- Doctor Frankenstein's frightful creature was assembled
from the limbs of corpses collected in the dead of night.
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- The Pentagon, with a steady supply of perfectly good
severed limbs and heads from all its bombing runs, has decided the good
Doctor's approach to the ideal soldier has certain public-relations liabilities.
Jerky, stitched-together bodies in uniform with putrid blue-green skin
would not make good photo-ops. So the Pentagon has taken the high-tech
approach, informing us recently that they are not many years away from
putting the finishing touches to a robot soldier.
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- The picture of the creature released with the chirpy
announcement - since the Pentagon has moved heavily into public relations
and spying, its tone has become more chirpy, sounding often like a 1950's
announcement for new car models - shows a stubby thing, resembling one
of Dr. Who's dreaded Daleks more than anything else. Only this delightful
creature has all kinds of antennae, lens, and gizmos, making it also somewhat
resemble a space probe sent to trek the arid sands of Mars, blasting, digging,
and probing as it hums along on nuclear batteries.
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- Thinking people, naturally, regard the prospect of imperial
robot forces with dread, robots shooting and herding civilians after being
parachuted into the mountains of Central Asia or onto the sands of the
Middle East. It is remarkable that such a nightmarish concept should spring
from the same people who fear so much as cameras on their crime-ridden
streets out of paranoid concern for individual rights.
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- Many outside the United States comfort themselves with
the belief that it really isn't the same people making nightmarish decisions,
for America, just as George Orwell's Oceania has several distinct citizenship
levels, each with differing rights and privileges. It is the group that
George Bush comes from - arrogant, unthinking, virtually-get-away-with-murder
snots - that dreams up these horrors and sees that they are generously
funded by ordinary, hardworking Americans who must pay their taxes.
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- When I heard about American soldiers killing an Italian
secret service agent who had worked to secure the release of hostage journalist,
Giuliana Sgrena, the thought occurred that maybe the robots couldn't do
much worse. American sources first tried to make it look as though the
car carrying the two innocent victims had been speeding towards a check-point.
With all the bombings in Baghdad, people would understand the killing as
regrettable but unavoidable.
-
- It turns out this effort to influence public understanding
was a total fabrication. Just as in the case, some while back, of the American
press's mythical Battle of Samara which proved nothing more than a slaughter
of Iraqi civilians by another group of trigger-happy Americans shooting
up a whole neighborhood without being so much as shot at.
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- The car carrying the released hostage to freedom was
not speeding. The car was a very short distance from the airport when a
patrol of American soldiers blinded it with a searchlight and an instant
hail of bullets. The occupants had no idea what was happening until it
was over, and the truly brave Italian agent lay bleeding and dying in the
arms of the wounded journalist.
-
- It became obvious what happened as the trigger-happy
soldiers stood around the car containing wounded and dying occupants and
wouldn't permit any access or help for several minutes. From such events
come the not-to-be-sneered-at stories of Americans targeting journalists
they don't like (Ms Sgrena being quite critical of Americans in Iraq).
The scene must have resembled the chilling one in Stanley Kubrick's "Full
Metal Jacket" where a group of American soldiers stands, with a wounded
and dying Vietnamese woman at their feet, chatting and unblinkingly watching
her die.
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- The only thing special about this horrible event in Baghdad
was that the victims were prominent Westerners. Events just like it happen
all the time to poor Iraqis, whole families being shot up sometimes by
American soldiers, to say nothing of the countless cases of brutality and
torture inflicted on men unfortunate enough to imprisoned at the mercy
of Appalachian Throwbacks in uniform.
-
- The New York Times, in its subtle propaganda campaign
supporting Bush, insists on referring to the troops in Iraq as "GIs,"
a term filled with sentimental suggestions from World War Two. GIs were
recruited, civilian soldiers, fighting the horrors of fascism. America's
legionaries in Iraq are professional soldiers, and certainly the world's
most pampered, best paid and equipped. They are not fighting fascism either,
or anything remotely like it. They are there, just as they were in a decade-long
massacre in Vietnam, to enforce the will of a distant imperial power.
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- There are Americans, and the President chief among them,
who will say, "Aw shucks, these things happen in war!" True enough,
but then Iraq isn't a war, it's the aftermath of a calculated invasion.
The troops shooting up civilians day after day are there for no high purpose.
Likely Bush would offer the same dismissive reaction concerning recent
evidence of America's brave boys having used napalm and poison gas in the
Fallujah. In for a penny, in for pound: hell, after an illegal invasion,
what's so bad about using banned weapons?
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- If you want just the tiniest insight into the minds of
the bleak figures in lab coats running the horror-filled laboratories of
Washington, you have only to look at Bush's reaction to Canada's decision
not to participate in a costly missile-defense system which has failed
every test. Before Canada's decision was made, during Bush's trip to Canada
and against all accepted diplomatic protocol, he publicly brought up the
topic of missile defense, a controversial subject in Canada, where it is
seen not so much as an effort at legitimate defense as one to weaponize
space. In private, on the same brief trip, he belligerently insisted on
his way. We know this because someone with access leaked to the press a
transcript of Bush's embarrassing, rather threatening words.
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- Then, only days ago, Bush literally wouldn't answer Prime
Minister Paul Martin's phone call concerning Canada's decision against
participation. His refusal to return the call went on for days, resembling
the behavior of a brooding bully who hadn't got his way. Bush's most unpleasant
factotum, Ms Rice, cancelled a scheduled trip to Canada. These kinds of
behaviors undoubtedly aren't well-publicized in America, but how revealing
they are of the integrity and quality of people claiming to lead the world
towards greater democracy and human rights.
-
- Having made his spiteful point, Bush finally returned
the Prime Minister's call, and Ms Rice re-scheduled her trip. Canada does,
after all, have a four-thousand mile border with the United States, a fact
which even Washington's most lunatic, safely-behind-the oak-desk warrior
fanatics recognize as of some long-term consequence.
-
- I read recently of another Frankensteinian project in
which a mouse is to be given a brain composed of a clump of human brain
cells. Perhaps the President personally inspired this one, his behavior
resembling nothing so much as a human with the brain of a mouse.
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