Did anyone see this to-the-point article? Did it get any coverage in the mainstream media? Is S.F. Gate mainstream in USA?
The points raised in this article are very valid - is anyone in the Bush gang listening? There is still time to backoff this mad rush to annihilate yet more innocent civilians.
Published on Friday, January 10, 2003 by the San Francisco Gate
Happy Imbeciles At War
Massive U.S. military buildup, billions of dollars, a useless enemy, and no one seems to know why
by Mark Morford
"This is not a war. Iraq will not be a war. Do we understand this? We do not seem to understand this. This is heavily corporatized power brokers killing each other for oil and capital. Oh yes it is.
…
You cannot have a war when there is nothing to fight against, when it’s essentially going to be a huge U.S. military stomping/bombing exercise, when, just like Afghanistan, we stand to suffer zero U.S. casualties (except for those we seem to kill ourselves), and we just bomb and bomb and kill and kill and shrug.
…
This is a Mack truck versus a Pinto. This is an F-16 versus a paper airplane, a Tomahawk missile versus a spit wad. There is no contest. “War” is exactly the wrong term. The U.S. attack on Iraq will be, of course, a massacre. Go team.
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Remember Afghanistan? Yes, we’re still there, warring away. Bombing and attacking and killing. Haven’t caught a single al Qaeda leader of note yet. That looks bad for Dubya. Killed a few thousand civilians though. Shrug.
…
Perhaps you wonder just where in the hell is the spineless major media in all this, …
Perhaps you wonder where is the national TV coverage of all those huge anti-war protests, hundreds of thousands of people, all over the world, from Spain to Berlin to New York to San Francisco.
Perhaps you wonder where are all the “serious” journalists, the risk-taking news agencies pointing up the absurdity of it all, the imminent horror, the outrage. Could it be these news agencies are owned by major conservative corporations? Could it be they’re all terrified of losing ratings, of saying something unpopular, of invoking Cheney’s wrath, of losing advertiser dollars and that ever-precious, ever-dwindling dumbed-down audience? One guess.
And besides, who needs a reason for a massacre anymore? This is the age of the preemptive-strike, screw-you Bush regime. Who needs, for example, the Monroe Doctrine, that crusty old rag stating how America will go to war only as a last resort, as a defensive measure, and won’t become embroiled in unwinnable foreign wars that are none of our business?
Who needs every precedent ever set by international law? Who needs the U.N. Charter? Who needs confused congressional approval? Who needs ethical integrity?
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Let us wantonly kill innocent civilians and children and thousands of Iraqi soldiers who, let us repeat, did nothing to provoke us. Shall we? Yes let’s. Why? Shhh.
Let us be clear. Saddam is not a threat to the U.S., and never has been. He is merely yet another cowardly and murderous thug, much like the countless other despots and autocrats, from Marcos to King Fahd to Ariel Sharon, the U.S. has added to its payroll when it served our needs, and whom we then backhand when we need economic stimulus, or when the president needs a boost to his approval ratings, or when the corporate pals of the Bush WASP mafia need more billion-dollar petrochemical and defense contracts. Aha. Perhaps this is why.
We are, in short, going to attack and massacre Iraq for the oil reserves, to protect America’s corporate interests, to feed the gaping maw of the military-industrial complex. Same as it ever was.
But let us be perfectly clear: We are most definitely not cranking up the appalling war machine for your sake, or for the country’s protection, or for our commendable standing among our humanitarian allies.
We are not doing it to defeat terrorism (it will have the exact opposite effect), or to make the streets safer for our children, or because they’ve found big scary WMDs (they haven’t – not a one) – or even for Iraq’s own good. And to believe we are is, quite simply, to be wholly misinformed and openly, flagrantly, deliberately deceived.
…"
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0110-04.htm
for the Brit public !
Yes lets support a civil war inside Iraq and disregard International laws and conventions. For your info, the Bush Administrations support for an uprising in northern Iraq, would be considered an ‘Act of Aggression’ against a sovereign state.