Letters to the Editor
Ijon Tichy
Published Letters: 452 Editor's Choice: 69
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Bush's speech today
[Read the article: Supreme Court: Bush overstepped bounds on Guantánamo]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Aaaaagghhh. I should not have been eating lunch. I can't believe he just said that:
Using a press conference with the Japanese PM to attack N. Korea, Bush referred to the kidnappings of Japanese citizens by Pyongyang with the followig comment:
"It makes you wonder what type of people would kidnap others; take them away from their families."
Yeah!! It sure does!! It makes you wonder what type of freedom loving democracy would yank people from their weddings render them to black sites in foreign countries and torture them and hold them indefinitely. It makes you wonder about many of the people sitting in Guantanamo with no charges and no date for any trial let alone freedom.
Yes, George Bush, it makes me wonder alot about the people who would do this type of thing. Why you need to wonder is beyond me.
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Is Iraq a less bloody hell hole now than under Saddam?
[Read the article: Did the invasion make things worse in Iraq?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Wow! Cindy Sheehan needs to read this article as it will answer the question that has been haunting her lo these years.
Aliya is the WMD Bush sent our boys to find. She went to the shrine and used her magic and six months later, US troops arrived to answer her prayers. Maybe those Baathists were right; she was a witch.
This article does nothing to answer it's title. It sets out a series of personal atrocities committed by Saddam and then tries to weigh them against statistics measured since our invasion and occupation. What disturbs me about this article is that the author compares the personal against the statistical. He gives life and meaning to the victims of Saddam while giving vague numbers of the dead and maimed since then. It would have been better for him to compare apples to apples, stats vs. stats, and let us give a face to it, or give the face himself to the families killed by the insurgents jihadists, sectarian strife, or US soldiers gone amok.
I'll give him credit for one thing; he didn't make a total ass of himself using these personal stories to defend the indefensible. (Yes thousands of Iraqis have died since we invaded, but what about Aliya? Had not invaded she might have spent two months in jail!).
Reading this article I can't help but be reminded of those propaganda films the Nazi's released after driving out the Soviets from the rest of Poland. To justify their actions they filmed and sent to the West documented films of Poles disinterred from mass graves who were massacred by the Soviets. It didn't work then, yet, at least to Americans it seems to work here. That would make a better more informative theme for an essay, not this muddled explanation that is no explanation; let alone a justification.
Maybe it is time to accept that there exist two evils here; those committed by Saddam and those committed by our recklessness. If any good comes from this it will be despite of us. Like a tsunami that forces a country to install early warning systems and safety measures, what happens in the next few years, after Saddam and this fiasco, may eventually be a good thing.
That, however, is no reason to praise the tsunami.
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It's the Hague on line one
[Read the article: "Mission accomplished" in reverse]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]They are wondering when they will be welcoming Bush, Cheney and Rumsfield in the dock on war crimes.
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For those who've been paying attention
[Read the article: An army of one]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The course Five Deferment Dick wants to stay, is the course for global war. It is not that he is itching for theApacolypse like President Bush and his fundamentalist base, but that he is really addicted to power and wealth, and sees, like any arms and resource merchant a great chance to benefit from chaos.
Look very closely at what Dick has been doing since we invaded Iraq. Aside from advising torturing prisoners and destroying the reputations of CIA workers involved in monitoring WMDs, Cheney, when he's crawled out of his bunker has been stirring up enmity with Russia and China while touting the great democratic heroes of such totalitarian bastions as Khazakstan. I think many things of Dead-eye Dick, but I don't think he speaks just to hear himself talk. When he speaks it is to accomplish a goal, and when he laid into Russia while speaking in the Baltic Republics he had an agenda. Piss off Russia.
Yes, everything is going to plan to Dick Cheney, just as, in August, 1914, when everything went according to plan for Germany, which had no intention of restraining the Hapsburgs, and England, which had no intention of restraining Russia. It is all about power and wealth and the unrestrained greed and the grand ideas of the smallest of minds, a fight for control of the world, as if it were so much sand in the playbox and those who fight and die for their delusions, so many plastic soldiers.