posted April 13, 2003 at 7:15 a.m. MDTThe Iraqi professor of engineering, standing in the Basra street, expresses his situation to the radio-journalist: "I don't even have clothes now; I don't have furniture, my house is a disaster, I don't even have a home; there is no water, there is no food. I have nothing. We have nothing. Everything we had is gone, destroyed!"
To be charged with Criminal Negligence Causing Death: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perles ... those who pressed their view that only prideful unilaterally assertive individualism is valid.I know that you support authoritarians because they provide pretexts for your lazy greed. But, like a Saddamite after the statue fell, the jig is up! You, as a literate citizen of a democratic nation, enjoy the gains and share the responsibility because (and this is the public secret behind it all) you share the action and the consequences. For you to shirk your responsibility as a citizen and as a human being is for you to throw the door open to the newest form of fascism. Do you value anything above your slothful self-indulgence? Do you acknowledge any real basis to your self-esteem, ignoring your entirely fictitious material success?
Everything is in play: the incompetent governor turns to the crowd and asks who shall be set free, and who cruficied? Last time, you chose Barabas. Will you free Barabas yet again? (Bear this in mind: while types like me have been, month after year after decade, telling you about Pinochet, and Noriega, and Hussein, you were paying highly educated sophists to feed you deniability; the blood is already on your hands.)
GO AS YOU PLEASE: Now, for the real war - "The war in Iraq is all over, bar the shouting. Brutal, bizarre and poignant images remain: young children kneeling in terror, hands raised; a looter carting off a grand piano; Iraqis stomping on Saddam's toppled statue; the Iraqi minister of information, fantasising in deep denial, as if fed on a daily diet of the Executive Intelligence Review. The Saddamites around the world will be gnashing their teeth: their hero is gone. Most of us have mixed feelings, as probably do the Iraqi people: shell-shock from the horrors of war; joyous relief to be rid of a bloody tyrant; deep disquiet about the future. But the real war is now being joined."
