They died not in vain
Published April 22, 2003
The Bush Administration lies a lot. But it is a tiny bit of comfort that its political strategists are not lying about their desire to make national security the primary issue of the 2004 election. They unabashedly leak to the New York Times their desire to exploit 9-11 for political gain:
- "The president is planning a sprint of a campaign that would start, at least officially, with his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, a speech now set for Sept. 2.
The convention, to be held in New York City, will be the latest since the Republican Party was founded in 1856, and Mr. Bush's advisers said they chose the date so the event would flow into the commemorations of the third anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.
The back-to-back events would complete the framework for a general election campaign that is being built around national security and Mr. Bush's role in combatting terrorism, Republicans said. Not incidentally, they said they hoped it would deprive the Democratic nominee of critical news coverage during the opening weeks of the general election campaign.
The strategy, described by Republicans close to the White House, is intended to highlight what Mr. Bush's advisers want to be the main issue of his campaign, national security, while intensifying his already formidable fund-raising advantage in the general election campaign.
So they want national security to be the #1 issue. And they control the apparatus that tells us when to be afraid. And we have yet to discover a moral or ethical limit to what the Bush Administration will do to achieve a political advantage.
Oh--and openly using the run-up to the Iraq war as a political tool during the 2002 mid-term elections was a wildly successful strategy for them.
If you think hoodwinking the American public into directly connecting Saddam and al Qaeda was a neat trick, I have a feeling you ain't seen nothing yet.
- They died not in vain
- Published: April 22, 2003
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- Section: Politics
- Writer: Brian Flemming
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"leaked" the date for their convention?? what is this, the latest developments in a soap opera? what the hell are you talkling about? of course national security will be the number one issue, whether bush likes it or not!!!!
speaking of "no limits," are their none to where you'll stoop to spit on bush's name??
Don't listen to these fuckheads, Brian; they're so busy jerking off to Fox documentaries on Shock and Awe that they can't see-literally, can't let themselves even acknowledge--the horrific civilian casualties that have resulted from Operation Turkey Shoot, all committed in the name of eliminating former CIA employee Saddam Hussein. (http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=Hacks%20Target.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=10&rnd=70.56245893661744); or hackworth.com
The good news is that we have disarmed Iraq. Check out the results of our great work. This terrorist has definitely been disarmed:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/laundering.html
There is a high risk that this tactic--exploiting human tragedy for political gain--will backfire. I'm willing to bet that there are a lot of independent voters who would take issue with this.
Check out this letter to the editor in the New York Times today. Is this person just the tip of the iceberg?
It is disturbing that President Bush's political advisers intend that he begin his fund-raising and re-election campaign to coincide with the third anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. To harvest the human suffering of this event for his political gain, to exploit a national tragedy for re-election money, is repugnant.
MATTHEW CLARK
Algodones, N.M., April 22, 2003
"fuckhead," eh? well, i guess when arguments are out, namecalling is pretty much the final resort. when i'm not "jacking off" to shock and awe footage, i'm usually wondering what happened to the 500,000 civilian casualties that the left were saying was inevitable. what's the number of civilian casualties?? i don't have it in front of me, but it's a hell of a lot less than 500,000. and do you really think the iraqis are worse off now than they were under saddam??
is it true? is ignorance REALLY blissful??
ok, went and got the numbers of iraqi civilian casualties from a LIBERAL site (iraqideathcount.com or something like that) and it said from 1930 to 2377... 500,000 huh??!!! wow, according to a liberal site, it's not even FIVE thousand!! boy yall were really on the ball with this one. oh, and nice link, show a iraqi kid with no arm. of course there are SOME civilian casualties, it's a sad fact, but sometimes war IS neccessary for peace. and like i said before, do you really think that kid or any other would have had a beautiful life under saddam had it not been for the evil americans?? yall are grasping at straws now.
Well, thanks for keeping score; let us know when the amount of civilian casualties exceeds your moral threshold.
By the way, the iraqbodycount list is based only on media reports; so far, the horrific carnage in Baghdad, for example, where children were (are) dying by the hour in hospitals, has not been tallied.
Who said 500,000 civilian casualties? I didn't.
"War to achieve peace"? Why not just say "terrorism to achieve peace"? Sounds like the sort of thing Ariel Sharon would say. Well, of course he would; we gave him all his weapons!
See "y'all" later.
Um, Mike, glad you're back and all, but "horiffic civilian casualties"?? None of our resident leftists even make this claim. You truly are off in Chomsky fantasy land. This was the cleanest military campaign in human history unless you include The Mouse That Roared. We always mourn the innocent dead (well under 1000), but we also rejoice for the freed millions. Perhaps we have found the missing Iraqi Information Minister, who states most forcefully that which is most absurd.
That's funny, because if you go back and read accounts of the British siege of Basra, you'll find British military officials issuing withering denunciations of American callousness towards civilians. It was one of the greatest points of tension between the U.S. and Britain.
So unless you believe the British defense establishment is off in "Chomsky fantasy land," you'll have to do a better job of addressing these criticisms.
I don't have any idea how many civilian casualties there were, but 1000 is an absurdly low estimate, unless you read only Pentagon press releases.
As for your mourning over the innocent dead, that's also funny, because I haven't seen a lot of that on this site. Where are the links to the fundraisers for Ali, the Red Cross appeals for aid, the outrage over cluster bombs and uranium depleted munitions?
Regarding the liberated millions, perhaps a glance at Kosovo or Afghanistan will offer insight into what's in store for Iraqis. Kosovo is blasted wasteland where non-Albanians have been ethnically cleansed, people are eating out of garbage cans, taxes are soaring, and organized crime and terrorism are rampant.
Afghanistan, according to a Human Rights Watch report issued recently, has essentially reverted to its warlord/Taliban state, except in Kabul, where the leaders only hold power because of heavy American guard.
So save your "liberated millions" line. It doesn't wash.
Eric,
You wrote:
- ..."horiffic civilian casualties"?? None of our resident leftists even make this claim.
I do. Civilian casualties are horrific. Claim made.
I will grant you that the casualties could be MORE horrific. (And it is not at all clear that they will not be.)
Your claim of "well under 1000" civilian casualties is absurd. The number is almost certainly higher than 1000. An awful lot of reports from many independent sources (including journalists) will have to be somehow wrong for "well under 1000" to be considered a likely figure for the civilian deaths. (Not to mention "casualties," which would include people like Ali who had their arms blown off--maimings such as this are not included in the 1930 min/2377 max currently estimated at Iraq Body Count.) And we know to a virtual certainty that there will be more killings and maimings--those cluster bombs will be killing for years, to name just one horrific legacy of the bombing.
You also wrote:
- You truly are off in Chomsky fantasy land.
The irony here is painful. You cite a figure, "well under 1000," without a source, after disparaging Chomsky, who is famously meticulous in citing multiple reputable sources when he discusses war casualties (as well as other statistics).
Here's your favorite punching bag a while back on the credibility of Arab sources, and this is from a man who is CRITICAL of Israel. From an L.A. Times story:
- At Royce Hall, after he had spoken on U.S. policies in Iran and Israel, policies he attributed to a desire to control the oil in the region and thus protect U. S. economic interests, an Arab admirer of his work stepped to the mike and took him to task for not using Arab sources.
It was a shortcoming to which Chomsky immediately agreed. He does not read Arabic well, he said. And tactically, "it's more credible if I quote from Hebrew sources.
"Arab sources are not reliable," he added. "They exaggerate. They're careless...."
One thing Chomsky is careful of is to be able to back up every fact he cites with a credible source. Eric, I challenge you to provide a link to a single document in which Chomsky fails to back up casualty figures he cites with reputable sources. If you cannot do this, I suggest that you retract your ridicule of him.
Just out of curiosity, on what do you base your antipathy toward Chomsky? I've never heard you take issue with a single fact he has cited or argument he has made. You just act as if we all know the man is crazy.
Why? Because somebody told you so? Because the right-wing echo chamber says so? Because everybody "just knows"?
Brian, "Civilian casualties are horrific" is a very different statement from "horrific civilian casualties" in the context of Mike's spew: yes, civilian casualties ARE horrific, but Mike's statement used "horrific" as a modifier implying the DEGREE of civilian casualties was horrific, which it most certainly was not.
RE Chomsky, I guess you haven't been around here as long as some - there have been many specific considerations of the reliability of Chomsky's "facts."
See http://www.blogcritics.org/archives/2002/10/08/160926.php#001167
http://www.blogcritics.org/archives/2002/09/21/173952.php#000731
for a couple.
All you have to do is listen to this mindless shit from right after 9/11 to hear for yourself: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/tt/2001/oct24/chomsky.html
I am a cheerful fool, then: the war has nothing to do with domestic control or diversion (not to say it won't be used after the fact for political gain, nothing strange about that), nothing to do with oil (other than oil intensifies world concern for the region in general - how could it be otherwise?) nothing whatsoever to do with Israel, Information Minister. Anyone who believes the above paranoid agitprop is the biggest fool of all.
Whenever you'd like to respond to the specific factual points I have raised in my posts, O BlogMaster, I'm happy to listen.
By the way, no hard feelings. I'm having a blast. Really.
Eric,
You wrote:
- Brian, "Civilian casualties are horrific" is a very different statement from "horrific civilian casualties" in the context of Mike's spew
I can't believe you're still arguing this one, Eric. First, Mike's spew in no way indicated he was talking about quantity instead of quality. And the word "horrific" doesn't imply quantity. If he had said "horrific number" of casualties, you'd have a point. But he didn't say that. He accused pro-warriors in general of not being able to "acknowledge" the "horrific civilian casualties" resulting from the war.
Ironically, you confirmed that this accusation has merit by suggesting the word "horrific" was from a "fantasy land" and by downplaying the number of deaths by citing a still-unsourced figure of "well under 1000" (I assume you made this up?).
Why not just acknowledge that there were horrific casualties, because war is war, but you feel that on balance the Iraqis are better off?
I mean, I thought that this WAS your position and suspect it still is. So your desire to downplay the horror and number of the casualties confuses me.
Re: Chomsky. The links you provided contained no incorrect citations of casualty figures by Chomsky that I could see. At most, it seems Chomsky is guilty of speaking bluntly at a time when the U.S. population was extremely emotional about 9-11. He cited facts that were not what Americans (including me) wanted to hear at the time, but that doesn't mean the facts he cited are not facts.
I think you are guilty of a typical maneuver people use to discredit Chomsky. They isolate a single part of a speech (a cold but accurate reading of past U.S. foreign adventures that are almost never acknowledged in the mainstream U.S. media) and use that as an example of "hating America."
Thanks, dude!
i guess i'm a few years late to add to this, but hopefully someone will read it one day... forgive me for not backing up my sources for the following. i also guess it has become obvious to even slackmer and olsen that bush and the rest had no interest in 'liberating iraq', unless of course they meant liberating [procuring for ourselves, ie not the benefit of US citizens but high-rolling companies] iraq ['s strategic resources such as oil, and constrction contracts paid for by iraqi citezen through govenment funds and US citizens through aid]. which of course is what they did.
as for attacks on chomsky: he also provides some argument that does not need meticulous referencing. here is one: if the aim of bush was to topple saddam and free the iraqi people, then presumabley it is a coincidence that iraq has such a wealth of oil and a strategic geographic location to settle an american base. why is bush not waging huge war on sudan? north korea? turkmenistan? these places have extremely opressive regimes under which their people suffer, but of course they have piss-all resources and wealth to gain from an invasion. it is simply not good business sense.
Add your comment, speak your mind
(Or ping: http://blogcritics.org/mt/tb/4781)
Nevermind that national security should be the #1 issue of the next campaign. Nevermind that it WILL BE the #1 issue for most Americans, regardless of what Bush's campaign desires.
Blame it all on Bush. This will make you feel good and promote your own leftist agenda.