Free Iraq

Ambiguous? I think not. When one considers what has happened in Fallujah alone, conclusions about culpability can be drawn.

Mainstream American media have shown less than zilch of Iraqi suffering, and zilch to the minus ten as it relates to the seige of Fallujah. Hence, failing to actively seek out alternative sources of information, our ignorance and callous indifference persist.

Many of the Iraq war photos available on the internet send me into a state of acute denial; scarcely can I fathom what it must be like for the people on the receiving end of our "liberation". For anyone unfamiliar with the work, for instance, of Dahr Jamail (an unembedded reporter), his site is highly recommended. His photos can be found at:

http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/
 

Dr. Imad,
I feel a lot of what you are saying. And I am someone who I think underdstands this stuff more than most. I even understand what that blood smeared on that little child's face means. (I study the Palestinians) And you know I ain't down with any aspect of this war, and if it was up to me I would bring everybody home now.

With that said, I have to say the shooting is legitimate - because it's WAR. And I am not saying that I think it was right, but a lot of things ain't right about war. If them guys really had just finished a firefight (and we all know how fiecre some of those probably were) then they must have been in some (WAR) state of mind around that time. And you may not agree with any of that, but you MUST agree that if those were dead Americans and armed insurgents - then that last American was a dead mutha... I don't agree with what happened and I don't think it was right but I do not think it was a crime in the context of war. Fair is fair. I don't even think it was pre-meditated. If you argue if it's a crime that America is there at all then that's another story all together (and really not much of an argument at all).

Another thing you might not realize is that a lot of American soldiers don't even want to be there. I have two first cousins over there right now. Neither of them wanted to go but had to because they were in the "US" National Gurad. My girlfriend's brother just got out of Iraq YESTERDAY after over a year. Everyone of them dislikes Bush. I know that may mean nothing to the ones getting invaded, or bombed, or whatever. It's funny, I just heard today that one of them wants to take in an young boy and bring him back to the states. That is unbelievable to me, maybe to you to. But now I'm rambling...I think because I feel as if I have to explain the reason for my stance.
 

I can understand a lot of things in war... Yet this is just another proof of another bunch of marauding barbarians. Lets see, The Amerikans have now far exceeded the Nazi's in their deeds and acts. We have pictures of kids carrying white flags dead. So please spare the bullshit about the heat of battle. We know about killing reporters, doctors and others.. heat of battle my ass.
Also spare me the bullshit about having no choice. Bunch of unethical immoral cowards.

The first thing to do is hang the politicians, after that hang the liberals and lawyers. For everything else there is time to handle the crisis.
 

Imad Khadduri -

Responding to Mudjack's remarks, I am well aware of the fact that you are an Iraqi. Having read your bio, I also understand why you chose to leave Iraq.
Little purpose would be served in answering Mudjack directly; any effort expended would be wasted.
To you, directly, however, I apologize for the attitudes expressed. I realize this may inflame Mudjack and others of similar bent. Nothing lost, however. Continued ignorance will be the lot of those schooled to believe in the supreme grandeur of their narrow nationalistic pride.
Iraqis (and peoples of other nations), at the receiving end of such attitudes, suffer the consequences of our unwarranted bloody foreign interventions.
I commend you for maintaining the dialogue.
 

I will condemn the American soldier for shooting the unarmed and injured iraqi fighter once I hear Imad Khadurri condemn the beheadings of innocent Westerners kidnapped in Iraq...or the suicide bombers denotaing themselves in front of police staions and Mosques. The author of this weblog is so blinded by his hatred for the West (excluding Canada, of course) that he is yet to utter an unkind word toward this brand of terrorist. You want to call the soldier a murderer, fine! But at least show some semblance of even-handedness by condemn the other sorry assholes mentioned above. One cannot claim to be so righteous and then refuse to condemn evil in all its various forms.
 

Dr Khadduri -
Your 4:09 PM entry: either choice works.

Jim -
I hate ALL the killing and maiming and torturing and terrorizing, regardless of perpetrator. I want every bit of it to end, NOW.
One point: The U.S. invaded and continues to occupy Iraq, not vice versa. This factor cannot be ignored.
One question: How would you distinguish between the grief and destruction wrought by a suicide bomber vs. that inflicted by someone launching a high-tech weapon at a vast remove from its intended and accidental victims?
 

Jim I agree with you. I have never heard the author of this website condemn the fiends in Iraq who slaughter their own people (children too) and slaughter civilians of other nationalities. The allies are doing a great job out there - staying until the job is done. The Kurds are singing their hearts out and the Shias now rightly will eventually contribute largely to the running of the country. Saddam will be executed in the fashion he deserves along with his posse. It's a pity a few of the regime such as al Douri and Sahaf either escaped or were released, but they'll be looking over their shoulders forever. As for those women scientists in Abu Ghraib? I hope they rot in there and then in hell.

Khadduri is a good example of a weak armchair spectator - if they don't like something they will sit there and moan but they won't actually get off their backsides and do anything.
 

Mudjack -
Hi, we meet again.
Speaking of "weak armchair spectators," I am myself one such. Almost everything done by this Administration I find offensive/destructive/immoral/short-sighted. A few of the policies/actions to which I object include: foreign aggressions, secret networks of gulags, the "Patriot" Act, harrassment of citizens for no apparent reason other than their dissent, ecological/environmental destruction, probable theft of the Nov. 04 election, irresponsible debt spending, sanctioning criminal corporate behaviour, continual lying and misdirection, and a tax structure that favors the VERY rich over everyone else.
(I am reasonably certain that you would have a different take on these matters.)
What effective remedies do you suggest for an armchair critic such as myself? If you answer and intend to be constructive, please exclude the "love it or leave it" response.
 

(Apologies for off-topic contribution)

A REMINDER FROM AUSTRALIA:

"Maj Gen Stretton said Australia should not have been involved in Iraq in the first place as there were no weapons of mass destruction and no links with al-Qaeda.

"The whole lot of it has turned into a bloody civil war," he said.

"All we are doing is reinforcing disaster. I just cannot understand it."

"Maj Gen Stretton said Iraq was already going the way of Vietnam."
 

I was a child during the Viet Nam war. By the age of 13, I had concluded that the war was a travesty, based on the images I saw on the evening news, as had just about all the adults I knew.

The kidnapping and murders of journalists, whether by criminals, US forces, or Iraqi nationalists, served to prevent images and human stories from being shown except on rare occasions like this. Although the mainstream US news would limit the carnage they would show in the US anyway, many Americans watch Canadian and Mexican channels. Journalists should be protected by the nationalists like gold so that the documentation would become overwhelming.

It is easy for Americans to react to one incident by dismissing it, but it is much harder to dismiss many incidents.

The Pentagon, BTW, long ago concluded that it was the media images of carnage in Vietnam that lead to the loss of public support for the war. That is why the Pentagon controls access so tightly, and has killed so many. We need the Iraqi insurgency to protect journalists as they do their work so that the volume of reporting begins to counter the 'clean' image the US media now projects.
 

Evelyn, you know as well as I that people like "jim", "mudjack", "tshearn" et. al. are so dillusional in their own thinking, that they'll argue with sticks if it makes them feel important or whatever they desire to feel. They have shown no purpose on this blog other than to troll for attention. I will not give them any run, except for what I've stated already. And with that, I'm out...
 

Dr. Imad,
What exactly is the Lion of Babylon? Could you recommend a book that would that would explain the Lion of Babylon? Or just plain Babylon? I always thought Babylon was like imperialism, or the way of the West, an extension of what became of Roman culture?
But (obviously?) i really have no idea...One of my favorite songs is a Bob Marley song (I don't know the name) that contains the line, "Babylon system is the vampire - sucking the blood of the sufferers." I figured you might be able to point me in the right direction. I was just wondering about Babylon because the quote you use at the top of your blog is pretty ambiguous - i can't tell if it's good or bad. Marley's lyric is way less so. And I am curious.
 

Al Mc.
Thank you. By and large I accept your observation.
Mainly I persist, not so much to answer the particular individuals, but because of a personal struggle to find a way of answering people within my own circle who have bought the "official line" hook line and sinker. There are a lot of otherwise good people out there who have no idea the extent of the lie they've been told. I do believe it true that "when we know better we do better." Somehow, we must find ways to open the dialogue. Too much, beyond "point scoring" depends on it. Talking only to the converted gets us nowhere.
And, an admission. I cringe when good people are slandered or threatened, even by indirection.
 

IRAN (Sorry, very off-topic)

Could THIS be what it's all about? - -

"Iran is proposing to develop something far more threatening to Bush interests than nuclear capability, WMD's, or even terrorists. According to this interesting article by William Clark, Iran has been planning to set up an international oil exchange denominated in the Euro currency. What needs to be understood is that if the world begins to primarily price crude in Euro, America will suffer as a net importer of the product, which incidentally will harm American corporate profits. The Iranian example as argued by Clark will be just like many US wars in the past. As Smedley Butler argued war is essentially the ultimate form of corporate welfare.

"The world is starting to ask the important question of why should we hedge oil with dollars instead of the more valuable euro? Iraq talked about it. Iran now is talking about it. Russia's hinting at it. Why does this development have the US government and its special interests all in a tizzy? Well to put it simply the entire warfare welfare state is at stake. If the dollar collapses, inevitibly so does the American empire and the free ride it has been enjoying on the rest of the world."

http://blog.lewrockwell.com/lewrw/archives/007485.html
 

Now THAT is good stuff, Evelyn.
 

I don't know why all the fuss over this incident. I mean compared to dropping a thousand pounder on a baby it pales in comparison. Like the man said he was still breathing. Heaven forbid. We don't know what he was thinking but He'll have to explain that one to his maker.

It's a non issue anyway hell even Abu Graib didn't stir up much controversy. Hey Inhofe was more outraged at the outrage remember. Graner lived freely on base yet Darby still has to live in protective custody.

You know what's really wierd is for a nation that got outraged over a 2 second tit on TV, forcing soldiers to look at Iraqi dick was never punished. Good old Rumsfeld and Meyers just blamed it all on Graner and the faithful accepted the explanation.

They are such good little sheep that they agreed to strip every roll of duck tape and plastic from Home Depot shelves accross the Nation. Imagine those poor fools sealing all the oxygen out of thier brains for thier Government. And if the leaders didn't know that they would suffocate then all those Patriots are in deeper doo than I thought. My favourite was the color code when the high alert got cancelled due to snow.

Hollywood got nothing on Rove. According to the latest Harris poll, there's still a substantial portion of the population that beleives Saddam had a part in 9/11 and the WMD is still hidden somewhere. The 911 Commission Report means nothing to these people. Thier rightousness is at stake. And it didn't even matter that thier Idol George said it was just weapons of mass destruction program related activities. Try screwing your head around that one. Of course spending billions on stink tanks and pledging allegiance every morning from childhood makes it all okay.

George don't need no stinking values anyhow and he made sure everybody knew pre election. He always got the biggest hoot out of the crowds when he ridiculed John Kerry's global test.

But you know how it goes. When you decide to kill babies people hate you.

Ahh no sweat eh? Americans got lots of money to pay for 3 occupations. All the oil goings to pay for it anyway right?

Hey Mudjack what came first, Abu Graib or cutting off heads?
 

Bishop
Your posting at 3:02 concerning the Lion of Babylon. This is a good posting:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ED26Ak06.html

Also, though not on Lions, but this is a very interesting historical relic about Babylon (aside from the first man-written Law Code of Hammurabi, which is now standing in the Louvre - and not strictly adhered to by Bush Jr):

"The First Underwater Tunnel"
By Wafaa' Al-Natheema

Although the Egyptians led the world in the art of tunneling by many centuries, they did not build underwater tunnels. It is believed that the Babylonians have built the first underwater tunnel.

Diodorus Siculus, the early Greek-Sicilian historian who wrote a
universal history of the world before the Christian (also known
as Common) Era (CE), mentioned this Babylonian under-river tunnel.

Due to the evidence in the way of history, present-day engineers
have accepted it as the first under-river tunnel ever constructed.

The date has been rounded between 2180-2170 BCE (Before Common Era).

At the bottom of an enormous trench dug out of the muddy bed
of the Euphrates, the Babylonians built this great tunnel. Walls of
brick rose from the bottom of the trench, with portions reached their full height and arching over to form a closed passage. The tunnel which passed under the great river was about 600 feet wide and more than 3000 feet (900 meters) long.

The purpose of the tunnel was to connect the Royal Palace with the Temple of Jupiter on the opposite
side of the river. It would provide a passage that is twelve feet wide and fifteen feet high, running under the river, which separated the two parts of this tremendous city.

This tunnel, a great achievement of that period, was big enough to
pass an underground train and considerably larger in area than some of our modern transit tunnels under rivers. It was not until London's Thames Tunnel of 1842, more than 3000 years later, that history had recorded the successful completion of another tunnel built in the soft ground of a riverbed.

About sixty years ago, the Germans sent an expedition to excavate in
this area, but the amount of sand and the limited funds available to pay for moving it prevented the project from happening.

Sources:
1."The Story of Tunnels" by Archibald Black, published by
McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.
2."A History of Tunnels" by Patrick Beaver, published by Citadel Press, Inc. 1973.
3.http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?tocId=72434
More on Diodorus Siculus:
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?tocId=9030527

List of Ancient Inventions
http://www.krysstal.com/inventions_04.html