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Terror Begets Terror
by James Glaser
Some days you read the paper or listen to the news and everything seems kind of slow. I like those "slow" days, as on slow days less people are dying. Of course even on a slow news day, people can die and we don't even hear about them. The Pentagon and the Bush Administration are good a manufacturing slow news days. Anti-war.com had an interesting piece today about the fact that 14 US Soldiers have been killed in Iraq so far this week. I looked in the NY Times and the Minneapolis Tribune and listened to MPR and read nothing nor did I hear anything about these Americans dying for their country. Maybe they died for George Bush. Here is a list of their names,
Michael Ewens writes on the Anti-War Blog, "Recently, the Department of Defense and CentCom have made a habit out of not reporting fatalities in Iraq until days if not weeks after they occur." George Bush has been telling America, "We are making progress on the ground," when he is talking about Iraq. Seven Marines were killed on one day last week and another 14 were killed in two days of fighting. Last year this would have been a big story, but not now, now we hear about campaign news and Washington doesn't want dead Americans to make the front page. Remember George Bush will not allow photos of American flag draped coffins to be taken. Bush is telling us we are making progress, while Americans are dying in his war every day and over 200 Iraqis have died in the last four. Bush's own intelligence reports tell him that things are not looking good in Iraq and we might be headed for a civil war there, but reports like that do not sound good during an election and neither do reports of dead Soldiers, so you and I are not going to hear of them. You ever hear George Bush claim Iraq was in violation of UN Security Council Resolutions and that is why we could attack Iraq? Well today United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annen declared explicitly for the first time that the US led War in Iraq was illegal. He said Bush's attack on Iraq was not in conformity with the UN charter. The Bush administration claims we attacked Iraq in self defense. Iraq had no navy, no air force, they were under a weapons embargo for a dozen years, and our attack has shown the world that Iraq's army was really nothing to fear, but we attacked in self defense. So far we have killed and wounded tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians as we tried to keep America safe from this pitiful third world country. Of course we could have attacked Saudi Arabia. The 9/11 attackers of our country came from there and they were financed from there, but all through George Bush's life, the Saudis have been his friend and whenever he was in trouble, it was some Saudi family friend who helped George out. So you can see why we had to attack Afghanistan and Iraq, Saudi Arabia is off limits for any American retaliation. America still has no exit plan for our troops to leave Iraq. Every day we can hear about more chaos in that country and more of our troops are getting killed or wounded, but as the election gets closer we will hear less and less about what is going on over there. The Bush administration wants to keep the war out of the news and paint a picture of real progress. John Kerry can't say much because he backs Bush on the war, only saying he would do things differently. Kerry wants to expand Bush's war on terror with new troops and a doubling in the number of Green Berets, so when he becomes President, he can attack terrorists in more (third world) countries. Neither Bush nor Kerry even talks about changing the minds of the terrorists. It seems the only chance we have is to kill them all even if we have to kill tens of thousands of innocent people to do it. Neither Bush or Kerry realize that when our military kills innocent people, we are committing an act of terror, and terror begets terror. |
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