Tuesday, April 08, 2003

The Bloody Butcher of the Potomac What makes me unable to sleep at night is the terrible hypocrisy of the Americans right now.  I have a sense that the country and life I used to lead have been taken over by something alien, so that suddenly meanings are turned upside down, war is peace, terror is freedom, and security is fear.   These some quotes from ordinary papers I read today. First, the New York Times gives this account of a victim of police interrogation in Iraq, who was literally freed when the Americans stormed the jail. "Of course I'm grateful that the Americans saved me," Mr. Neama said. "But I'm only one of 28 million people in this country. We would not like it if the Americans try to stay here for long." At that point, an elderly man, Sultan Mahdi, stepped forward to declaim that such ambivalence was an evasion. "For 75 years I have been alive, and I'll say this," he said. "If the Iraqi people loved Saddam Hussein, the American military wouldn't be able to last one day in Iraq. Not one day. We would attack them. "If Bush just wants to get rid of Saddam, that's fine, but if he is going to try go alter our basic institutions, like our religion and traditions and culture, then he will have no support." Then, the Wall St. Journal, this time a column, Political Capital,  on doings in Washington:[subscription] "During lunch last week at the Palm, tax-cut enthusiast Grover Norquist stopped by the table of the Recording Industry Association of America's Hilary Rosen. "I need your help," he said cheerfully. "I'm working on intellectual-property laws for a free Iraq." At the Treasury Department, one undersecretary, John Taylor, is drafting tax laws for postwar Iraq while the other, Peter Fisher, is working on new securities laws. Meanwhile, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick sees a free Iraq as key to a potential Middle Eastern free-trade zone. The catalyst for all this activity was a speech in February by President Bush to the American Enterprise Institute. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom. .” So under the rubric of freedom, we have a new power spreading terror across the world. I lived in Africa (Dar es Salaam) for two years when I was in my early twenties, and that experience forever changed the way I viewed America.  It made me realize that other people matter, that the desires and lives of the boys I worked with in Dar es Salaam were just as vibrant, important, sacred as the lives of boys in Boston or San Francisco.  When bombs were raining down on Hanoi, I could only imagine them raining down on my beloved Dar es Salaam. When the world trade center was attacked, over 3,000 people were killed who were innocent non-combatants in a war they never sought.  Since then, the Butcher of the Potomac who has a callous yet gleeful approach to the killing of human beings has led a vicious military response that has killed between 3,000 and 3,500 innocent victims in Afghanistan, and another 960 to 1138 innocent victims in Iraq. [references here and here] Furthermore, the U.S. has killed more than 5,000 Iraqi soldiers who never attacked or represented a threat to the U.S.  So the Butcher of the Potomac has killed nearly 10,000 people, of whom not more than 20 may have had anything to do with the world trade center bombing. When the news came last night that the Butcher had struck again, trying to murder Saddam Hussein at a restaurant, all I could think of were the cooks, waiters, and kitchen help—all precious lives, snuffed out as so much dirt. Other countries would prosecute war crimes by capturing people like Slobodan Milosevic and putting him on trial in the Hague. They would not kill the kitchen help.  But now it is clear the Butcher of the Potomac is so against the international courts because he could wants to judge, but not be judged. The Butcher claims that Saddam is the evil one.  But results speak for themselves.  It does not matter how many times you trumpet your motives—the end result of firing on journalists, bombing civilian targets, of killing innocents, is all the same.  Motives don’t matter.  That is the argument that says the end justifies the means.  That is the road to fascism, terror and holocaust.  In this respect, Osama bin Laden and George Bush drink from the same fountain of death. Results do matter.  The Butcher has had his blood revenge.  But the world is a darker and more sordid place.  More Americans will die in places like Pakistan, the Philippines, and Malaysia, and the Butcher will rail against the terrorism he created. My parents grew up with Nazi Germany.  Some of my relatives were killed there.  Fascism turned Germany into an alien country, where life had no meaning, except for the master race.  Our America is turning into a monster, where life is precious only if it is American, especially non-Muslim American.  The rest of the world simply has to live with collateral damage, or with the terrorism that comes with the American face. The Wall St. Journal again, with a Q&A on chemical weapons: "Q: Are gases such as sarin weapons of mass destruction? A: The U.S. government considers most nuclear, chemical and biological weapons to be weapons of mass destruction. Though their ability to cause casualties differ, all are deemed indiscriminate and inhumane." Indiscriminate and inhumane.  Isn’t that the description of billions of dollars of advanced weaponry raining fire and terror down on peasants.   The thing that disturbs me more than anything else about George Bush is that he could preside over a system of execution in Texas that sent hundreds of people, including innocent people, to their deaths, and he would mock them as they died.  Then he would say that the system could never make a mistake.  Now he has become the Butcher on the Potomac, the executioner on a world scale. 9:42:36 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2003 Toby Sackton. Last update: 5/1/2003; 11:43:29 PM.