Letters to the Editor
MereMortal
Published Letters: 151 Editor's Choice: 19
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If you look carefully, the seeds were always there
[Read the article: Theater of blood]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In the 80s marooned in Manchester England trying to become a better draughtsman, I heard an astonishing thing.
Apparently the water inside the bedrock of England was now considered contaminated. It had been thought of as pure since time immemorial. The source of the contamination? Super strong industrial detergents that had been liberally used in WWII to clean and maintain Spitfires between sorties. So it took 40 years, but the action that started the problem had already been undertaken and for decades no-one thought there was a problem.
We know that The Dulles brothers and Kermit Roosevelt terrified of an independent and socialist Iran deposed Mossadegh using seriously dirty tricks in 1953. They then installed the Shah. The shah was loved by some key elites but hated by the masses. He had a vicious secret police called Savak. Just like with the supposedly clean water underneath the UK, the US now considered the Iranian problem solved.
Well, the ramifications of the overthrow of the Shah were thunderous and widespread indeed.
Khomeini came to power, he inspired a generalised fanatic fundamentalist resurgence among the Shiites, which resulted in the al-Qaeda type backlash among the Sunnis. We now have Hezbollah and Hammas.
Why talk about Iran in an article about Iraq. Duhhh because Saddam Hussein was a largely a secret policeman thug turned highly efficient deputy president for about 10 years between 1968 and 1979. If you were his enemy, he had no mercy, but largely Iraq was prosperous and there was much progress and much forward thinking: free schools, medicine etc... why, he even won a literacy award from the UN.
come 1979 and Saddam is terrified of the ructions next door in Iran, largely because of the Iraqi Shiite majority in his population. He decides to go on an ill-fated adventure to annihilate the Iranian regime.
In this he is supported by the US and Europe. We all know the details. This goes on for 8 years and ruins the Iraqi economy. He invades Kuwait to prevent them from dumping oil and lowering the price (or stealing oil sideways from Iraqi oilfields) and also because at the very moment of his nadir, they insist on calling in his debts. The Kuwaitis have a lot to answer for. Many people believe that Saddam was baited by the US to invade Kuwait because he was now dispensable, the cold war having ended and all that [April Glaspie conversation with Saddam]. Then we have gulf war one, where an Arab country is savagely beaten up [Powell doctrine]. Sanctions are then applied for 14 years. Allbright thinks that 500,000 dead children "yes, is worth it" as a price to pay for containing Saddam.
Anyone who doesn't think that this is about Israel and the US being terrified of any Arab nation doing what the US does (i.e. get big for its boots) had better have a really convincing explanation. What scares the US more than anything is any Arab leader expressing a kind of wild and popular nationalism, of controlling their own destiny [i.e look at the US hysterical reaction to Iran now].
If the Dulles brothers hadn't been so keen on eliminating Mossadegh, maybe Saddam wouldn't have ruined his economy fighting Khomeini. Bush going into Iraq again in 2003 was part of a complex neo-con agenda for projecting power, controlling oil, intimidating the enemies of Israel and showing the world that the US can't be attacked with impunity. Much as I despise Bush, I really don't think he had much to do with this decision. I doubt he could have pointed to Iraq on a map. Remember that the PNAC people forced Clinton to sign the 'Iraqi freedom act' into law in '98 when he was at his lowest ebb. I think Bush's abler and more sinister masters played to his simplistic psychology of revenge and 'evildoer punishment' and got him on board. Bush can't be deemed a spectator but he has been swept along in a tide not of his own making. He is not the visionary in this new US national nightmare, for that you have to look to the neo-cons and their oligarchical backers. This is no apologia for Bush, I meant it more as a way of saying that fingering him as the guilty one, whilst highly satisfying, still leaves with the problem of the unbelievably rotten democracy that these despicable people have contrived to bequeath you, Bush or no Bush.
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Bush is highly problematic but he is only a part of the problem
[Read the article: Theater of blood]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]DC your perceptive remark that Bush is:
someone who feels entitled to whatever he wants (another man's wife/undermining the American constitution/invading Iraq - same difference), regardless of the consequences. He's surrounded by courtiers who will laugh when he laughs and do his bidding (Rove, Gonzales, Scalia, Snow, Blair)
is what made Colbert’s white house dinner speech, for me, the single most courageous act of defiance of the last 6 years by any US media personality.
*Because, he told him to his face*
Of course he hasn’t and won’t get any credit for it in the current climate.
Yes Deniz, you made my point far more eloquently than I did, namely that it’s not merely a tragic play with flawed personalities, it’s a monstrous machine, headed by a clown, and whilst we laugh at his ineptitude and dysfunctionality, the machine whirs remorselessly in the background aware that it has dispatched the clown to the foreground to take the flack for it, meanwhile it plans new atrocities for Iran.
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I can hardly believe...
[Read the article: My friend went to bed and her husband tried to seduce me]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]that advice...
I normally really enjoy Cary's replies, but this one is outrageous.
He not only tells her in a patronizing way to learn to declare her boundaries in a really forceful way (the easy part), but he ducks out entirely of his responsibility to the LW on the far trickier question of how she is to approach her friend from now on.
I'm really shocked at his near total derelication and insensitivity by giving that advice.