicit network media. That the dunderhead right swallowed such bullshit hook, line and sinker is of no concern to me. My concern is stopping their support for an ongoing crime against the past, present and future of humanity. There's more to this story than meets the average Republican's eye and, as Robert Fisk says at the outset, "...something is going terribly wrong." If United States' citizens cannot see their regime mirrored in that of the now-departed and unlamented Saddam Hussein, they have a long way to go before their minds hit ground.

The short story is that there are no 'weapons of mass destruction' in Iraq. As for the Americans, the story is very different. However, when it comes to the U.S., we use different criteria and standards. Rumsfeld knows this all too well and exploits it to the nth degree. The argument pushing oil as a prime motivator of this conflict is convoluted and follows two strands. The first runs along very much the same tack as that set out in my reference to the nefarious doings of the Carlyle Group and Dubya's childhood friend, Osama, another well-paid scapegoat and fugitive from justice. Crude Vision, a publication put out in March by one of myriad shady Washington DC-based outfits, the Institute for Policy Studies [IPS], appears to capitalise on Rumsfeld's buffoonery during the recent onslaught on civilisation. It reads as a publication targeting Rummy's tenure as Defense Secretary. Whether they're right, left or misguided, the IPS does offer us some facts.

Between 1983 and 1988, during the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam allegedly unleashed 13,000 - 19,500 chemical bombs and artillery shells on Iranian forces. He acquired them from his chief backers, the United States and other Western powers. On March 16, 1988, Iraqis allegedly gassed the Kurdish city of Halabja, killing approximately 3,200 people. While Iran and Iraq cluttered the Straits of Hormuz and the Shatt-al-Arab Waterway with the hulks of tankers of every nationality, the Reagan administration and Bechtel, whose interests and agents were synonymous, courted Saddam for the rights to build a pipeline from Iraq through to the Red Sea at Aqaba in Jordan. U.S. government officials and agents for Bechtel offered Israel's Labour Party 10% of the profits if Shimon Peres's government did not bomb the thing to blazes. With Aqaba a stone's throw from Eilat, I doubt he'd be able to resist the temptation.

None of them gave a damn about dead Iranians or Kurds. They gave Saddam the ordnance needed to get the Iranians to "shut the fuck up". While thousands choked on gas made in the U.S.A. and gasped their last, Rumsfeld did all he could to help Saddam 'increase his oil exports'. Official condemnation placated the media and Reagan's hoods put the squeeze on U.S. Export-Import Bank and the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation to put up the money for Bechtel's pipeline. This disgusting [and shameful] episode shows us that, in 1988, the United States viewed the gassing of thousands of people as a potentially "embarrassing situation". Today it forms the focus of the publicity campaign driving their so-called War of Liberation in [or on] Iraq. How times and viewpoints have changed. I doubt pangs of conscience or a feeling of goodwill to all men have anything to do with it.

According to the IPS, the blood-toothed greedheads and numbskulls involved in the Aqaba pipeline deal included George Schultz, Ed Meese, William Clark, James Schlesinger, Lawrence Eagleburger, Robert McFarlane and a supporting cast of thousands. Ed Meese was later investigated for the Iran-Contra affair. He was about as much an Attorney General as Ollie North was a war correspondent. After Iran, Saddam thought he could count on the moral torpor of his Yankee friends and slid into Kuwait. He should not have mixed a dearth of morality with benefits accruing to the States from a cosy oil source. Saddam was hit with another devastating war, twelve years of sanctions and UNSCOM and UNMOVIC weapons inspections. These were interrupted by Operation Desert Fox, the carpet-bombing of suspected weapons facilities by Clinton's administration in 1998. Militarily, Saddam was a spent force by 1999, incapable of mounting a meaningful defence of Iraq.


Nuclear proliferation threatens U.S. hegemony.

Four years later, Scott Ritter of UNSCOM and Hans Blix of UNMOVIC went as far as they could in stating that no weapons 'of mass destruction' existed in Iraq. They were more inclined to point to those wielded and used so readily by Israel and the United States. These two rogue states seem to have a surfeit of the damned things. Why should Syria and North Korea not have a few nukes if Israel can stockpile around 160 bombs? What of the annual India-Pakistan Derby, during which long-range delivery systems and nuclear warheads are tested? What do these people need such things for if not to sow terror? Ah yes, Pakistan is on the U.S. roster. It is, after all, an Islamic dictatorship. Should it send one of its missiles towards Israel it would, if U.S. foreign policy is to make any sense at all, constitute a direct threat to the stability of the United States of America. Today, as U.S. oil reserves drop and the need to pump oil for their own account becomes more urgent, the U.N. is avenging its drubbing by the murderously arrogant NeoCons. It is demanding the reinstatement of UNMOVIC before the Security Council considers lifting sanctions against a U.S.-occupied Iraq. It's unlikely to win many friends delaying the U.S.' ability to flaunt its newfound wealth and hits a raw and oily nerve both sides of the Atlantic. The second strand of the oil story lends some substance to a near-miss post I made a few days before writing to Marek [see above]. On January 16 last year, I wrote:

This war has been waged for millennia and its battles have been fought on a pretty much continuous basis in the hearts, minds, and countries of every person conscious of its existence. The buildings hit on 9-11 were symbols or, if you insist, targets rather than battlefields. And the attacks formed a message rather than a military onslaught designed to meet set objectives. The message was simple. "You have lost the war. If you don't understand that by now, you're even dumber than your worst critics think. We, the barbarians, are no longer at the gates. We are inside and, once we've fucked you up good and solid, we'll be on top. Catch us if you can. Sleep tight."

It was as straightforward as that. Just because Dubya used the event to further family and others' interests in the oil and armaments businesses will not change a thing. The clarity of the statement was immediately apparent to all but those living inside the mental fortress of the Northern psyche. Subsequent events have shown Africa to be bemused at, Asia perturbed by, and the East indifferent to the West's propensity to try and stuff the process of achieving global dominance into an envelope of several years. They know all to well that these things take time and they're prepared to wait.

Saddam told Daddy that he was initiating the mother of all battles. Daddy didn't listen and Desert Storm was the result. All the US seemed to gain from that exercise was more sand in its eyes. It took the victor, Saddam, eight years to build his Mother of all Battles mosque and a further three to deliver his riposte. Destiny's children. We'll see more of them born as our misunderstanding of each other increases.

False perceptions abound. The US believes it's in a position to help the world. Crap. It needs all the help it can get. Its enemies believe they can teach the US a lesson. Rubbish. Uncle Sam is far too arrogant. Once we get these little misperceptions out of the way we can, perhaps, start communicating with each other and find a way out of the mess. Otherwise we'll just have to get used to living in the state of perpetual idiocy to which we seem to have become accustomed.

With an ability to discern differing personalities [Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein], I was right about destiny's children, but I failed to interpret Bin Laden's message correctly. After advising Bush he'd lost the war, he said "We are inside, and we are going to fuck you up. We are on top. Catch us if you can. Sleep tight." The translation doesn't really matter very much because the message remains lost on those 'living in the mental fortress of the Northern psyche'. The extent of Bin Laden's victory is only now becoming apparent. In The Real Motives for War in Iraq, Noor ad-Deen Ingalls fills us in on just how frantic our satanic suitor, Little Bush, has become. He also shows up the arch-conservative and hopelessly corrupt French president, Jacques Chirac, for the vested-interest joker he is.

The U.S. imports about 60% of its oil needs. Iraq's oil reserves are second only to those of Saudi Arabia, a country from which the U.S. is trying, with increasing desperation, to sever unnaturally close ties. Pointing out the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments estimate of $688 billion needed for long-term occupation and rebuilding and Yale University's Prof. William Nordhaus high-end estimate of $1.92 trillion, it seems George's desert adventure will not endear him to penny pinchers watching the U.S. economy and millions of jobs going down the drain. How does this fundamentally depraved and morally bankrupt individual get Iraq's looted oil to market? Ingalls highlights both the means Bush will use to accomplish this and the reason for the rift tearing apart the cosy family of Western nations. Bush will enter Partnership-sharing Agreements [PSAs] with U.S. and British oil companies large enough to foot the $60-140 billion needed to pump the black gold through various stages and into the back of your SUV. The advantage to the oil companies, which stand to realise a 30-year fixed profit tax and exemption from domestic environmental, tax and safety laws, is mind boggling.

The fly in the ointment, however, is the smiling visage of Saddam Hussein. Forced by sanctions to enter future PSAs with Russian and French companies, Saddam did two things. He put the oil beyond the rapacious America's reach and ensured one hell of a fall out. As France and Russia are two of Bush's most vehement opponents and stand to have their PSAs torn up, I guess he played his cards right. Further, the small matter of $1.1 trillion in contracts awarded China, Russia and the E.U. means the U.S., hell-bent on paying for its new acquisition through PSAs with U.S. and British companies, is likely to view those it intends disappointing as potential threats to entrenching its hegemony. One can view the Occupation of the Middle East and Asia as mineral and territorial imperatives for the U.S. and Israel. One can also see it as a last-ditch attempt by Bush to ensure the dominance of the dollar over the Euro and the Yen. Big Dick Cheney's view is less subtle. He reckons that whoever controls the flow of oil in the Persian Gulf enjoys a "stranglehold on the economies of most of the other nations of the world." Heh. Saddam and Osama bin Laden appear to have achieved what nobody was able to do before them, i.e. set the U.S., Russia, China and countless bit players at each other's throats.

Okay, let's deal with 'Saddam Invades New York'. We have seen there was no 'real and imminent threat' to the security of the region or the United States of America. Saddam had neither the weapons nor the means to deliver them. That around half of Americans believe the secular infidel Hussein played a role in a terror attack allegedly carried out by a shadowy bunch of Saudi religious fanatics and moneyed hoodlums going under the collective name of al-Qa'eda, is no indicator of Saddam's power. It shows how dumb most Americans are. For fuck's sake, I do believe if I leaked South African plans to invade America tomorrow, I'd be toast this evening. Yeah, we're coming at you with our 10 gunboats, 20 outdated Mirage IIs and 30 vials full of AIDS. Cause for a pre-emptive strike? You bet. The simple, brainless dupes who sucked in Bush administration garbage, slaughtered thousands, and then gloated while a bunch of uniformed yahoos, Iraqi dissidents and high-flying hoodlums flown in for the occasion, joined a few dozen locals looking for a party in pulling down a statue outside the hotel where the independent media had been shelled a couple of days before, are less than shark shit.

They have no brains and no balls. They are dumb cunts. Period.

Look, the evidence arguing against this act of Momentous Barbarism has been available for decades. It has been posted, nay plastered, across the Web for two years. Valid arguments opposing the invasion of the sand-blasted backwater formerly named Iraq so that the U.S. could manage a Yugoslavia-type break-up were as compelling as those used to fight bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age and implanting U.S. military and air bases in a ring of steel across Asia. If you need arguments opposing these things, well hell, I guess you need arguments opposing rape, pillage and murder. There aren't any that would matter to those who indulge in such things. I'd say you have to be pretty fucking bent if you don't see such activities as evil.

What do 'anti-war' or 'pro-peace' wets want now that the carnage has been allowed to go ahead? Simple. Get the fuck out of Iraq and forget about it. Let others, advised by Iraqis prevented from killing each other by a multinational peace-keeping force, clean up the mess and get the hell out as soon as possible. You foot the bill. Instead of realigning your sights on African oil-producing countries, stick your armaments up your jack and get down to negotiating oil deals. Start observing international protocols. Impeach the Anti-Christ Bush and his flunkies. Try them for heinous crimes against humanity and find the unscrupulous bastards as guilty as all hell. Burn them at the stake. Make like normal human beings. Take cold showers. It's not your job to impose your nightmare visions on the world. Leave it alone already. Is this likely to happen? Hah! The multi-billion dollar invasion of Iraq is going to cost nothing compared to the damage caused by its immediate after-effects and the coming war of liberation. As the generals tighten their grip, lock Iraqis in their houses at night and shoot curfew breakers on sight, antipathy towards the United States increases by the day. Americans will not bring war to Iraq. Iraqis and Arabs from across the Middle East, Africa and Asia will visit war on occupation forces.


Palestine: A working model of Divide and Rule.

As tens of thousands of Iraqis chant "Yankees go home" in the streets of Iraq, Robert Fisk has been dragging himself around Baghdad, taking notes as he goes along. Fisk is a damned fine reporter. He reports what he sees and this drives Americans crazy. He offers no spin. The man's obviously fucking crazy. If he sees Marines shooting civilians for the sheer hell of it, he reports it. If he sees canned carnage of a bridge over the Tigris, he reports it. If he hears of theories speculating on the whereabouts of Saddam and his missing thousands, he reports them. In fact, all you can really say of Robert Fisk is that he's about the only reliable source of information going in Baghdad today. Here's what he says of the coming war:

"It's easy for a reporter to predict doom, especially after a brutal war that lacked all international legitimacy. But catastrophe usually waits for optimists in the Middle East, especially for false optimists who invade oil-rich nations with ideological excuses and high-flown moral claims and accusations, such as weapons of mass destruction, which are still unproved. So I'll make an awful prediction. That America's war of "liberation" is over. Iraq's war of liberation from the Americans is about to begin. In other words, the real and frightening story starts now."

Too right. Witness Britain, where a semblance of conscience, 'fair play', and security of tenure in the House still plays a part in directing foreign policy. In Prove Iraqi guilt, MPs tell Blair, panic-stricken Labour backbenchers show increasing alarm that the failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq will confirm that the war was illegal. Such things matter to the Brits. Was Saddam still alive as statue toppled? fuels a horrible fear that Saddam strolled the streets of Baghdad, waving to adoring throngs, as his statue was being leant on in the botched PR job Rummy laughably likened to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Brits fear Hussein has lived to fight another day. If he hasn't been bought off, as speculated above, I don't doubt it. Saddam does not die for causes. Like Tony Blair and George W. Bush, he employs others to die for him.

This weekend's Mail & Guardian carries an Ewan MacAskill story from Nassiriya, US faces its nightmare scenario. "Dissent emerges as in Southern Iraq as Shia Muslims oppose a Western-style democracy" shouts the blurb. This is where the wheels come off and the Guardian reporter, for once, misses the point of this exercise in global rat-pack chicanery. Citing the possibility of Shiites aligning themselves with their Iranian counterparts, MacAskill warns:

"Western diplomats and academics have been warning Washington and London for years that the fall of Saddam could be accompanied by a rise in Shia power. Washington opted to take the risk and may yet have to live with the consequences."

MacAskill is one of countless journalists stuck in a groove that says the U.S. seeks a peaceful transition to 'democracy' in Iraq. It wants no such thing. It has gone in to smash the country, carbonise people who get in its way, render the place ungovernable, divvy it up, occupy it for years and profit hugely from its wealth. Echoing Rebuilding America's Defenses, a September 2000 PNAC strategy document, the Bush Administration's September 2002 National Security Strategy Report calls for a permanent American military presence and domination, through an imperialist Pax Americana, around the world, particularly in the Persian Gulf. Presenting the views of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush and business interests including Lockheed-Martin and Cheney's Halliburton, the PNAC states:

"The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American military presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

Need more? This is the stuff of apartheid South Africa. The Nationalists were past masters at the old 'divide and rule' strategy. They used it at every level of government and in every organ of civil society. Israel has used it most successfully to slaughter Palestinians and filthy anti-Semitic foreigners, and it is now being put to effective use by the United States. 'Divide and rule', applied by the National Party, became so entrenched in South African thought it struck me only last night that other societies might be new to its double-dealing, underhand and deadly duplicity. For many years, I've taken for granted an awareness of its use in hobbling the Palestinian cause. The U.S. goal in the region is to smash all dissent by setting neighbour on neighbour. It will exploit any social, religious, and ethnic differences it can find to foster massacres, terror, gangsterism, a fresh market for new guns and anarchy. MacAskill's article is blithely oblivious to this. The U.S. seeks fragmentation or atomisation rather than a threatening stability. Why else would the U.S. bring in Iraqi National Congress leader and international gangster, Ahmed Chalabi? Sentenced in absentia to 22-years in prison for a $200 million banking scam that threatened the Jordanian economy, the U.S. do not expect Chalabi to succeed. They need him as a front. The U.S. does not want secular states of the type built, against overwhelming odds and with uncommon brutality, by Saddam Hussein. Chalabi is a face of convenience, a short-term puppet with a healthy bank balance, no scruples whatsoever, and zero future.

Saddam Hussein represents a failed experiment in power broking, a deluded stooge with an independent streak willing to challenge Israel's regional hegemony and, therefore, the heartbeat of America. Noises now being made of Bush getting tough on Israel are just that, noise of a flatulent nature. With elections looming, Bush has to look to his traditional power bases, the fanatical far-right Jewish community that funds his campaigns [represented by mad beasts like Perle, Wolfowitz, Libby, Feith, et al], the white fundamentalist trailer trash who vote him in and the brainless bully, Big White Business, that sustains him. George W. Bush, fast developing a taste for frenzied orgies of genocidal gluttony, is as much a fascist dictator as the U.S. has seen to date. Having secured his domestic power base with a multi-billion dollar campaign of duct tape, flashing lights and draconian security legislation undermining the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, the anthrax-spreading, remote-controlled corpse and dyslexic cowboy might turn out as much a failed experiment as Saddam. Somebody has to pay for so-called 'war-time security intensification'. In the short term, the U.S. taxpayer will foot a large and completely unnecessary bill.

Will the average American see through this giant charade? It's unlikely. A floundering economy, soaring unemployment and tax breaks for fat-cat friends, call for distraction and Bush Inc. can be counted on to deliver. While he can use Israel as a hollow drum on which to beat for a couple of months, the single-track U.S. and Israeli policy on Palestine calls for further twists and turns in the famously "fictitious" War Against Terror. In the cynical world of global politics, with a couple of months to go before the presidential campaign gets under way, Syria and other states fill the roles of expedient options. Little Bush holds them in reserve. They are targets of convenience furthering the agenda of a gang of thugs that, calmly and without blinking, stole democracy from under the noses of U.S. voters. These Third-World clay pigeons are guaranteed international sympathy. When it comes to a choice of the lesser of two evils, the dime-a-dozen pariah states awaiting fragmentation don't look half as dumb or dangerous as the average American voter. Lacking the willing blindness of the average couch potato to whom war is beamed by satellite from a swamp full of rumour-mongering satyrs mesmerised by the sleazy pornography of their own groupthink, they might well turn out to be the instruments of George's eventual undoing. But we can't bank on it. It's my belief that only the people who give George W. Bush his power can stop him. Until the American public steps up to the plate and says "Enough", this nauseating gnome doubling as the epitome of everything execrable and evil will continue to mug the world.

People are crazy and times are strange | I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range | I used to care, but things have changed

Bob Dylan | Things Have Changed

Primary Sources

Graphics: James Neff

Jeff Rense

InformationClearingHouse

WeLoatheGeorgeWBush.com

al-Sahaf Celebrates a Year in Power

Plus ça change, plus cest la même chose

[A transitional arrangement, with words and music by the indistinguishable duo, George W. Bush and al-Sahaf, from their smash-and-hit conflagration, Any Given Despot.]


"I think there is some methodology in my travels." U.S. President Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf

Hah! Yes, by the Grace of Allah, the Most Merciful, it is me again, you scabrous infidels and louts of colonialism. I am now your president, but you have nothing to fear from me. I know something about being a government. And you've got a good one. I think anybody who doesn't think I'm smart enough to handle the job is underestimating. Be assured. I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully. I think the American people - I hope the American - I don't think, let me - I hope the American people trust me. I promise you I will listen to what has been said here, even though I wasn't here. Please excuse my English. Although I do not speak it well, Allah be praised, I've coined new words, like, misunderstanding and Hispanically. Besides, it does not matter. I speak better English than that villain Bush.

By the Grace of Allah, the Most Merciful, the war against you infidels is over. The super power of villains has been utterly vanquished. Allah be praised. Their military effort is a subject of laughter throughout the world. On this occasion, I am not going to mention the number of the infidels who were killed and the number of destroyed vehicles. The operation continues. We're giving them a real lesson. Heavy doesn't accurately describe the level of casualties we have inflicted. Their dead and wounded lie everywhere. We have destroyed 2 tanks, fighter planes, 2 helicopters and many shovels. We have driven your soldiers back and I am now president of U.S.A.

Allah be praised, we have occupied you and are now in control.

Blair is accusing us of executing British soldiers. We want to tell him that we have not executed anybody. They were either killed in battle, most of them getting killed because they are cowards anyway, the rest they just got captured. Their forces committed suicide by the thousand at the gates of Baghdad. As they did so, our Iraqi fighters slapped the gangsters on the face, and then when they fled, they kicked their backsides. The battle was very fierce but God made us victorious. The fighting continues. It is a pathetic sight. These soldiers were thrown into the fires of Hell, the Museum of Antiquities and several government buildings by their leaders. They were like a snake and we cut it in pieces.

The Americans? They fled. The American louts fled like wild donkeys. Indeed, concerning the fighting waged by the heroes of the Arab Socialist Baath Party, one amazing thing really was the cowardice of the American soldiers. "By God," I thought on hearing this. "I think this is rather very unlikely. This is merely a prattle." Definitely, we had not anticipated this. We blocked the faltering forces of infidel mercenaries inside the city and we slaughtered them in the airport. We went into the airport and crushed them, we cleaned the WHOOOLE place out. They were slaughtered. They tried to bring a small number of tanks and personnel carriers in through al-Durah but they were surrounded and most infidels had their throats cut.

They were in a state of hysteria. Losers, they thought that by killing civilians and trying to distort the feelings of the people they would win. I did not think they will win, those bastards.

God willing, and with me as president, you are safe, protected. I think we agree, the past is over. There's no such thing as legacies. At least, there is a legacy, but I'll never see it. I am not scared, and neither should you be, praise be to Allah in His Infinite Mercy. I'm a patient man. And when I say I'm a patient man, I mean I'm a patient man. But do not turn off your TV sets. It will do you no good. I am your president now. I have you surrounded. You are being besieged. I am hitting you from the north, east, south and west. I chase you here and you chase me there. But at the end, thanks be to Allah, the Divine and Most Merciful, I am the person who is laying siege to you. And, God willing, it is not you who are besieging me.

We have driven the leader of the international criminal gang of bastards, the insane little dwarf Bush, back into the swamps where God will roast his stomach in hell at the hands of Iraqis. We're going to drag his drunken junkie nose through Iraq's desert, him and his follower dog Blair. There's no cave deep enough for America, or dark enough to hide. He deserves only to be hit with shoes. In fact, he is not worth an old shoe. I am a person who recognises the fallacy of humans. Bush is a very stupid man. His rear is blocked. When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfathers of Blair and little Bush were scratching around in caves. I think the British nation has never been faced with a tragedy like this fellow Blair.

You American people are not stupid, you are very clever. You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test. Rarely is the question asked, "Is our children learning?" So listen carefully. I can't understand how such clever people came to elect such a stupid president. My goals for this country are peace in the world. There's only one person who hugs the mothers and the widows, the wives and the kids upon the death of their loved one. Others hug but having committed the troops, I've got an additional responsibility to hug and that's me and I know what it's like. A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier.

My officials have been calling upon all the leaders in the - in the Middle East to do everything they can to stop the violence, to tell the different parties involved, praise be to Allah, the Divine and Most Merciful, that peace will never happen.

George W. Bush, this man is a war criminal, and we will see that he is brought to trial. God willing. We are not afraid to try the whole former American leadership. We butchered their villainous mercenaries and bastards with bullets and shoes. Allah has condemned them. They are nowhere... they are nowhere, really. They are also stupid. They are stupid - and they are condemned. We have them surrounded in their banks. I triple guarantee you, we have given these blood-sucking bastards a sour taste. God willing, they will be burnt. Our initial assessment is that they will all die. We are going to tackle them. They are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves! I do. By the Grace of Allah, the Divine and Most Merciful, I am President Mohammad Saeed al-Sahaf of U.S.A.

We made Bush Jr. and his international gang of bastards drink poison and Saddam Hussein's soldiers and his great forces gave them a lesson which will not be forgotten by history. Truly. They are lost in the desert... they can not read a compass... they are retarded. We defeated them. God willing, I will provide you with more information. I can say, and I am responsible for what I am saying, that they have started to commit suicide in the secret chamber under the Lincoln Memorial. We will encourage them to commit more suicides quickly. Yes, we will kill them all... most of them.


"There ought to be limits to freedom." U.S. President Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf

But, praise be to Allah the Most Merciful, I am not here to speak to you of the miserable Bush and his gang of Al Capones. We are here to make peace with Iraq and Syria. It is clear our nation is reliant upon big foreign oil. More and more of our imports come from overseas. For this reason, Allah be praised, you will now watch al-Jazeera TV. It is better for you than Fox or CNN or other blood-sucking instruments of the Great Satan. Don't believe anything they say!

What is this headline, "Time to restore order"? What does that mean, by God? Time to cover up the crimes of the villains? We will chase these rascals back to London! There ought to be limits to freedom. Will the highways on the Internet become more few? Allah, the Most Merciful, will decide. For now, the American press is all about lies! All they tell is lies, lies and more lies! These cowards have no morals. They have no shame about lying. They deceived their soldiers and their officers that aggressing against Iraq and invading Iraq would be like a picnic. This was a very stupid lie they told their soldiers. What they faced was a definite death. No one received them with roses. They were received with bombs, shoes and bullets. The game was exposed. Awe backfired on them. This was the boa snake. We extended it and cut it the appropriate way.

I blamed Al-Jazeera for the lies - they were marketing for the desperate Americans! But they are our brothers and, praise Allah, they have repented. I said to them, "The Americans, they always depend on a method what I call ... stupid, silly. All I ask is check yourself. Do not in fact repeat their lies. I can assure you that those villains will recognize, will discover in appropriate time in the future how stupid they are and how they are pretending things which have never taken place." Praise be to Allah, the Most Merciful, this has happened and I am able to speak to you today. Lying was forbidden in Iraq. President Saddam Hussein [there are 26 million Saddams in Iraq] would tolerate nothing but truthfulness as he was a man of great honor and integrity.

The little criminal bastards’ failure in this regard was abysmal. Bush, Blair and Rumsfeld. They were the funny trio. They wanted to tell the world changes thought - as a matter of fact, they did not respect the world, they wanted to tell taxpayers and the domestic public to keep them deceived. We embroiled them, confused them and kept them in the quagmire. They began to tell more lies so that they might continue with the perpetration of their crimes. May they be accursed. As your president, I encourage everyone to speak freely of the truths evidenced in their eyes and hearts. Just look carefully, I only want you to look carefully. Do not repeat the lies of liars. Do not become like them. Once again, I blame al-Jazeera before it ascertains what takes place.

Please, make sure of what you say and do not play such a role. Search for the truth. I tell you things and I always ask you to verify what I say. I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe - I believe what I believe is right. To this law, you will surrender or we will behead you all. Like flea-infested camels with open wounds and saddle-sores, you will carry your coffins on your backs until the day you die. Wherever you go, you will find yourselves encircled.

In the name of Allah the Most Merciful, you will vote for me in 2004. There may be some tough times here in America. But this country has gone through tough times before, and we're going to do it again. We will fix up little Ali and forget the rest. Our nation must come together to unite. God willing, things are looking up. As people do better, they start voting like Republicans... unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.

By the Divine Grace of Allah, the Most Benign and Merciful, there's no doubt in my mind that we should allow the world worst leaders to hold America hostage, to threaten our peace, to threaten our friends and allies with the world's worst weapons.

Praise be to Allah in His Infinite Mercy. May he continue to bless our country. I have taken up too much of your time. You infidels who celebrate the death of the prophet must take up your hammers and spikes, spears and vinegar-soaked sponges, and head for the hills. Your time has come. Eh? Who is this dog Powell in Qatar? What are you saying? Send him to me. There are no Americans here! What? Do you have blacks, too?

Sources

Slate

WeLoveTheIraqiInformationMinister.com

Whitehouse.org

MongaBay.com

"Even those who live on another planet, if there are such people, would have condemned this action before it started."

U.S. President Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf [April 16, 2003]

The Struggle...

...of Memory Against Forgetting

Chris Hani 1942-1993

We appeal to every religious service over this Easter Holiday to commemorate Chris Hani's life and what he stood for. Let Wednesday 14 April be a day on which, wherever we are, we hold memorial services in honour of one of the greatest freedom fighters this country has ever known. We are a nation deeply wounded by callous, uncaring men who plot such heinous crimes with impunity. The cries of our nation are heard from old men who bury their sons and daughters, wives who weep for their husbands, communities who endlessly bury young and old, infants and pregnant women.

This killing must stop.

Chris Hani championed the cause of peace, trudging to every corner of South Africa calling for a spirit of tolerance among all our people. We are a nation in mourning. Our pain and anger is real. Yet we must not permit ourselves to be provoked by those who seek to deny us the very freedom Chris Hani gave his life for. Let us respond with dignity and in a disciplined fashion. Let us observe April 14 in dignified memorial services and in accordance with the decisions of our leadership. more...

Many have asked why we South Africans will go to the polls today, Wednesday April 14, 2004. Eleven years ago, four days after Chris Hani was murdered outside his Boksburg home, South Africa remembered a man who went a long way to making today's elections possible. On that day, South Africa could have gone either way. We chose the right way.

At the end of the day

Off-the-cuff reflections on a healthy democracy...



Scanning the above, my wife commented, "So you think Thabo had Hani in mind when he set the date, eh?" There was a familiar, ribbing scepticism to her question. "Nah, but it's a nice coincidence, isn't it?" I replied. "Besides, people are going out to vote. I couldn't possibly push my own choice, could I?"

Democracy comes in many flavours and we've invented our own. Many supporting the splinter groups making up the former 'white' parties, the NNP and DA, don't like what we have. They face an ANC likely to harvest more than 70 percent of a vote depleted by apathy or dissatisfaction. Apathy need not be a bad thing. Generally, complacency is born of being satisfied with the way things are going. Either way, when a party dominates a democracy as the ANC does, there are bound to be those who mutter "One-party state."

Such people are clueless and deserve to take a beating at the polls. If South Africa is a one-party state, it is a direct result of policies implemented over centuries by succeeding colonial powers that succeeded only in driving South Africans to a common cause. Since 1912, the ANC has been that cause, first as an organisation, then as a liberation movement and only over the past ten years, as a political party.

Until 1994, close on 80 percent of South Africans had no say in how their lives were run. Those now rabidly criticising the ANC can count their lucky stars that disenfranchised South Africans aligned themselves with an organisation holding to the view that this country belongs to all those who live in it. The Africanists and Black Consciousness movements, the "Africa for Africans" and "One settler, one bullet" factions, and other malcontents served to remind those in danger of being seduced by Western models of democracy that they should not stray too far from their roots. They kept the ANC honest and, to a degree, complemented it.

Most, however, felt at home in the broad church of the African National Congress and it became, for tens of millions, the representative voice of most South Africans. In short, it was a government exiled in its own country, catering to the needs of South Africans from myriad cultures, creeds, and views. This being so, it had within itself the capacity to be infinitely more democratic than the country in which it existed.

This was evident after its unbanning in 1989. Every member of the organisation had direct access to members of the national executive. Of course, those who lived in urban areas with access to telephones and transport had greater access than others but, as an ordinary South African, I was able to meet and discuss issues of immediate national importance with the likes of Dullah Omar, Albie Sachs, Kader Asmal and many, many others who once held or now fill positions in our national leadership. I could pick up the phone or, at a branch meeting, argue a point with Willie Hofmeyr, Tony Yengeni, Cheryl Carolus, Bulelani and Phumzile Ngcuka, Cheryl Carolus, Peter Mokaba (he of "Kill the farmer; kill the boer" fame), Johnny de Lange, Trevor Manuel, Tokyo Sexwale or Cyril Ramaphosa. And then there was Winnie... but we'll leave that for now.

They were, and still largely are, that accessible. Those now filling provincial leadership positions, the Cameron Dugmores and Ebrahim Rasools of the movement, were less so. They were the workhorses, putting in 24 hours of work each day for years. The striking thing about these people was that they were not dedicating their time to their constituents; they were doing it for their country. Idealism had a place and it made a difference. The ANC and its partners, the SACP and COSATU, had become the de facto representatives of all South Africans and, accommodating vigorous debate within their structures, had developed a culture of democracy and tolerance few other countries will ever know.

Those who chose to remain outside the Mass Democratic Movement cannot seem to grasp the importance of this home-grown school of democratic thought. It is inevitable that people who have aligned themselves with a movement for decades will take their grievances back into structures that have accepted them in the past. Sure, there was a lot of authoritarianism, corruption, and bullying from branch level on up. Show me a political organisation in which this is not the case. Power play is the name of the game. Generally though, the ANC was home and that's where problems were worked out. The result was better and more effective policy formulation.

Anybody with the slightest experience of the ANC as a movement was taught three things. One, politics and day-to-day living are inseparable. "Buying a loaf of bread is a political act." Two, government's job is to legislate and regulate; nothing else. Government cannot create jobs. That's up to those steering the economy. Government can only create a climate conducive to job creation and, for the most part, the ANC set out to do that after 1994. Unfortunately, it had both become a political party and business, in the hands of the whites, did not want to (and did not) play ball. Inheriting a civil service that had for centuries served authoritarian regimes and an economy run by those who'd benefited from perpetual privilege was a daunting prospect for a newly elected government hamstrung by 'national unity' ruling partners dead-set on up-ending it.

In the language of the day, 'counter-revolutionaries' were expected and contingency plans had been made and the government of Nelson Mandela survived its detractors. It did not fare so well on the global stage. Egged on by a sullen business sector, the First World and its economic instruments, i.e. the World Bank and IMF soon made their presence and their power felt. In 1996, the ANC's Reconstruction and Development Programme was abandoned in favour of our current neo-liberal economic policy, GEAR. Today, the poor are poorer and the rich far richer. Families and countries, no matter how close, survive on their economies and it is on matters pertaining to the economy that the ANC, as a ruling party, has compromised most. As Arundhati Roy is so fond of pointing out, it sold out. In its favour, it was coerced into doing so and bowed unwillingly.

Even so, given that it sold the family jewels, the ANC remains the only party capable of governing South Africa. It is still the organisation with which the vast majority of South Africans identify and it therefore reflects their aspirations. It has its faults; it is deaf to outsiders but, internally, it has an under-appreciated culture of democracy that makes it amenable to change. Today, the PAC, AZAPO and, to a degree, the IFP have given way to non-governmental pressure groups born of the congress or mass democratic movements. AIDS, Zimbabwe, poverty and job creation are all hurled in government's face by those who, frustrated by internal inaction, take to the streets in the knowledge that those to whom they are speaking know who is speaking to them.

That's democracy as I see it. Who needs 'an effective opposition'? Why does South Africa 'deserve better' and where are we going to find it? Which brings to mind the third lesson taught South Africans from grassroots up. It remains one of the reasons I continue to support, if not work for, the ANC. It is appreciated throughout the former movement that government is its own greatest opposition. Working with the broad range of structures and groups it encompasses, this insight remains one of the ANC's greatest strengths. Therefore, seeing as the polls are now closed, I ask "If it ain't broke, why the hell try to fix it?"

If ever there should be a need to 'fix it', South Africans will want to do the job themselves. My wife, for whom Chris Hani was something of a pin-up boy, understands these things better than most. Her parents and other family members continue to live in Zimbabwe, a country devastated by mismanagement and a thuggery edging towards genocide. Many of her family have been either murdered or shot in the years following independence. She knows that Robert Mugabe is planning his retirement and will settle in a ZAR30m mansion overlooking Llandudno on Cape Town's Atlantic seaboard. Serves 'em right. Mad Bob will be followin the example set by Mozambique's RENAMO leader Alfonso Dhlakama who, after the apartheid-backed civil war in that country all but destroyed it, retired to a villa overlooking Maputo. Nobody troubles Dhlakama any more. The war is over.

Chill and enjoy it. Things could be far worse. You might live elsewhere. Besides, they used to be...

It is estimated that more than 3 million workers stayed away from work, and several million more students joined the strike. A huge demonstration in Pietermaritzburg, Natal, was described in press reports as the largest ever ANC gathering in that city. 100,000 people gathered in Durban, also in Natal. What violence did occur was overwhelmingly the result of police attacks on the demonstrations. More than 26,000 police were deployed by the government to deal with the April 14 protests. Many parts of the country were declared “unrest areas”, giving police powers equal of the states of emergency through the '80s. The ANC called the declarations a “calculated provocation”. At least nine people were killed by police in Cape Town and Soweto. In Soweto police fired on a demonstration at the Protea police station, killing at least three and injuring 240. more...

Note Yes, I'm hopelessly biased (and this does read somewhat like a children's story) but this is my day for being so. For a detailed and impartial breakdown of the South African elections, links to our political parties, and our political topology in general, visit Farrel Lifson's comprehensive and informative site, Politics ZA.

Looking for the Heart...

...that Beats Beneath...

...the American Breast


Looking for the heart that beats...

I'll remember you | When I've forgotten all the rest, | You to me were true, | You to me were the best. | When there is no more, | You cut to the core | Quicker than anyone I knew. | When I'm all alone | In the great unknown, | I'll remember you.

Bob Dylan | I'll Remember You

Attracted to an article in the Calgary Sun, I discovered one featuring the star of one of my earlier posts, the delectable Elisha Cuthbert. The girl's a Canadian... I might have guessed it, eh? Ah well, either way, I was scouring the media for the important news of the day; the stuff that really matters, the adrenal journalism that gets our blood pumping and raises our ire. I found all I needed in an article in which Janet Jackson's breasts feature prominently. Censured (yes, it should be "censored") March 30 by a bleep from CBS on David Letterman's show for blasphemy—she did, after all, say "Jesus!", the publicity seeking Ms. Jackson must have the world's most remarkable boobs.

Not that her boobs are the point of the article to which I was attracted. I just thought I'd mention them. In Boob Tube: The Naked Truth About Us and America, Canadian journalist Bill Brioux explores the curious reaction of Americans exposed to the sight of the female breast. Introducing us to this somewhat odd phenomenon, he leads with singer Alanis Morissette appearing on Canadian TV in a body suit, proclaiming "I am overjoyed to be back in my homeland, the true North, strong and censor-free."

Examining her statement, Brioux finds it accurate: "Even on our specialty channels, sex and nudity are becoming commonplace," he writes. "Every station seems to have its own Sex Files or Naughty Bits. The few Canadian dramas that remain on the air, such as The Eleventh Hour or Da Vinci's Inquest, have far more explicit sexual content than anything on NBC or ABC—and viewers here seem to take it in stride."

Looking due south, he finds Americans outraged by Ms. Jackson's proclivity for popping her mammaries. "Jackson's brief boob flash triggered a storm of condemnation south of the border. A staggering 200,000 viewers called CBS to complain; the U.S. Federal Communications Commission threatened to fine CBS and its 200 affiliates $36,000 US each for broadcasting indecent material. The trickle turned into a torrent. A delay was slapped on the Academy Awards (for the first time). In the strangest irony, NBC snipped a quick peek at an elderly woman's breasts out of an episode of ER."

Pointing out that Canadians take umbrage at anything perceived to be a racial slur, Brioux does more than scoff at American sensibilities. He points to a strange anomaly. "This week, Fox network brings The Swan, a nightmarish series which takes 16 plain-looking women and, through extreme cosmetic surgery, attempts to transform them into something quaintly acceptable in American society: Beauty-pageant contenders. The result is far more pornographic than anything seen on TV before—either in Canada or the U.S."

His conclusion? You can carve, remove and 'enhance' a breast on U.S. TV. Just don't show it.


...beneath the American breast.

I'll remember you | At the end of the trail, | I had so much left to do, | I had so little time to fail. | There's some people that | You don't forget, | Even though you've only seen'm | One time or two. | When the roses fade | And I'm in the shade, | I'll remember you.

Bob Dylan | I'll Remember You

Finding in every other news article I read today the same measured tones and considered opinions of the 'carve, remove and enhance' school of journalism, I started wondering whether Brioux had not stumbled onto something.

Iraq, as ever, tops the news. If you know where to look, you get the story. What do you get? Fact after fact, horror after horror written up in the same inverted-pyramid 5Ws + 1H style. After a while, it's plain fucking boring. It's death by stylistic convention. It's pornography. It's not pornographic in that the articles detail the horror of an interminable, incomprehensible suffering. It's pornographic in that the articles' writers strip their material, line by line, of all feeling, passion, and humanity.

This past Easter, I sat through Mass wondering at my own ignorance. How can I call myself a Catholic, a believer, a person of faith when I attach so much importance to the sanctity of life here on earth? Why, if I hold so strenuously to my beliefs and the little faith I have, do I doubt the existence of a life after death? Why do I believe that the life we are given here on earth is all that we have and that none of us has the right to take the life of another? Why do I rage so against the death of others?

Reading Bill Brioux and the news today, I realised that I have perhaps far less faith in the Hereafter than do most who adhere to religious belief. They do not need or wish to see the effects of war. They realise, without needing to have their faces shoved in the 'pornography of passing', the implications of extinguishing countless private universes with weapons sculpted to kill en masse. They must know, far better than I, that those to whom those universes belonged—earlier today, yesterday and the day before, are now in a Far Better Place.

Hence the unspoken rule. It's okay to write, photograph, and broadcast a war as long as you do so in the measured tones of the 'carve, remove and enhance' school of journalism. Strip it of all feeling, passion, and humanity. Just don't show it.

We are, after all, swans. There are no ugly ducklings here.

"Ah hell, Elisha, we both knew it. It never would'a worked. You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last..."

I'll remember you | When the wind blows through the piney wood. | It was you who came right through, | It was you who understood. | Though I'd never say | That I done it the way | That you'd have liked me to. | In the end, | My dear sweet friend, | I'll remember you.

Bob Dylan | I'll Remember You

Note The exception to the norm is Jo Wilding's Inside the Fire. It is a story of exceptional courage from the hell of Falluja. Also, studying Helmut Newton's works above, I've a feeling 'the heart that beats beneath the American breast' is to be found in the first photograph; though not obviously so.

Using Graphics...

...for effective blogging

Allowing every picture to tell its story

American Leftist has come up with a great way of making a point. Yesterday, several hundred dead Americans joined ranks on his site to pay moving tribute to the corporate interests for whom they have so needlessly given their lives. Truly, patriotism is alive and well. I am, however, a bit miffed with American Leftist. As my five or six readers know, I have been working hard at making appropriate use of graphics in my blog entries of late and marshalling the dead to the cause is old hat. On posting the photograph of a U.S. marine past his sell-by date last April, I was visited by well over 1,000 art lovers from the far right. Holding themselves and all before them to exceptionally high standards, they gave me their honest impressions of my breakthrough in artful blogging. Some were not all that kind, but I took their criticism to heart and have been working hard on making new and novel uses of graphics on this site. Some have worked and some haven't. None of this, of course, has anything to do with my being more than mildly pissed off with American Leftist. The point is, this technique is old hat. I perfected it a long while back. It follows therefore, that American Leftist has somehow, following time-honoured, lily-livered anti-American leftist-liberal tradition, filched my idea.

You doubt it? I don't give a shit, my friend. In fact, I don't give a flying fucking continental. On this page I offer you incontrovertible proof that the low-down, scum-sucking bottom feeder is nothing but a self-serving publicity hound. I spent my whole Easter weekend on the graphic posted beneath American Leftist's and can honestly say it is far better. You will see that it is, if you save it to your hard drive and magnify it 48 times, a mosaic. You'll have to do it yourself. Our server can't handle the job. What's more, this is a moving tribute offered the President of the United States by all Iraqis killed by American forces over the past twelve years as they have has fought to secure their freedom from the heinous and brutal one-time partner of the U.S., Saddam Hussein (unless your monitor supports 32-bit rendition, you're stuffed). More than one million once-suffering people took part. A mugshot of each and every Eternally grateful Iraqi has been included and none has been duplicated. Moreover, rather than a tacky representation of the President, those Iraqis who willingly laid their lives beneath the falling bombs of the U.S. and British air forces so that their fellows may savour the freedom they enjoy today, decided to render a remarkable likeness of his drunken daughter, the slag Jenna.

They felt it appropriate that I should convey to the U.S. president their ardent desire that they should be allowed to meet him, Jenna, Barbara, Laura and the remaining dogs as soon as his schedule allows it. They're running short on vestal virgins up there. "Not that she's one," remarked one cynic. "But we've no fresh supplies coming in and are growing desperate. We'll take anything."

So, there you have it. American Leftist indeed. You want art, I'll give you art. All you need do is ask.

Raping the Girl Next Door

When Boys Will Be Boys...

...and the result much the same

The people in Falloojeh have been trying to get the women and children out of the town for the last 48 hours but all the roads out of the city are closed by the Americans and refugees are being shot at and bombed on a regular basis… we're watching the television and crying. The hospital is overflowing with victims… those who have lost arms and legs… those who have lost loved ones. There isn't enough medicine or bandages… what are the Americans doing? This is collective punishment … is this the solution to the chaos we're living in? Is this the 'hearts and minds' part of the campaign?

River

Like George W. Bush, John Kerry's a shadow man, a projection of the cumulative shards of others' intents. Hell, he even looks like a shadow. But he is America's chosen alternative to Bush, the loser and incompetent now being flogged out of the White House by a U.S. citizenry enraged at their own stupidity and George's inability to prosecute a simple war perpetuating an American dream given substance by digital images of... yes, Elisha Cuthbert, star of the recently released The Girl Next Door.

What a lousy screen name. Can the girl not get herself a decent manager...

There... I've e-mailed Elisha and will interview her tomorrow. I'll probably take the job too... Bob Dylan's work with Victoria's Secret is depressing. I've been informed by Marvin Wasserstein, head of marketing for Victoria's Secret, that the girls breasts are not airbrushed. Their contract with the world's largest purveyor of intimate wear stipulates they have their nipples removed for fear of corrupting the morals of young Americans. When not on set, they wear Janet Jackson nipple caps (would you believe it?).

It's all very distressing. The way things are going, Kerry will get the job.

I know I'd do a damned side more good volunteering for the American presidency but, damn it... while Bill Clinton has my sympathies, life is far too short, Victoria's Secret is out, and the world is still full of girls like Elisha. I have no time to play at politics or with others' lives. Which is what George has been doing these past few years. And now he's taking a whipping... Hounded out of every Iraqi city on the map, the whimpering coward is fighting for his miserable life.

Would that he could do so in circumstances similar to those enjoyed by the victims of his dumb ambition. No, not the American people...

The American and European news stations don't show the dying Iraqis… they don't show the women and children bandaged and bleeding - the mother looking for some sign of her son in the middle of a puddle of blood and dismembered arms and legs… they don't show you the hospitals overflowing with the dead and dying because they don't want to hurt American feelings… but people should see it. You should see the price of your war and occupation - it's unfair that the Americans are fighting a war thousands of kilometers from home. They get their dead in neat, tidy caskets draped with a flag and we have to gather and scrape our dead off of the floors and hope the American shrapnel and bullets left enough to make a definite identification… One year later, and Bush has achieved what he wanted - this day will go down in history and in the memory of all Iraqis as one of the bloodiest days ever...

River

Although you might suspect it, I've not been trolling the Web looking for pictures of blondes. After watching Kevin Costner's 13 Days on the idiot box a couple of days ago, I decided to spend some time reminiscing about the good old days, when girls were girls and men were men. In 1962, John F. Kennedy was president of the United States and Cuba was the girl next door. Costner's high-budget, selective retelling of a forgotten time in which the threat was both real and imminent fails to convey the tension generated by the Soviet Union positioning ICBMs on Cuban soil. History tells the tale far better and, through its archives, the Michigan State University's History and Politics Out Loud project gives it voice.

I've been listening to a time when politicians sought to avoid rather than provoke war; when they bludgeoned Pentagon hawks with the jackhammers of reason and conviction; when they did their job. Studying the details of the Cuban Missile Crisis would do most Americans the world of good. They have a patchy history when it comes to warfare. It is not something at which they excel. In fact, as Muqtadah al-Sadr has taught them this past week, they are and always were bloody hopeless at it.

Dragged at the last into two world wars, they were always Johnny Come Latelys, the genial saps with the heavy armour. Much as Hollywood would like us to believe the U.S. conquered Hitler, they cannot evade history's recognition of Britain and Russia's more weighty and telling contributions to Adolf's downfall. And much as Arnold Schwarzeneger, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude van Damme and a host of kung-fu patriots would have us deny it, the United States security apparatus military has performed abysmally in every armed conflict it has instigated or contributed to since WWII.

But there were bright patches, and John F. Kennedy's evasion of a nuclear holocaust late in 1962 remains one of the Twentieth Century's great military achievements. Now, all we get is Twentieth Century Fox or, worse, FoxNews. Yup, it was after Kennedy's assassination that the Curtis Le Mays and Rumsfelds of the world took over. They gave us what we have today, the snivelling weasel from Crawford, Texas, the search for a new girl next door, and a docile populace exhibiting all the spine of a rubber chicken.

The people in Falloojeh have been trying to get the women and children out of the town for the last 48 hours but all the roads out of the city are closed by the Americans and refugees are being shot at and bombed on a regular basis… we're watching the television and crying. The hospital is overflowing with victims… those who have lost arms and legs… those who have lost loved ones. There isn't enough medicine or bandages… what are the Americans doing? This is collective punishment … is this the solution to the chaos we're living in? Is this the 'hearts and minds' part of the campaign?

River

Mind you, despite Americans having the national resolve of a bluebottle, I have a soft spot for them. They too appreciate the virtues of digital foxes like Elisha Cuthbert now being dished up by Hollywood. These girls of great and obvious virtue appeal to healthier appetites and sensibilities than does Cuba as perceived by the average redneck; offering us hope for the future. Sharing the tastes of more refined US-ians, how could I ever give up on them? For all their faults, dead presidents, war-mongering and naive hysteria they, like their former girl next door and its president, Fidel Castro, are real and can be dealt with.

After WWII's birthing of new cycle of global intercourse, every superpower was given a fresh start and Kennedy inherited Cuba. However, like most Americans, Kennedy had a voracious sexual appetite and proved incapable of accepting that there is and will always be only one girl next door. Once deflowered, she exists no more. Search for her as one might, she will never return. That's all there is to it. There is no going back and no new dream girl. Grow up, settle down, and get used to it.

Kennedy might have learnt a great deal from Cuba. Or from Elisha from that matter. Like history, she takes different roles for different times and people. I will spend some time with her over the next few days, exploring her potential to take on parts other than that of a former hooker. She is, like Cuba at the time of the Revolution, an archetypal whole-wheat blonde, and has her own story. What we see in The Girl Next Door is, well, what we see. What we see in 13 Days is, well, nothing more than what we see. I have spoken at length to Elisha about this and can assure you she is what we might call a 'good' girl. She tells me Cuba was much like her in 1962.

In 13 Days, Costner omits the sordid detail heaped on the U.S. side of the ideological divide. Kennedy was no hero. However, suffering his pains and perversions privately, he delayed the onset of an era of global rape. The short, odious story is that he ravished Cuba before dumping her. Subject to the scorn of an indefinite blockade to mark her conquest, she became the whore of fat-walleted congressmen on fishing trips, their eyes reflecting dreams of the good old days when Havana provided sex, drugs and dubious deals on every street corner.

Where are the useless Governing Council? Why isn't anyone condemning the killings in the south and in Falloojeh? Why aren't they sitting down that fool Bremer and telling him that this is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong? If one of them were half a man or even half a human, they would threaten to resign their posts if there isn't an immediate ceasefire… the people are enraged. This latest situation proves that they aren't Iraqi - they aren't here for the welfare of the Iraqi people.

River

Like countries, Elisha takes on certain roles. Generally, these roles are set by the major studios and their markets and are foisted on her by the pickle brains running Hollywood. Should I now advise Elisha to play a thick-legged, potato-picking Ukrainian woman unaware that she can order Bob Dylan CDs and pleasing lingerie from Victoria's Secret, that will be her role. But we are dealing with movies here. The Elisha we see in The Girl Next Door will be the same person starring as Olga the peasant girl raped by the vodka-swilling prince on his way to the front.

Superpowers are no different. The archives tell us so. The longer, more correct story, and the one they narrate, tells us that Cuba played Olga to the U.S. prince in 1962 for, although Kennedy subdued the hawks, he did so to crush Castro, not save him. In Turning History on Its Head, at the George Washington University National Archive Site, Philip Brenner, explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis to his fourteen-year old daughter and the world, reminds us that, at the time of the crisis":

"...the United States was waging a war against Cuba that involved several assassination attempts against the Cuban leader, terrorist acts against Cuban civilians, and sabotage of Cuban factories. The endgame of this low intensity conflict envisioned a U.S. invasion."

Brenner points to Operation Mongoose, History and Politics Out Loud to Operation Ortsac:

"After weathering the failed Bay of Pigs invasion by CIA-backed Cuban exiles in 1961, Castro observed as U.S. armed forces staged a mock invasion of a Caribbean island in 1962. The purpose of the invasion was to overthrow a leader whose name, Ortsac, was Castro spelled backwards. Although Ortsac was a fictitious name, Castro "got the message" and soon became convinced that the U.S. was serious about invading Cuba."

In a related article, Annals of Blinksmanship, Thomas Blanton notes:

"Perhaps most striking is evidence of the Cubans' unrelenting fear, before and after the Bay of Pigs landing in 1961, that a U.S. invasion was imminent. The...resulting paranoia suggests that when Khrushchev claimed that the missiles were there to defend the Cuban Revolution, he was not just scoring a propaganda point."

It would serve us well to remember that American, Russian and Ukrainian girls all want to have fun. Elisha as Olga was raped by JFK and the miniscule Cuban Revolution, subject to the use of overwhelming force by the U.S., was denied oil and a market for its sugar. Russian adventurism in Cuba had a cause, namely U.S. adventurism. It was left to one man, Castro, to keep the Revolution alive in Cuba. That he has been able to sustain it these past four decades despite American aggression and interference, makes him the equal of Mandela.

Do Americans realise this? Of course not. They also tend to forget that the girl next door is always somebody else's little sister and if you fuck with her, well... Forever adolescents on drugs, they chase the impossible dream. Not for nothing did Michael Moore entitle his book, Stupid White Men.


The Girl Next Door...A Real and Imminent Threat

They say around 600 Iraqis were killed in Falloojeh - 120 children and 200 women... it's an atrocity and horribly sad. They have let one or two convoys in and the rest were sent back. The refugees from the area are flowing into Baghdad and it's horrible to see them. Women and children with tear-stained faces, mostly in black, carrying bundles of clothes and bottles of water. The mosques are gathering food and clothes for them... one of the storage areas for the refugee stuff was hit by an American tank today in A'adhamiya and the scene is chaotic... scattered food, medication, bandages, blankets, etc.

River

Somalia almost proved America's second Vietnam. Somalia showed that the Americans had learnt nothing from JFK and his many peccadilloes. Had they done so, they would never allowed Bill Clinton his Monica Lewinsky blowjobs in the Oval Office. But no, they looked the other way and Bill's sex-crazed eyes lit on Somalia. And so it came about that Bill almost had his pecker trimmed in Mogadishu. Eight-hundred thousand Rwandese would testify to his hasty withdrawal if they could. As would Mohamed Farah Aideed were he in a position to do so. As would all those Rangers not available for the filming of Black Hawk Down.

The Russians are as randy as the Yanks and are as loath to learn from the past. Two decades after the United States screwed Cuba, Moscow's little sister, the Soviets ventured into Afghanistan. Many refer to their failed attempt to seduce and later rape that ancient country as its Vietnam. It's not a bad analogy. Afghanistan under the Soviet whip saw the mujahideen enjoying Big Brother Washington's active and material help. Afghanistan was not, to its ayatollahs' collective relief, to be Russia's girl next door. In many ways, as was the case in Vietnam, it played Lorena to Moscow's John Bobbit, offering great pleasure but delivering terrible pain. For the Soviets, Afghanistan was a bitch.

Afghanistan, if she doesn't mind me saying it, is proving to be something of a bitch to the Americans as well but, having been bombed back to the Stone Age, she has not yet or is incapable of inflicting the ultimate indignity of Mr. Bobbit on the U.S. and its recalcitrant proxy forces. Having locked down the Afghans more tightly than the Taliban in a religious frenzy, they are too busy fighting each other to be seduced by Afghanistan's natural charms.

Perhaps I should explain something here. When it comes to gratuitous sex, most women are bitches. Trust me. I know these things. Being a good Catholic boy, a blogger, and a professional to boot, I offer my counsel freely. I have more respect for the United States than I do for Bob Dylan, Victoria's Secret and Elisha Cuthbert, all of whom will receive large bills for my not insubstantial services. A country sharing many of my attributes; the rugged, sensitive and caring Marlboro man (in fact, all the attributes lacking in the shadows occupying America's highest office), the United States would do well to heed my advice.

To George W. Bush, I will say this much. In as much as Vietnam came to visit Soviet forces in Afghanistan, it will return to haunt you in Iraq. Like all conflicts and genocidal wars you have perpetrated or in which you have played a major role since Cuba fell in 1962, Iraq is not your next girl next door. That was Cuba and you raped her. Iraq will be your Palestine, the Lorena to your John Bobbit. Trust me George, I am an expert in these matters.

So it goes. People are generally slow to realise that when a relationship has run its course, it's over. Where rape is involved, the consequences are far harsher. The Yanks are slower than most. Kevin Costner is slower than most Yanks. Today is a different movie altogether. Kennedy raped Cuba and, although the case was never brought to trial, his misdemeanour has not been forgotten or forgiven. If George W. Bush's increasingly likely successor, that cadaverous man of the shadows, John F. Kerry, turns out every bit as rotten and corrupt as he's shaping up to be, we will likely see him chasing my charge, Elisha Cuthbert, with as much vigour as his predecessor and before him, JFK.

The retread version of the man who tamed his hawks will enjoy as much success with Elisha as the Soviets enjoyed in Afghanistan.

All I can think is, "We've become one of those countries..." You know - the ones where hostages are taken on a daily basis and governments warn their civilians of visiting or entering the country. It's especially sad because even during those long years during the blockade and in between wars and bombings, there were never any attacks on foreigners. Iraqis are hospitable, friendly people who always used to treat foreigners with care... now, everyone is treated like a potential enemy.

River - Not Your Average Girl Next Door

From the comment box:

HaloScan permits only 1,000 character responses to comments. Shelley asks some pointed questions and deserves a full reply. She comments:

What do you want, Mike?

You don't want Bush. You don't Kerry. You don't like Americans, because we fuck up constantly.

Do you want us to just detonate all of out atomic bombs over our own country and wipe us off the face of the world? Will that then end all evil, since we are the root of?

To which I offer the following response:

To your first and key question, an end to this carnage, Shelley; no different from you. I distrust Bush and I distrust Kerry. Big time. Bush is a criminal. Kerry has supported his every move. There are many reasons for me distrusting them, most of which you know and most of which are archived here. Were Kerry to make an unequivocal commitment to withdraw from the Middle East and bring the international community in to negotiate, enforce, and monitor its withdrawal (it has no credibility left), I'd support him as I would participating Middle Eastern states. Until he does that, I'd rather see Bush retain office until he is tried as a war criminal and international sanctions imposed on the U.S.

Bush's administration must be forced out. Until a U.S. administration is in place that does implement these steps, I cannot but wish to see the incumbents ousted. If I were to settle for less, I'd probably settle for anything and, finally, accept this ongoing butchery. There's enough of it elsewhere. Look at Sudan.

As for not liking Americans and your last two questions, you're angry and I excuse you that. It's patent bullshit and you know it. That's the sort of simplistic crap that equates criticism of Sharon and his supporters to anti-Semitism and I don't believe you believe it. I do not dislike Americans or the people of any other nation, creed, or race. Nor do I believe Americans fuck up more than some. When the U.S. does, however, it does so with devastating consequences for people living elsewhere. Yes, generalisations are bound to abound, but the U.S. invasion force is out of control and that is a big deal. We knew it would get to this.

Until U.S. citizens start telling the U.S. administration what they think of it, the world and I can only believe they condone what is happening in Iraq and elsewhere. There is, after all, a pattern here. Many U.S. bloggers do speak out against these illegal, murderous actions. You are one of them. And many U.S. citizens remember having to meet state intransigence with blunt force to effect a withdrawal from Vietnam. What's wrong this time round?

Is what is going on in Iraq cool? Seventy occupation troops, 700 Iraqi resistance fighters, and an unknown number of civilians killed in the past week... Do we, as peole sharing the planet, accept it and hope these fools will do better over the next seven days? A third battalion has already been brought into the attack on Fallujah. Iraq on fire? After a year? For what? Fuck no, I don't accept it. Nor do I think do you.

In short, your anger's aimed the wrong way. And no, there's no end to the evil we do. You know that too.