Antiwar.com Blog

Only follow this link if you’re one of the reality-based community. Otherwise, you’d best keep your illusions intact by sticking to the pure, unfiltered Chrenkoff version:

Good electricity news from Iraq

Via Jim Henley

Under the absurdly self-evident headline, “Many Iraqis See Sectarian Roots in New Killings” (duh) the NY Times, after relating how Hassan al-Nuaimi, an Iraqi Sunni cleric, was found dumped in an empty lot with a hole drilled in his head and both eyes gouged out, quotes Ghassan al-Atiyya, a secular Shiite and the director of the Iraqi Foundation for Development and Democracy, a Baghdad research institute: “The Americans, instead of strengthening liberal and secular, they are now hostage of Sciri,” he said, referring to a religious Shiite political group, “and Kurds.”

So, amid the “welter of allegations about Shiite death squads going after Sunni Arabs” what better way to foment sectarian hate and violence than to have 40,000 Kurdish peshmergas and SCIRI’s Iranian trained Badr Brigade Shiite militia backed by 10,000 Americans blockade Baghdad and carry out raids?

This assault suggests the stiletto bootprint of Rice and the hamfisted thuggishness of Rumsfeld, both of whom were recently imposed on the Iraqi “government” where they apparently pressured al-Jafaari to act more American. If the cordon and massive raids really happen, the insurgent reaction is predictable – expect Mosul to erupt into violence (and possibly Kirkuk) just as it did when the US concentrated forces to crush Fallujah. It would also be an optimum time for the newly re-emerged Muqtada al-Sadr to consolidate his hold on Basra and other Sadrist areas of southern Iraq.

Drudge is running a report about an exchange between the only White House correspondent who matters – Helen Thomas – and White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. It goes like this;

Q The other day — in fact, this week, you said that we, the United States, is in Afghanistan and Iraq by invitation. Would you like to correct that incredible distortion of American history —

MR. McCLELLAN: No, we are — that’s where we currently —

Q — in view of your credibility is already mired? How can you say that?

MR. McCLELLAN: Helen, I think everyone in this room knows that you’re taking that comment out of context. There are two democratically-elected governments in Iraq and —

Q Were we invited into Iraq?

MR. McCLELLAN: There are two democratically-elected governments now in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we are there at their invitation. They are sovereign governments, and we are there today —

Q You mean if they had asked us out, that we would have left?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, Helen, I’m talking about today. We are there at their invitation. They are sovereign governments — Q I’m talking about today, too.

MR. McCLELLAN: — and we are doing all we can to train and equip their security forces so that they can provide for their own security as they move forward on a free and democratic future. Q Did we invade those countries?

MR. McCLELLAN: Go ahead, Steve. (Emphasis gleefully added by me)

Yes, Steve, go ahead. Please bail me out of this disaster. I shouldn’t have to answer unpleasant questions like this.
Anyone who has to resort to using a phrase like “I think everyone in this room knows” is full of crap. Imagine if the entire press corps weren’t a passel of gutless power worshippers — imagine they all had the sack to tell the Emperor that he was buck naked — now that would be fun, unless your name is Scott McClellan.
PS. Somebody tell Drudge that his title tags on that page contain erroneous information, in that it is no longer 2004…

Due to some personal obligations, there won’t be a Balkan Express this week. Look for a new article next Thursday.

Justin Raimondo appeared again on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! Wednesday morning. He discussed the Larry Franklin/AIPAC affair.

The show segment is now available archived on the Democracy Now! Website.

The show will also be on today:
Direct-TV, channel 375, from 11am-12noon and 6-7pm (Eastern time) and
Dish Network, channel 9415, 8-9AM, 12-1PM, 7-8PM and 12-1AM (Eastern time)

“What no one seemed to notice. . . was the ever widening gap. . .between the government and the people. . . And it became always wider. . . the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway . . . (it) gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about . . .and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated . . . by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. . .

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’. . . must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. . . .Each act. . . is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow.

You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone. . . you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ . . .But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. . . .You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father. . . could never have imagined.” :

From Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)

Thanks to Tom Feeley