Thursday, January 10, 2008
Hating the War in Iraq
Boredom, pop culture and emotional tear jerking nonsense.
by Ferdinand III
You need something to hate. Hate is a normal, natural, quite human and Greek-myth inspired emotion. Zeus after all killed his father and his siblings in a hateful rage, to win control over the Earth. Who does not like to hate now and then? Society is full of whiners, cry-babies, over-emotionalised feminists and fembots. Crying, hating, dramatics – this is what the elite and media tells us should be the stuff of life. Since most people cry about everything, something is needed to hate and hate with impassioned fury. Enter Iraq and Bushitler.
Iraq is a success. But you would never know it. Yet another recently released [big yawn] report details the carnage from this conflict – 151.000 civilian dead since 2003. This is about 30.000 per year, the total that us fascist-baby eating-racist-imperialist neo-cons have said was the death rate for some time now. So this is really a new report with old news. Sure 30.000 innocents murdered every year by fanatical Muslims, jihadists, gangs, murderers and left-over fascists is appalling. It is a rather terrible price tag to rid us of a tyrant, establish a forward base inside the largely illiterate and supremacist Islamic world, and take the fight to ideological fascists. But what is the other side of this story ? Or is just hating conflict enough emotional emollient in itself?
One flip side of the 'Iraq is a disaster' story-line is that the current death toll is 1/3 of what it was, during those halycon days of the 1990s. You might not remember those days since the media chose not to discuss or show Hussein's totalitarian Iraq. Or maybe you got your news from CNN or Michael Moore, showing happy, cherubic Iraqi's flying kites, eating chocolate and engaging in advanced cultural and scientific achievement – all with an eye towards improving the lot of the world and of mankind.
In reality about 90.000 people were murdered each year during the 1990s or about 3 times what we see today. This tells us that Iraq has never been stable, peaceful, or redolent. It also should tell us a lot about Arab – Islamic culture and the poverty of both. When a society can murder close to 100.000 of its own, and the media reports nothing, it should also tell us alot about the mainstream media.
Hussein's death tally dwarves the current insanity of Islamic-Arabic attacks on innocent civilians. Saying that the Arab-Islamic 'culture' is a death cult is rather obvious. Highlighting Hussein's butchery as juxtaposition to the current senseless slaughter of innocents is strangely, rarely done. For the media and the screaming Marxist-socialist left to prove that Iraq is a disaster, inconvenient truths such as the $100 billion Oil for Food [and palaces] scandal, along with the 1-3 million or so murdered civilians and military personnel, needs to be quietly and quickly forgotten. Since the current death total means a savings of 70.000 or so lives and the creation of a viable Iraqi state with increasing oil wealth, would that not constitute a success of some measure?
Or are people that dumb to believe everything that the Code-Pink; Hollywood-Media crowd tells you to believe ?
Hussein started 2 regional wars and threatened Israel with annihilation. During the 1980s it is estimated that close to two million people, including between 150,000 and 340,000 Iraqis, and between 450,000 and 730,000 Persian combatants were killed during the Iran-Iraq War. An estimated 1,000 Kuwaiti nationals were butchered following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991. During the first Gulf War, upwards of 20,000 Iraqis were killed, thanks to Hussein's aggression and over 100,000 Kurds were murdered by Hussein.
But that is just the beginning. During the 1990s it is guestimated that about 300.000 to 800.000 Kurds and Shias were killed and according to UNICEF approximately 500,000 Iraqi children died during the Oil for Food scandal, as Iraq exported food and medicine to earn Hussein and his gang hard currency. Gas, torture chambers, mass murders, women raped in front of their husbands, mothers and fathers killed in front of their children, babies ripped apart while their moms watched.......yet Abu Ghraib is the nadir of military evil apparently.
So the death total from Hussein during the 1980s and 1990s was only....let's see....between 1.8 to 2.5 million. A number rarely reported or talked about. And what is the news headline today? American initiated war kills 151.000 innocents!
It is Arabs and Muslims who are doing the killing, not the Americans. Al Qaeda, jihadists, and Baathist die-hards are the ones who are butchering civilians. America has given Iraq a chance at modernity and a real opportunity to move from the killing squads and death cult of the Hussein era into something more sensible. Given that the death toll has been reduced by 1/3, it appears that the opportunity is being taken – albeit slowly.
Around 100.000 jihadists and fascists have been killed in Iraq. For all Al Qaeda's bravado, it has suffered an overwhelming defeat in Iraq. In 50 years Iraq will be a new South Korea with normal civilian death rates. You can't drag a fascist backwater into the modern world, and eradicate overnight a failed Arab-Islamic culture of death. Murders, bombs, and carnage will still haunt Iraq for some time to come, but the unfettered death cult of primordial savagery is gone.
Instead of presenting both sides of this story, the media headlines are as usual, ridiculously insipid. Iraq is far better off today than 5, 10, 15 or 30 years ago. It now has a chance. Blaming the US for Muslim-Arab savagery is disingenuous and bigoted. Perhaps the Arabs should take responsibility for their own barbarity?
Nah of course not, the ills of the world flow from America. Islam and the Greater Arab empire are peaceful, don't you know. The need to hate something, anything, should never be under-estimated. But maybe people should start hating fascist death cults, instead of America.