- I had an unpleasant moment on the day Bush decided to
address "the Arab world." He is a man I cannot stand hearing,
so when his voice comes on the radio, I always switch it off. Well, this
time I was too far away and necessarily heard a couple of sentences, the
ones starting with "People in Iraq must understand - And they must
understand."
-
- Must? The dumb arrogance of his words was stunning. On
top of his poorly-chosen vocabulary, the man never apologized as I later
learned from the Internet. Here was a commander talking about inexcusable
brutality against helpless prisoners telling millions of angry people that
they must understand. Here was a pathetically-inadequate man so overtaken
by events that he felt the need to address "the Arab world,"
and he was telling them what they must understand.
-
- Of course, his immense, brainless arrogance was transmitted
in other ways. He addressed the "Arab world" without using the
networks that many listen to. He wanted a safe outlet - safe, that is,
for him and his known inability to handle any question more complex than
"How's Mom?" He deliberately avoided al Jazeerah, a network that
asks tough questions and whose employees his soldiers have deliberately
targeted and killed.
-
- I wonder how many new terrorists Bush has created throughout
the Middle East? Imagine the rage of young Arab men seeing pictures of
other young Arab men with their heads in bags being used like the cast
of a vile underground pornographic film? Some of the most terrible scenes
undoubtedly have no photographs because the actors were almost certainly
murdered. Even the smiling cretins from the bayous and backwoods of America
seen in the published pictures know better than to be photographed committing
murder.
-
- For the most part, the armed forces of the United States
do not hire the kind of clean-cut, Sir-spouting faces invariably used as
their public-relations spokesmen. They need people who will be trained
to kill and obey orders, and most of the killing is to be done in poor,
distant places where the victims' voices are never heard in America.
-
- Military recruiters fill a good part of their quotas
from the many dismal backwaters and slums of the Republic. They fill them
with the kind of people who otherwise might not be employed at all. They
undoubtedly get a disproportionate share of the people who enjoy killing
and inflicting pain, the kind of people found in every society on earth.
-
- It doesn't take a great effort of the imagination to
anticipate what will happen when you give such people a few weeks' training
in killing and shining shoes and send them off to a remote land like Iraq,
a place whose people they cannot understand, and about whom they know only
the uninformed, provoking slogans of their President.
-
- When a contemptible moral weakling like Bush sits comfortably
in his leather chair and signs an order to invade a distant land, it is
precisely the horrors of Abu Ghraib prison he necessarily releases.
-
- Remember Lieutenant Calley and his boys murdering an
entire village in Vietnam? That good old boy never experienced a moment's
meaningful justice. There was actually a brisk business for a while in
Lieutenant Calley souvenirs, especially in the South.
-
- There were several such massacres discovered in Vietnam,
and one cannot doubt others went undiscovered. More disgusting still was
the slitting of about twenty-thousand throats, mostly village officials,
by the brave men of the Special Forces. But even their Nazi-like slaughter
couldn't compare to the work of the men flying jets, men still called war
heroes in America, men who systematically bombed and napalmed countless
towns, villages, and farms, producing enough victims to bury the city of
Washington under a mountain of burnt flesh and gore, almost all of them
civilians.
-
- During that war, I once talked to an American veteran
of World War II about the horror of what was going on. He told me a story.
He was on a train with two other Americans and a German prisoner of war.
One of the Americans suddenly put his automatic pistol to the head of the
German and blew his brains out. He had no reason and just laughed after
doing it.
-
- As I've written before, I can never forget someone I
knew in high school telling me about how he and his friends would pile
into a car and drive down to the ghetto some nights, trying to "run
down niggers" for the hilarious entertainment of seeing them run for
their lives. I've always associated that painful memory with the men who
later raped and murdered their way across Vietnam.
-
- It is not that Americans are worse than other people,
it is that they are the same. Yet they are encouraged constantly to think
they are better - more advanced, more educated, more dedicated to democratic
and human values. In the President's words, "The America I know cares
about every individual." Well, apart from the fact that those descriptions
fit at best a minority of Americans, thinking that you are better than
less fortunate people is a guaranteed method for producing injustice and
horror.
-
- I note that to this day even more hideous pictures of
Iraqi children mangled and killed by American bombing are not published
by the county's main press. Many Americans are sentimental, and pictures
of smashed and mangled children might produce results not desired by those
running the country, but the prison pictures can be characterized as an
exception, as the fault of a few bad people breaking the rules.
-
- Well, what society doesn't have such rules? There's nothing
special about America in officially opposing torture, humiliation, and
murder. Even dictatorships publicly set such rules, but what society doesn't
violate the rules as soon as it sinks to the putrid business of war?
-
- A French television station has obtained a three-and-a-half
minute videotape from an American helicopter taken last December. There
is a pilot and a military gunman on board, and their commanding officer
talks to them on a radio. The American soldier shoots three unarmed Iraqis,
one by one, as the commanding officer barks his directions to him. The
third man attempts to hide, and then tries to crawl away, clearly wounded.
The officer orders him killed, and he quickly is.
-
- Remember the broadcast conversations of American pilots
during the first Gulf conflict as they strafed and bombed miles of Iraqi
soldiers caught in a traffic jam while retreating from Kuwait City? We
heard the words, clearly spoken with the same sense of amusement I heard
as a young man in Chicago, "It's like shootin' fish in a barrel!"
broadcast on television without any comment or criticism from broadcasters
or politicians.
-
- To this day, there is no examination into the disappearance
of about three thousand prisoners in Afghanistan. A European documentary
film strongly suggests American complicity in their mass murder out on
the dessert by some of the more grotesque warlords with which the U.S.
allied itself. The prisoners reportedly were driven, batch after batch,
stuffed into vans, through a sun-baked wilderness, suffocating in the heat
while American troops idly watched.
-
- Don't forget the words of Donald Rumsfeld concerning
prisoners in Afghanistan. He said publicly that all foreign fighters captured
should be killed or permanently walled away. Do you think that kind of
leadership might influence the attitudes of creeps in the unwatched corridors
of military prisons with people at their mercy?
-
- Wars are an utterly filthy business, and, unless you
are depraved, you don't start them. Bush is responsible for what has happened
in Iraq and Afghanistan as surely as German leaders were responsible for
the acts of their soldiers during World War II.
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