Tuesday

100,000 Murdered Iraqis

March 29, 2005

In Bushzarro world, as reflected by the corporate media, flattening large swaths of Fallujah is considered democracy. “The commander of the Marine force that drove Iraqi insurgents from Fallujah last fall says the town will become a model for how democracy can take hold in Iraq,” writes John E. Mulligan of the Providence Journal. “[Gen. John Satler] held out the story of Fallujah as a source of great hope for Iraq’s future and—by implication—for the prospects of reducing and eventually concluding the commitment of U.S. troops here.”

If we are to believe the corporate media—the Strausscon lie machine on steroids—only “insurgents” were killed in Fallujah. “Like the Nazi media, the major US radio and TV networks only report what they call ‘military casualties’ —failing to report the civilians killed since the war started and the thousands of women and children killed and wounded since the assault of Fallujah began,” writes James Petras. “The mass media fabricates a web of lies to secure a gloss of legitimacy for totalitarian methods in order that the US armed forces continue to destroy cities with impunity. The technique perfected by Goebbels in Germany and practiced in the US is to repeat lies and euphemism until they become accepted ‘truths’, and embedded in everyday language.”

Consider the “everyday language” of J. Grant Swank, Jr., church pastor and graduate of Harvard Divinity School:

“It’s the spark for freedom that’s inspiring neighborhoods to keep their homes safe from murderers global. At the grassroots level increasingly the Iraqis themselves are taking care of the malcontents out to undo the historic January 30 Victory Vote. In other words, it just won’t happen; that is, the foes won’t win. The victors will continue to win; the enemy will be deposed, one by one, place by place, and the local Iraqis will see to it.”

In other words, thousands of Iraqis resisting the occupation of their country will be “deposed, one by one, place by place.” In fact, as Gen. John Satler noted above, the “model for how democracy can take hold in Iraq” does not accept Swank’s ill-informed delusion that patriotic Iraqis will slaughter their fellow countrymen “one by one, place by place,” but rather en masse in U.S. directed medieval sieges, complete with internationally outlawed chemical weapons, including nerve gas. This fact was revealed by Dr. Khalid ash-Shaykhli, an official at Iraq’s health ministry, apparently one of Swank’s heralded “local Iraqis.”

Meanwhile, as if to add legitimacy to the mass murder of non-combatant Fallujans—even though most Americans remain oblivious to this fact—the Pentagon is stepping up its effort to portray the resistance as “tens of thousands of hardened criminals… driven by devotion to Saddam,” as Rowan Scarborough of the ever-faithful to the Strausscon cause Washington Post reports.

“Above all the mass propaganda media has done everything possible to deny Iraqi national consciousness,” explains James Petras. “Everyday in every way the reference is to religious loyalties, ethnic identities, past political labels, ‘tribal’ and family clans. The purpose is to divide and conquer, and to present the world with a ‘chaotic’ Iraq in which the only coherent, stable force is the US colonial regime. The purpose of the savage colonial assaults and the political labeling is to destroy the idea of the Iraqi nation—and in its place to substitute a series of mini-entities run by imperial satraps obedient to Washington.”

However, corporate media spin, engineered at the Pentagon, will not diminish or blunt the resistance, especially in the wake of “the historic January 30 Victory Vote” that has yet to result in a viable or representative government in Iraq. “The countdown has begun to the day a legitimate Iraqi government, dominated by the Shias, will politely ask the Americans to leave and take their bases with them,” writes Phil Toler. “Once again, the spectre of a Sunni/Shia alliance with regard to the resistance would be too compelling to ignore.”

Delusional wishful thinking on the part of pastors and analysts at the Pentagon will not put an end to the resistance, nor will the continued characterization of the resistance as a criminal enterprise spawned when Saddam Hussein emptied the prisons prior to Bush’s invasion. Iraqis understand the Strausscon “model for how democracy can take hold in Iraq” and realize all too well this will translate into more mass murder, more suffering and privation. For now the Shia are holding their cards close to their vest, but eventually they will demand Bush remove his troops and bases from their country. Of course, Bush will not do this—in fact, he will antagonize and possibly begin murdering fellow Shia Muslims in neighboring Iran. And when this happens there will be hell to pay and no amount of corporate media spin will paper over the disastrous results.

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