Milking Zarqawi’s Life & Death For All That It’s Worth
The real story about Zarqawi is not that he was finally killed last week, but that he was allowed to live four years after the Bush regime had actionable intelligence on several occasions in 2002, and could have taken him out before the war even started. Zarqawi was actually under our protection in northern Iraq at the time, in the no-fly zone, and he was producing chemical weapons to boot. But Bush needed him as a pretext for the invasion – to be able to say he was going after El Qaeda terrorists who were in cahoots with Saddam. When in fact it was our own Air Force that was protecting him – not Saddam.
After the invasion the regime continued to use Zarqawi and inflate his relative importance within the overall insurgency. They wanted us to believe that all the fighting and bloodshed and bombs were the result of a few outside terrorists like Zarqawi, though of course we now know differently. They used Zarqawi as evidence that what we were really fighting in Iraq was international terrorism rather than Iraqi patriots who just wanted their country back.
Even after he’s been killed, it should be no surprised to anyone that Bush is still milking Zarqawi for all he’s worth. He seem to think that if he can keep spinning the truth and fooling eveyone, everything will turn out OK. The sad truth is that as evil as Zarqawi was, his death will probably help the insurgency in Iraq. There is even speculation that the Iraqi insugency or even others in his own organization gave him over to the Americans. He was a devisive figure there, and even El Qaeda wanted him to cut out the beheadings and other brutal atrocities since it was a very bad public relations move. Nevertheless, Bush wants everyone to believe that we’ve turned another corner in Iraq, though we’ve turned that corner so many times we’ve circled the block about 20 times.
When I first heard that Zarqawi had been killed, I was thinking about Nick Berg. I am one of the people who watched the video of his brutal beheading. It was undoubtedly the worst thing I have seen, and I sincerely regret ever looking it. Michael Berg, Nick Berg’s father, blames Bush for the death of his son. And it certainly is true that Bush let him get away in 2002, and that his invasion of Iraq gave Zarqawi the elbow room he needed to freely operate in Iraq. He calls Bush a coward, and says he’s even worse than Zarqawi since he’s killed many more people than Zarqawi has. The only difference being that Bush is too much of a coward to do it in person, the way Zarqawi murdered his son.
It has really struck me this week what completely guttless cowards that entire gang really is. I heard about how Carl Rove - after the speical prosecutor decided he was just too powerful to prosecute for doing what everyone now knows he did: he committed treason by outing an undercover CIA agent – how he gave a speech in which he specifically questioned the courage, if not the patriotism of John Kerry and John Murtha – saying they wanted to “cut and run.” Excuse me? Mutrtha and Kerry are men who actually served in the military and fought for their country. Rove is just another one of the many chickenhawks who staretd this war for other people to die in, though he ran away from the fight when it was his time to serve. Like Cheney, Rove got a student deferrment during the Vietnam war – though in a typically crooked fasion. He pretended to be a full time student when actually it was only part time – and then he dropped out just as soon as his eligeability for the draft was over.
The point is – with Rove, Bush, Cheney and all the chickenhawks supporting this war – druggie Limbaugh included - their unflinching support of the war is a manifestation of their cowardice, not their courage. It takes courage to admit your mistakes. It takes no courage whatsoever to send other people to fight and die for your mistake, and only a coward would pretend otherwise. Only a coward would pretend that sending other people to die takes more courage than risking your own life like Kerry and Murtha did. Only a coward would use other people’s lives to prop up their own cowardly self-image. Only cowards could so divorce themselves emotionally from all the real suffering and dying that is going on, to pretend that their inabilty to feel anything was the same thing as courage. That their unwillingness or inability to feel regret or remorse was anything more than the same sort of moral cowardice that first compelled them to dodge the draft.
It really struck me when Cheney shot his friend, how he said, ” It is the worst day of my life” Hello? What about 9/11? What about the 3,000 people that died on that day? Why can’t you feel anything for those people – you certainly like to pretend that you do by using 9/11 to justify everthting you want to do politically. Sure that old lawyer was your buddie, and he had to stay in the hospital a couple weeks. But he recovered, and is fine. How about all the young men and women that have been killed or seriously maimed every day in Iraq because of a war that you started? Aren’t you just as responsible for that – so why can’t you feel anything for them? Why isn’t every day the worst day of your life?
The reason is that these people can’t feel anything for anyone unless it directly affects their own life or their own small circle of cronies – even if they are directly responsible for those deaths. These are cowards in every pathological sense of the word. Michael Beg is right – they are nothing more than mass-murderers using other people’s lives as props. They can kill people or have them killed without feeling any remorse whatsoever – only, unlike Zarqawi, they are too cowardly to do it themselves. That makes them worse and a more insidious evil than Zarqawi, because they present themselves as decent, law abiding and courageous men when they are the exact opposite - the most dangerous, cowardly, cold-blooded gang of mass murderers on the planet today.
I wish that instead of posing for photo-ops - flying into the anticeptic security of the green zone, as if he had the courage we all know he doesn’t have - that we could put Bush in a room alone, without any cameras, just tape his eyes open, and have him watch the Nick Berg execution video over and over for about twelve hours straight, so that he could get a rough idea of what is really going on in Iraq every day, and what he has done.
After the invasion the regime continued to use Zarqawi and inflate his relative importance within the overall insurgency. They wanted us to believe that all the fighting and bloodshed and bombs were the result of a few outside terrorists like Zarqawi, though of course we now know differently. They used Zarqawi as evidence that what we were really fighting in Iraq was international terrorism rather than Iraqi patriots who just wanted their country back.
Even after he’s been killed, it should be no surprised to anyone that Bush is still milking Zarqawi for all he’s worth. He seem to think that if he can keep spinning the truth and fooling eveyone, everything will turn out OK. The sad truth is that as evil as Zarqawi was, his death will probably help the insurgency in Iraq. There is even speculation that the Iraqi insugency or even others in his own organization gave him over to the Americans. He was a devisive figure there, and even El Qaeda wanted him to cut out the beheadings and other brutal atrocities since it was a very bad public relations move. Nevertheless, Bush wants everyone to believe that we’ve turned another corner in Iraq, though we’ve turned that corner so many times we’ve circled the block about 20 times.
When I first heard that Zarqawi had been killed, I was thinking about Nick Berg. I am one of the people who watched the video of his brutal beheading. It was undoubtedly the worst thing I have seen, and I sincerely regret ever looking it. Michael Berg, Nick Berg’s father, blames Bush for the death of his son. And it certainly is true that Bush let him get away in 2002, and that his invasion of Iraq gave Zarqawi the elbow room he needed to freely operate in Iraq. He calls Bush a coward, and says he’s even worse than Zarqawi since he’s killed many more people than Zarqawi has. The only difference being that Bush is too much of a coward to do it in person, the way Zarqawi murdered his son.
It has really struck me this week what completely guttless cowards that entire gang really is. I heard about how Carl Rove - after the speical prosecutor decided he was just too powerful to prosecute for doing what everyone now knows he did: he committed treason by outing an undercover CIA agent – how he gave a speech in which he specifically questioned the courage, if not the patriotism of John Kerry and John Murtha – saying they wanted to “cut and run.” Excuse me? Mutrtha and Kerry are men who actually served in the military and fought for their country. Rove is just another one of the many chickenhawks who staretd this war for other people to die in, though he ran away from the fight when it was his time to serve. Like Cheney, Rove got a student deferrment during the Vietnam war – though in a typically crooked fasion. He pretended to be a full time student when actually it was only part time – and then he dropped out just as soon as his eligeability for the draft was over.
The point is – with Rove, Bush, Cheney and all the chickenhawks supporting this war – druggie Limbaugh included - their unflinching support of the war is a manifestation of their cowardice, not their courage. It takes courage to admit your mistakes. It takes no courage whatsoever to send other people to fight and die for your mistake, and only a coward would pretend otherwise. Only a coward would pretend that sending other people to die takes more courage than risking your own life like Kerry and Murtha did. Only a coward would use other people’s lives to prop up their own cowardly self-image. Only cowards could so divorce themselves emotionally from all the real suffering and dying that is going on, to pretend that their inabilty to feel anything was the same thing as courage. That their unwillingness or inability to feel regret or remorse was anything more than the same sort of moral cowardice that first compelled them to dodge the draft.
It really struck me when Cheney shot his friend, how he said, ” It is the worst day of my life” Hello? What about 9/11? What about the 3,000 people that died on that day? Why can’t you feel anything for those people – you certainly like to pretend that you do by using 9/11 to justify everthting you want to do politically. Sure that old lawyer was your buddie, and he had to stay in the hospital a couple weeks. But he recovered, and is fine. How about all the young men and women that have been killed or seriously maimed every day in Iraq because of a war that you started? Aren’t you just as responsible for that – so why can’t you feel anything for them? Why isn’t every day the worst day of your life?
The reason is that these people can’t feel anything for anyone unless it directly affects their own life or their own small circle of cronies – even if they are directly responsible for those deaths. These are cowards in every pathological sense of the word. Michael Beg is right – they are nothing more than mass-murderers using other people’s lives as props. They can kill people or have them killed without feeling any remorse whatsoever – only, unlike Zarqawi, they are too cowardly to do it themselves. That makes them worse and a more insidious evil than Zarqawi, because they present themselves as decent, law abiding and courageous men when they are the exact opposite - the most dangerous, cowardly, cold-blooded gang of mass murderers on the planet today.
I wish that instead of posing for photo-ops - flying into the anticeptic security of the green zone, as if he had the courage we all know he doesn’t have - that we could put Bush in a room alone, without any cameras, just tape his eyes open, and have him watch the Nick Berg execution video over and over for about twelve hours straight, so that he could get a rough idea of what is really going on in Iraq every day, and what he has done.
posted by R. Stephen Hanchett at 9:55 AM
<< Home