Category Archives: Iraq

Moussaoui Not Mad, Just Bad (And Honest About It)

According to the Associated Press, Moussaoui said that “it made his day to hear accounts of Americans suffering from the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and he would like to see similar attacks—every day.”

Family members of Sept. 11 victims exited the courtroom adamant Moussaoui should die, his callousness and cruelty having sealed his fate. Had he sniveled, sworn he had experienced an epiphany, or accepted the diagnosis of schizophrenia he was generously offered, victims may have looked upon him more favorably—as a victim too, perhaps (I can just hear the cliché, “We are all victims of this Islamic deadly ideology.”)

But Moussaoui stuck to his guns. Indeed, the Islamic terrorist is perfectly candid about why he kills, or schemes on killing. He doesn’t resort to the-camel-ate-my homework excuses, but tells it like he sees it. He kills us because he hates us.

The common criminals inhabiting Western jails, however, have made an art of using the therapeutic idiom, which they imbibe from their psychotherapist tutors, to work backwards and discover the exculpating “roots” of their behavior. Islamic criminals are different. They haven’t yet learned that “Daddy doesn’t love me” is a sufficient excuse for any crime committed in the West. They don’t need excuses—they are proud of their faith and the ghastly deeds they say it commands. These brutes exhibit not the slightest need to give their barbarism a palatable pedigree. It is Western intellectuals and pundits, not Arabs and Muslims, who developed the root-causes theories of terrorism. This is why Islamic criminals are so much more believable. When they tell us why they kill, we can take them at their word.

The evil Moussaoui also mocked Navy Lt. Nancy McKeown, who wept on the stand as she described the death of two of her subordinates. “I think it was disgusting for a military person to cry,” he snarled. “She is military; she should expect people at war with her to want to kill her.” The sounds of her sniffing meekly in front of him, he said, had made his day.

Here I have to agree with him. A representative of the military crying in front of her assailant exudes mush, not mettle. As I pointed out in “Osama’s Snickering at our Military,” OBL and his ascetic Islamists know full well that “the mentality that pervades the military, including the top brass,” is the “let-it-all-hang-out credo,” and that one is encouraged to parade emotions like one would a Purple Heart. Islamists despise us for it. More importantly, they don’t fear us because of it.

Frankly, I think that in front of the enemy, the military should suck it up.

The Rummy Red Herring

Iraq, Politics, Republicans, The Military, War

On the six retired U.S. Marine and Army generals calling for the resignation or firing of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: other than that they are going by the book so as to get a book deal, this amounts to meaningless musical chairs. It suggests that if one could locate the source of dysfunction in this administration, things would be on the mend. That’s an error. The perennial calls for resignations or for a reshuffling serve to obscure profound matters of policy and principle, matters the government and most pointy heads can’t and won’t grapple with due to moral and intellectual deficits.

A Saddamless Iraq — A Free Iraq

Bush, Democracy, Iraq, Islam, Neoconservatism, War

Genghis (Bush) and his gang have recently told Iraqis to get with the program: form a government, or else. There is something really screwy about this administration’s admonitions to Iraqis for not getting it together. As though Iraq ever had it together; Saddam’s reign was one of the more peaceful periods in the history of this fractious people, which did not, I might add, ask to be invaded—and “improved.”

Under our ministrations, Iraq has gone from a secular to a religious country; from rogue to failed state. Put yourself in the worn-out shoes of this sad, pathetic people. Would you rather live under Saddam—who was a brutal dictator, but did provide Iraq with one of the foundations of civilization: order or under a force made up of ideological terrorists and an “Ali Baba” element, all running rampant because they can, and where not even mosques provide a safe haven from these brutes and their bombs?

I know what my answer would be. But then I’ve actually had some experience—nothing compared to the experience of the Iraqis, but certainly something compared to the inexperience of the types (Hannity, O’Reilly et al.) who talk up this war.

I lived under a dictatorship in apartheid South-Africa. So did millions of Africans. Crime was never an issue then. Africans suffered indignities, but not much violence. Unless one made a point of clashing with the authorities, one’s life was secure. Now that “freedom” has come to South Africa, lawlessness is such that the “democratic” government has implemented “an official blackout” on national crime statistics. The place is one of the most violent spots on earth, after Iraq, Haiti, and some other African countries.

A few weeks back I got the news that my youngest brother and his family (wife and new baby) were attacked in their suburban fortress at 2:00am by a gang of Africans. The alarm was bypassed. Luckily they escaped with their lives.

In my father’s upmarket neighborhood, another dad was shot point-blank in front of his little girls, as he exited his car to open the garage gates. The loot? A cell phone and some cash. He begged the savages to take his car and all his possessions and spare his life. Two of my husband’s colleagues are dead; one shot in broad daylight as he left his girlfriend’s apartment.

South-Africa is heaven on earth compared to Iraq. So don’t speak to me about “liberation.” The removal of Saddam is not to be equated with liberty in Iraq; a Saddamless Iraq is not necessarily a free Iraq.

Let us stipulate for the record that Saddam Hussein was a killer, a wicked man indeed. Yet even the invasion’s most avid supporters cannot but agree that Iraq was not a lawless society prior to our merciful faith-based intervention.

In addition to their society’s cultural limitations vis-a -vis the attainment of democracy, if Iraqis appear ungrateful or disoriented it is because they are busy… busy dying at rates much much higher than those claimed by the Saddam = Hitler crowd. In the final days of Saddam’s reign of terror, i.e., in the 15 months preceding the invasion, the primary causes of death in Iraq were natural: “heart attack, stroke and chronic illness,” according to a Lancet report. Since Iraq became another neocon object lesson, the primary cause of death has been violence.

As I once wrote, people “whose lungs are airless, whose hearts are not beating, and whose eyes and limbs are missing are not free and will never be free.” And people who risk such a fate daily are not free in any meaningful way.

Costs of War Predicted By Prescient Libertarians

Iraq, libertarianism, War

On April 30, 2003 I wrote the following:

According to figures provided by Yale professor William Nordhaus and the Council of Foreign Relations, the eventual costs of the war on Iraq will be roughly $1.2 trillion.

Very many libertarians debated—and were familiar with—this estimate.

On March 17, 2006, MSNBC’s Martin Wolk finally awoke and wrote:

One estimate puts the total economic impact [of the war] at up to $2 trillion.

On May 28, 2004, I noted in amazement that the neoconservative talking twits [have] been wrong all along about the invasion of Iraq. Their utter ignorance of geopolitical realities had them insisting our soldiers would be greeted with blooms and bonbons and that an Iraqi democracy would rise from the torrid sands of Mesopotamia. They’ve consistently dished out dollops of ahistoric, unintuitive, and reckless verbiage.

They were wrong all along, yet they’ve retained their status as philosopher-kings.

On the other hand—and unfortunately for America—there hasn’t been a horror in Iraq that certain libertarian prescients did not foretell well in advance.

And I asked: “So why are insightful commentators, whose observations have predictive power, generally barred from the national discourse, while false neoconservative prophets are called back for encores?”

The answer I gave in 2004 applies today:

Elites—media included—can rule only if they represent ideologies that are widely embraced, as the invasion of Iraq was. Today’s news is not what it used to be because a dumbed-down population, well represented in newsrooms, cannot distinguish evidence from assertion and fact from feel-good fiction. News is now nothing but a slick, demand-driven product designed to please—not inform—the populace. Having their worldview affirmed—even affirmed in a parallel universe—is worth a lot to news consumers, who are keener to avoid the pains of cognitive dissonance than to get the real deal.