First, can we stop the Orwellian language and start using the proper names for things? Those are not “contractors” in Iraq. They are not there to fix a roof or to pour concrete in a driveway. They are MERCENARIES and SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE. They are there for the money, and the money is very good if you live long enough to spend it.
Halliburton is not a "company" doing business in Iraq. It is a WAR PROFITEER, bilking millions from the pockets of average Americans. In past wars they would have been arrested -- or worse.
This is the same Orwellian redefinitions we saw Kos practice earlier. FYI: You can't be a mercenary for your own country, dimwit!
There must be something in the word "Halliburton" that makes radical leftists like Michael Moore totally lose their minds. Halliburton drives gasoline to Iraqi civilians. What a horrible crime!
But much worse is to come:
The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "The Enemy." They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow -- and they will win. Get it, Mr. Bush? You closed down a friggin' weekly newspaper, you great giver of freedom and democracy! Then all hell broke loose. The paper only had 10,000 readers! Why are you smirking?
It's pretty much beyond comment, isn't it? Moore, what are you smoking? And what were you smoking during the history lessons in school?
Michael Moore is very much in line with Jihadists of all stripes. You think it's a joke that he hates freedom? Moore hates his countrymen and their freedoms to disagree with him. He wants the Iraqis bound under ruthless dictators and Mullahs, because they don't concern him. He only cares about his hatred for his fellow Americans, who he really wants to see dead:
There is a lot of talk amongst Bush's opponents that we should turn this war over to the United Nations. Why should the other countries of this world, countries who tried to talk us out of this folly, now have to clean up our mess? I oppose the U.N. or anyone else risking the lives of their citizens to extract us from our debacle. I'm sorry, but the majority of Americans supported this war once it began and, sadly, that majority must now sacrifice their children until enough blood has been let that maybe -- just maybe -- God and the Iraqi people will forgive us in the end.
Talk like that, Mr Moore, would surely have you strung from the treetops during the American revolution you misrepresented here earlier. In fact, any other countries than the liberal democracies of the west that you detest so much would have killed you for such treachery.
And, yeah, the brave Mr Moore has some cameramen travelling secretly around Iraq to get footage for his movie, "Fahrenheit 911". Why bother with real footage, Michael? We already know you just edit, misquote and make up the footage you need anyway.
PS 2:Tim Blair found this outragous statement, too, and points out that Moore doesn't know the difference between Libya and Iraq. Wonder where he really sent those two cameramen?
A new search engine from Amazon: A9, is online in beta. Check it out! It looks very promising, very sophisticated user interface and, yes, it not only searches the web, it searches inside books too.
Obviously not a Google-killer - it uses the Google engine so why should they worry? - but surely some healthy competition.
PS: A9 has a Toolbar, too. No, I haven't tried it yet.
George Bush has today dramatically changed US policy in the Middle East conflict. Ariel Sharon is delighted, the Palestinians and the Arab world are outraged, Kofi Annan is deeply concerned, as he is paid to be, and they are probably pretty shell-shocked in the US State Department.
If the objective in giving Sharon everything he came to Washington DC to get was to bolster Sharon's disengagement plan against a defeat in a Likud referendum, it is likely to have succeeded.
Depending on your opinion, the US position is now updated to be within the realsms of the possible, the realisitc, or it is a betrayal of the Palestinian side and an end to the Bush administration's claim to be a honest peace broker in the region.
I'd say more of the former, as you can expect, and maybe also a little FY, considering the Palestinians haven't been burning American flags all this time to warm American hearts, have they?
Shock number one, Bush has totally rejected the idea that the Palestinian refugees can ever return to the State of Israel.
It seems clear that an agreed, just, fair and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any final status agreement will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state and the settling of Palestinian refugees there rather than Israel.
Earlier peace plams have always postponed this question to later rounds of negotiations, as it would be a bloody freezing day in hell before Israel accepted any significant number of Palestinian Arabs who had some claim to having lived there prior to 1948 or 1967, but had chosen to, or been pressured to, flee during the wars. The demand was unrealistic, and everybody must have known it was merely a show-stopper, but Bush saying so openly will still abslutely outrage the Arab world. Teeth are gnashing in Ramallah. But Bush is not a man for symbolics; he believes in facts on the ground. Which brings us on to the next point, or shock number two.
The "green line" is not a border between Israel and the Palestinian areas. It is an armstice line. It has been understood, and accepted from both sides, that a negotiated settlement would depart from this line. However, the US position on the "illegal" settlements in the West Bank has been clear: They are "obstacles to peace." They are "unhelpful" to the peace process. Bush has dramatically updated US policy:
But the realities on the ground and in the region have changed greatly over the last several decades. And any final settlement must take into account those realities and be agreeable to the parties. [...]
In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities.
Bush tried to soften the blow, but a reference to realities on the ground has brought an angry response from the Palestinian side: Bush is rewarding the illegal settlers. Maybe, I may add, and he is also "rewarding" the cheering in the Palestinian streets following 9/11-01. He is rewarding years of terrorism, of deceptions from Arafat's government, of a fundamental unwillingness to do any substantual moves towards peace from the Palestinian leaders.
Bush is also stating the obvious. No Prime Minister of Israel can never, even in more peaceful times, dismantle settlements of a hundred thousand Jews and move them into crowded Israel proper. These settlements are living towns and cities, it is property bought and legally owned by Jewish families.
I also must ask: has it never given room for pause to leftist supporters of the Palestinians that they actually support a demand that Gaza and the West Bank become judenfrei, ethnically cleansed for Jews? I fear it hasn't.
PS: I suspect Tony Blair managed to shock his own Foreign Department badly today by issuing a statement with pretty strong support for Sharon's disengagement plan today. Blair did not explicitly support Bush on the two controversial topics above, by all means, but what he did was still a pretty strong endorsement of the entire Sharon plan. It is a running joke that if the Prime Minister of the UK actually has a foreign policy, then Britain has two competing ones, because the Foreign Department runs its own show pretty much the way it always did. And for the last decades, the British foreign service has been quite pro-Arab. Blair will have a few internal turf wars on his hands if he plans to change it substantually towards being Israel-friendly.
Oliver Stone's film Looking for Fidel is reportedly soft on Fidel Castro (who would have thought?). On the other hand, Slate's Ann Louise Bardach is not soft on Oliver Stone in this interview.
The Irish connection to the Oil-for-Palaces scandal
BlogIrish has found that Irish politicians were among the countless pro-Saddam lobbyists who were involved in the corrupt mess that was the UN oil-for-food programme.
The Iraqi anti-sanctions campaigner's website features quotes from former UN Assistant Secretary General in charge of the Oil for Food program Denis Halliday., After quitting his job in 1998, this proud Irishman has been able to travel the world to campaign against sanctions and the US military use of Shannon airport.
As part of the anti-sanctions PR campaign, several Irish politicians, including former Irish Prime Minister Albert Reynolds, visited Iraq in 1998.
After Mr Reynolds' visit, he made pleas for ending sanctions. Then he became chairman of Bula Resources, an Irish oil exploration firm.
The PR firm's fees for the anti-sanctions campaign were paid by Bula Resources.
The Iraqi anti-sanctions campaigner was listed by the Iraqi newspaper Al-Mada as receiving 11,000,000 barrels in oil "allocations" (worth up to $3,300,000 according to the Financial Times estimates).
Read all of it. It stinks to high heaven. And I bet this will keep growing, even as mainstream media doesn't give it half the attention it deserves (you know, Halliburton is not involved).
Roger L. Simon is feeling left out as nobody tried to bribe him. I can sympathise. I guess it was Saddam's mistake not to bribe the blogosphere. Heh.
