Let's Do the Timeline Again

[lapsedmodernist]

So a few hours after Saddam Husein is captured, this story breaks in the British press. I'm sorry, but doesn't that just scream "freshly fabricated"? For one, if this is true, the entire CIA is full of shit, and I think what with the sword-falling and the secret-agent-ousting and the yellow cake and just with the bare bones of logic, the CIA is marginally more trustworthy at this juncture than BushCo and press releases cooked up in the DoD cauldrons. Secondly, the authors of this "angle" are banking on the "eradication of short-term memory" programme that has been successfully implemented by the form & content of news for the last 2 1/2 years, it's like, dude, if the only thing you were ever made to watch were Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon, what would that do to your sense of linear narrative? The short-term memory lapse in question, done away with through strategically repeated metonymy between Bin Laden and Hussein is the fact that the former is an Islamic extremist who despised the latter, who was a secular dictator, a.k.a. "apostate" working in the tradition of Stalinist state socialism. Even within the murky discourse of the Bin Laden "tapes," if there was any sort of cooperation brewing twixt the two, it would not have commenced until right before the US invasion of Iraq, as shown in this discussion. Note how the conjecture from that tape is interpretive, whereas here you can read all about how the US press did not cite the parts of a Bin Laden tape where he condemns Hussein and calls the Iraqi people to rise up again him. Not because he's humanitarian, but because he is a religious fanatic, and I don't see that cosmology allowing for much distinction between the capitalist West and an ideologically "socialist" Iraq where the state is atheist and women are educated and employed. I remember being outraged at the time about how information was manipulated, but I remember because I exercise my mind to retain chronology, linearity and short-term memories. It's like an exercise to improve eyesight.
Don't get me wrong. I think Saddam Husein should be tried for war crimes. Same goes for Bush and Rumsfeld, no wonder they are throwing bully weight around and refusing to sign treatiesto avoid being prosecuted. I just read that Saddam has already been whisked out of Iraq. Never mind the fact that Iraqis had already set up a war crimes tribunal. Why is that? Are they going to torture him at Guantanamo Bay from now until Novemeber when he will sign a confession admitting to having a secret WMD lab so deep underground it had to be run by dwarves and hobbits and then we will have elections, after all? And if the Husein/Bin Laden connection is the new hot item, why not remind people that Bin Laden, the main terrorist responsible for 9/11 was trained and funded by our very own Central Intelligence Agency?

*Incidentally, the links I have been providing lately are google cached links, with words I used to search highlighted through the text. As annoying as that is, it's not nearly as annoying as the fact that articles have been mysteriously vanishing leaving a 404 error in place.

[On Edit: Until I just started reading it over to phone to nuncstans, I did not even realize that the first article that I linked to, the one from The Telegraph, had a whole section about the "second part of the memo," which, apparenly, after it gets done linking Husein and Bin Laden, also magically ties up all the loose ends with the Uranium Niger scandal, the presence of WMDs in Iraq and, for good measure, fingers Libya and Syria for future invasion thusly:
"The second part of the memo, which is headed "Niger Shipment", contains a report about an unspecified shipment - believed to be uranium - that it says has been transported to Iraq via Libya and Syria.". Jesus Christ. Isn't it all so convenient? I am surprised there wasn't a third part of the memo, which documented how Bush's plastic Thanksgiving turkey came to life Pinnochio-style. Critics lambast Hollywood movies that end like this. Or, as nuncstans said, they have better writing on 7th Heaven. ]

Comments

[warpsmith.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it was the "Niger shipment" part that really had me screaming "Oh, come ON, now! Why would this even be part of the same memo? Who's gonna buy this silliness?" And the sad fact is, probably enough people to put Bush back in office for another term. One of the things about this administration that most infuriates me is their utter contempt for the intelligence of the general public when they cook up this bullshit. But it probably isn't contempt, rather a cynically dead-on assessment.

[(Anonymous)]

hey, it's the holidays. of *course* everything gets wrapped up in a nice, neat package. the pretty bow is probably the economic upswing that bushco has "given" us (this has nothing to do with the usual rediculous increase in spending this time of year, however). and i'm sure that the $61 million that haliburton "possibly" owes the government won't be used to fund a re-election campaign or anything like that. i'm sure it's earmarked for something important like providing enough force to properly quell any more peaceful protests that threaten our national security.

seltix

[(Anonymous)]

> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/12/14/wterr14.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/12/14/ixnewstop.html

as the new yorker pointed out a couple of weeks ago, conrad black is the owner of several conservative newspapers that spew out propaganda daily, including the telegraph, the jerusalem post, and several in the u.s. he has a business relationship with r. perle, which is why the j. post has printed perle's propaganda. i don't think the conservative press is worth any consideration since they've demonstrated time and again that they have no principles. (as michael kinsley once observed, "you can waste a journalistic career just disproving all of the (crap) the wall street journal editorial pages print.") it's enough work trying to glean information from the w.post and the nytimes (when are they going to fire judith miller, the chalabi conduit?).

-mjm

[(Anonymous)]

>Same goes for Bush and Rumsfeld, no wonder they are throwing bully weight around and refusing to sign treaties to avoid being prosecuted.

from "War and Never Having to Say You're Sorry":

(McNamara is Robert S. McNamara, the Vietnam war "defense" secretary, and role model for the part played by rumsfeld in the absurdist play "the iraqi 'war'.")

"The most stirring scenes in "The Fog of War" surround America's firebombing of 67 Japanese cities in World War II, during which time Mr. McNamara was working under Gen. Curtis LeMay of the Air Force. Mr. Morris unearthed spine-curdling government reports showing the raw calculus undertaken to speed America's victory. "In order to do good," Mr. McNamara says, articulating the film's ninth lesson, "recognize that at times you will have to engage in evil." In a single bombing raid, he recalls, "We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo — men, women and children." Some 900,000 Japanese civilians were killed overall. Was he aware this would happen? "Well, I was part of a mechanism that in a sense recommended it," Mr. McNamara tells Mr. Morris. "Lemay said, `If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.' And I think he's right. He — and I'd say I — were behaving as war criminals." He asks, "What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?" The answer, of course, is that war's winners write the history books, and, if they can help it, they avoid legal accountability."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/movies/14POWE.html

"history doesn't repeat but it does rhyme"
- Mark Twain

-mjm

[(Anonymous)]

> Don't get me wrong. I think Saddam Husein should be tried for war crimes.

every time someone criticizes shrub&co about the assault on iraq and subsequent occupation, they feel they have to preface it with "i don't support hussein", as if they were former baathist party members. i wish they would stop it. when have you ever heard any shrubite say, "Don't get me wrong -- the reagan/bush foreign policy of supporting hussein is the crime that started all of this."?

it's because no one admits past foreign policy crimes (fire-bombings and atomic bombings are two that have never been owned up to, that is, no one has been held responsible or prosecuted) that these continue to recur, and why repubs were and have remained opposed to an international criminal court. they opposed it even when clinton was president because they knew from their past and from their future intentions that they could be held accountable.

more from "War and Never Having to Say You're Sorry":

Re-examining our reasoning is not something that has come naturally to American statesmen. In fact, Mr. McNamara is one of very few senior American government officials ever to admit major error without being forced to do so. In an interview last month, I asked him why. "People don't want to admit they made mistakes," he said. "This is true of the Catholic Church, it's true of companies, it's true of nongovernmental organizations and it's certainly true of political bodies. My rule has been to surface the tough problems. It's very unpleasant to argue with people you admire and associate with. But you have to force debate."

-mjm

[(Anonymous)]

> Jesus Christ. Isn't it all so convenient?

Holy Moses, too.


-mjm