“They know we own their country. We own their airspace… We dictate the way they live and talk. And that’s what’s great about America right now. It’s a good thing, especially when there is a lot of oil out there we need.” –Air force Brigadier General William Looney, head of the US Central Command’s Airborne Expeditionary Force.

“More than 4,500 children under the age of 5 are dying each month from hunger and disease.” -UNICEF, October 1996.

“I want every Iraqi soldier bleeding from every orifice.” — General Norman Schwarzkopf .

Leslie Stahl: “We have heard that a half million children have died (as a result of sanctions against Iraq). I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Madeleine Albright: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.” — A CBS Sixty Minutes interview between Leslie Stahl and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, on 12 May 1996 

 In July 1989 (before the sanctions), 387 children under the age of five died in Iraq.

 In July 1998 (after the sanctions), 6,495 children under the age of five died, a 16-fold increase from before the sanctions.

“Surely the extermination of Jews in gas chambers is not comparable to the slow death inflicted in Iraqi children by deprivation. But from another angle the latter is even more despicable. The genocide against Jews was perpetrated in the greatest secret and without the blessing of the “civilized world”. The crimes against Iraqi civilians are committed in full day-light, with the blessing of the ruling “civilized nations” and with the tacit support of the educated classes in these nations. Those who keep silent and are legally able to speak up, are morally accomplices to this crime.” — Elias Davidsson, Musician and a Palestinian Jew, 16/4/1999

So again the world stands on the brink of another  slaughter  of the weak and the downtrodden. Two puppets  of the oil oligarchy, placed in a position of power to represent their  people have turned Judas to the trust of their own citizens. They now lie  and blaspheme  in the world forums  arguing  and justifying the use of naked aggression against a people who have already been pile-driven to their supplicant knees. Bush and Blair now covet their death. They long to hear the screams of jets and whistle of bombs, they want to harvest tears and slaughter. A dozen or more years have passed since they have last had a “turkey shoot” like the one on the “Highway of Death”. Its been awhile since the world has seen the charred death-mask of a human being. It has been a so very long a time since the calibration of “smart” bomb and cruise missile delivery systems on living targets.

Finally when the fingers get tired from pushing buttons and triggers; when the eyes get tired of the lines on the aiming reticle of a F-16 heads-up display; when the snow-plough and bulldozer drivers have covered the dying,  the frozen  with fear Iraqi conscripts  and the mercifully dead in the sandy trenches of the defence lines,  when the acrid smell of napalmed human beings melt into the cooling air of a desert dusk, the raison d’etre of the genocide will insidiously seep into the value of shares on Dow Jones and FTSE. “Food for Oil”, the ignomious paradigm of the present will finally be replaced by what it truly should be called “Blood for Oil”. It has a similar ring and the same difference.

The end of the Cold War was marked by celebration of fireworks to mark the birth of Daddy Bush’s “New World Order” and the venue was Iraq, everybody was invited and most came brandishing their new toys.

It took all of  6 weeks and 88,500 tons of bombs and 30,000 tons of artillery shells on military and civilian targets. 2,095 HARM missiles; 217 Walleye missiles; 5,276 guided anti-tank missiles; 44,922 cluster bombs and rockets; 136,755 conventional bombs; 4,077 guided bombs. While watching and amazing at the accuracy of the “smart” bombs, we failed to realise that only 9% of the bombs dropped were of the “smart” variety. Worse still, only 30% of those lived up to their nomenclature.

The mainstream media pool were fed their lines and the rose-tinted stories were regurgitated, appropriately censored, for our benefit during prime time TV. The whole gamut of emotion was covered as we watched pictures of F-16s with glowing afterburners taking off, almost forlornly against the backdrop of a golden sunset; the black-and-white footage of a precision guided bomb obliterating a target  and the anxious moments on the carrier as the crew awaited the return of the aircrafts. Our brave boys were back, they were safe and we felt a quiet pride as our leaders expounded the fact that our planet was inordinately safer still.

No one reported the screaming and wailing down below!

The immediate cost? Not the nauseous years of infamy of sanctions… just the 43 days.
35,000 civilians killed better known to our free and objective mainstream media by the conscience salving obscenity “colateral damage”.

150,000 to 220,000 Iraqi soldiers dead, buried unknown in mass graves.

More than 9,000 homes destroyed.

31 bridges

Innumerable water treatment, sewage, electricity grids, telephone exchanges etc. (Iraqis have always possessed an inordinately large number of command-and-control centres)
One building which the Pentagon, even now, maintains was a “legitimate military target” is Al-Amiriya bomb shelter. Presumably the US thought that all Baghdad required was a museum of murals, painted and pasted by the residue of  408 splattered women and children.

No! No one reported the screaming and wailing then.

And now Baby Bush and his Brother-in-Arms Blair want to do it all over again.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant…. Where they create desolation, they call it peace!

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