Getting So Much Better All the Time,

Here are some choice paragraphs from the featured Counterpunch story of the day, written by Patrick Cockburn:

There is a horrible desperation in the hunt for work. A Russian company asked a
man who was trying to get a job as a driver about his qualifications.
He said he felt he should get the job because, quite apart from his great experience as a driver, he had a live grenade in his pocket. He then showed the grenade to the Russian interviewing him and threatened to remove the pin unless he was immediately taken on.

Iraqis jokingly call those who have done well out of the collapse and occupation hawasimi or 'finalists'. This is a reference to Saddam's prewar claim that Iraqis were about to witness 'a final battle with the Americans'. Newly recruited policemen are hawasimi, said with a slight sneer. (The same word is used about those who are obviously much better off since the looting of Baghdad.) The US is hopeful that the new police force will be the front line against resistance attacks, but when I asked a policeman, who had just caught a car thief in al-Masbah Street, if he was doing anything to stop assaults on Americans, he replied: 'That isn't really our job. What we do is provide security for ordinary Iraqis.' When police in the town of Hawaija, west of Kirkuk, shot dead a Fedayeen they were warned by local tribesmen to stick to their policing duties if they wanted to stay alive.

The US has the military strength to retake a town like Baiji easily enough. But the friction points between occupation forces and Iraqis are so numerous and diverse that there will always be fresh crises. The US lacks allies not seen as its pawns. In Baiji, the local office of the Iraqi National Accord, one of the members of the Governing Council, had been set on fire. There is a self-defeating crudity about the occupation's methods. US troops routinely tie up those they detain, force them to lie on the ground and put bags over their heads.

Saddam Hussein should not have been a hard act to follow. Iraqis know that he ruined their country with his disastrous wars against Iran and Kuwait. But in Baiji a clerk at the local registration office for births and deaths said he noticed that over the last couple of months parents of newborn babies had started to name them 'Saddam'.

The only question now is whether or not the United States public decides that they too, like George Bush, prefer to have their perceptions of Iraq filtered through the looking glass.

I've spoken with a number of people regarding Son of Gulf War, and often they tell me things like, "well, we have to get revenge for 9/11." This argument is starting to really make me seethe, as it smacks of a level of racism that's astounding. I don't know if people realize it, but lumping all Middle Easterners (Middle Easterner can be Arab, Jewish, Kurd, Persian, Pashtun, Turk, Azeri, Armenian, and more than I can think of offhand)--anyway, to assume all Middle Easterners harbor terrorist aims towards the United States is like assuming all white males want to blow up Federal Buildings a la Timothy McViegh. It's like assuming that all folks in St. Francisville are serial killers because that is the home town of Derrick Todd Lee. It also belies at least one of the Bush Administration's spin points--the one about wanting to "liberate the Iraqi people." Liberate them for what? So we can kill them or be killed ourselves in some sort of insane reaction to "potential terror?" Unbelievable...

Old news again, but I recall emailing a friend right after the war began--I told this person that it looked like the US policy was "we'll liberate the Iraqis even if it means we have to kill every last one of them to do it." Not long after that, some web sites began to publish pictures of dead Iraqi civillians, sadly legitimizing my assertion. Those who we don't kill are often humiliated in some way shape or form, which wins over hearts and minds the same way a burning bag of shit on a porch wins over neighbors. For the life of me, I can't fathom the level of ignorance, cynicism, and evil that has gone into the Iraq debacle.

Years from now, historians will be scratching their heads, wondering why the hell we let it happen. Of course, the fact that corporations have essentially taken over the political process is one reason. In addition, the present Administration has further taken the step of thuggery in dealing with its political enemies...

Which is yet another reason to write this web log, and to give a thumbs up to web logs in general. Sure, I'm on the low end of readership, numbering in the low single digits (mainly just me), but web loggers have taken back at least some of the political process, namely, the role of the press--actually, the so called free press gave up their freedom, just like The Grand Inquisitor's flock did in The Brothers Karamazov.
Sure, it may all get lost in the ether--though I expect some folks make occasional print outs--but if this web log does make it to the future, it and others will let the historians of that era know that not all of us are completely nuts, nor are we all drug addicts.