Anniversary of a Bush Outrage!

Ten years ago today, Aug 21, 2002, Ned's friends will no doubt recall these comments from then-generalissimo and widely acknowledged war criminal George Bush: "No decision has been made on Iraq, but we believe the world would benefit by regime change." Of course all Ned's friends know that was just one of the many blatant, felonious lies told by that lizard. But Ned suspects that, having heard this fatuous remark from Bush, billions of the world's citizens would have cried: "Yes! Regime change! For America first!"

More deaths on GWB's Head

Not content with near-bankrupting the country, Bush set in motion events which are still having hellish consequences. The toppling and death of Hussein (Sadaam, not Barack) set in motion tribal and clan warfare that continues to take lives in Iraq. Today, we hear of co-ordinated attacks that killed 70 and wounded hundreds. That dreadful country remains paralyzed by sectarian warfare that any fool with a sense of history could have foretold. But Bush wanted to get Sadaam because he "tried to kill my dad." So he sent hundreds of thousands of mercenaries, killing and maiming, then set p a puppet regime which set about round after round of ethnic killing, fomented no doubt by Iran, Iraq's historic enemy.
But, after all, Iraq is just a creature of European diplomats, drawing lines on a map during the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. It really doesn't exist as a real country at all.

$1.5 trillion and counting

Ned seems to recall that a historian, Paul Kennedy, wrote a tome years ago called "The Rise and Fall of The Great Powers" in which he described the reasons for the decline of once-mighty world powers including Spain, Britain and by inference, the United States. Ned finds Johnson's thesis to be more and more persuasive in view of the money pissed away on wars by the criminal Bush regime and, sadly, the Obama administration, which, like a grouper repeatedly trying to eat a porcupine fish, are very slow learners. Comes word today from Bloomberg News that the total cost of the misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan is at least $1.26 trillion and counting, and this does not count the cost of maimed soldiers returning with severe mental and physical problems. Adding these, and Ned gets about $1.5 trillion. It makes Ned's blood boil to think of the waste of lives and treasure carried out in the name of "defending freedom" and "protection from terrorism", not to mention, "spreading democracy."
As an exercise, Ned asks his friends to think of how this money could have been spent productively; for example, giving every city in the US a rapid transit system and paying for it for fifty years, or retrofitting every house in the country with the latest in energy-saving devices, or giving every kid with a B average a free college education, or even giving free memberships in the Delta Sky Club to anyone who wanted it--no, scratch that, Ned has to rub shoulders with enough riff-raff as it is.
One day, Ned hopes the criminals in the Bush regime will answer for their crimes with their heads, but by then the damage to the country will no doubt already be done.

An American Holocaust?

Today's NYT contained a profoundly troubling story about a 12-year-old Iraqi girl whose parents were killed by trigger-happy American soldiers at an American "checkpoint" in Iraq. The kid is traumatized, her brother was in the car, wounded, and died afterwards. There are hundreds of thousands of Iraqis whose lives have been terminated (mostly innocent) or ruined by the actions or consequences of American invasion and occupation forces.
Once the total reaches the hundreds of thousands of innocents, when does it start to be genocide and a holocaust? Ned repeats that this was all done in his name but without his sanction. George Bush just decided to send American troops to invade a country without a declaration of war, and there was not a God-damned thing we could do about it, and now Barack Obama is sending American drones to kill civilians, children and "suspected insurgents" and "suspected terrorists" in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
When will this nightmare end? Ned only wished the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity would get the justice he would give them.

The Value of Empires: Iraq

Ned is advised by his local public TV station that today marks the 5th anniversary of the discovery, outside Baghdad, of the bodies of 30 beheaded corpses, the victims of sectarian killings. Now, these and thousands more like them are taken by American apologists of the Iraq invasion as 'collateral damage' in the battle for Freedom. In other words, sometimes 'democracy is messy' in the infamous words of Bush's Krieg Reichs Kommander Rumsfeld. However, no doubt the sons and daughters, wives, mothers and fathers of these murder victims might disagree. Had we not invaded that country on specious pretexts, they and thousands like them would be alive today.
And here we see a value of despotism, in this case Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Iraq is not a real country at all: its boundaries were established by a commission of imperialists after WWI. It includes peoples who have for centuries, to put it mildly, had issues with each other, over such weighty points as who should have succeeded the Prophet Mohammed in the 7th century. [However, Ned would add parenthetically, we might sneer less at such unsophisticated goings on if we were to remind ourselves with humility that cults established in the 1st century AD govern much of U.S. government policy today. But let that pass.]
The point is this: the value of the Hussein regime was that it kept people who hated each other from killing each other. That is the essence of empire. Ditto the Ottomans, and the Austro-Hungarians. Same goes for Tito's Yugoslavia, and the British Raj in India. Churchill, that old anachronism, pleaded in Parliament for his colleagues not to 'abandon' India, predicting correctly that independence would bring terrible bloodshed at Hindu killed Muslim and vice versa. Hundreds of thousands were killed and millions displaced.
So Ned advises his jingoistc friends not to be so arrogant in their use of power--in our case, sending mercenaries to bomb and kill innocent people and 'suspected terrorists.' Over the past few weeks many children have been killed in air strikes against 'suspected terrorists.'
Ned for one hates the perpetrators of these deeds and hates them further for the evil done in his name.