restless,
I know you would prefer to have Iraqis have their throats cut from ear to ear, their women raped in front of their helpless husbands by gangs of security operatives, their testacles cut off and stuffed into their mouths, dropped off of buildings, the entire family hung for the transgressions of a single member (like mentioning in public that he didn’t care for Saddam), their fingers cut off joint by joint, their tips of their tongues or their entire tongues cut out, beheading by sword and then knife to cut the gristle, be lowered slowly and feetfirst into a giant paper shreader while their family looks on in helpless horror, be shot at point blank range with a pistol rifle or submachine gun, entire villages gassed and the survivors murdered by armored units, political dissidents used as human mine detectors, electric drills used to penetrate soft areas of the chest and abdomen, people that did not celebrate Saddam’s birthday being dropped feet-first into either large pools or small tubs of acid, beaten into permanent disfigurement or even death, being made to eat their own flesh as it was cut from their body, having electrical nodes hooked up to their testacles and shocked repeatedly, playing dominoes on the back of women who had just been kidnapped and gang-raped by government agents, breasts cut of with hand-saws or Sawzalls or those electric knives used to cut turkey, being forced to labor all day in the Iraqi 120 degree heat and then drink their own urine as they collapsed from deadly exhaustion, smaller ethnicities rounded up into refugee camps and their ancestral lands given to Saddam loyalists, “Shoot at demonstrators with the aim of killing 95 percent of them and saving the rest for interrogation” (from the Baghdad Security Headquarters), hung ten at a time for teaching the Kurdish language, guns put in the mouth of babies in their mothers arms and then discharged, beating prisoners to death and then billing the family for the labor (and then no funeral, because even if they could bribe a guard to get the remains back Saddam was known to order the gassing of the ‘illegal’ funerals of executed prisoners), having finger and toenails removed slowly with pliers, be fed small amounts of poison to cause varying degrees of internal trauma or be fed enoough poison to kill, the hands and feet whipped until all the sensitive bones are broken, the intentional application of skin diseases, be shot and stabbed in front of their children and pregnant wives for suspected membership in the FreeMasons or suspected private practice of Judaism, their children beaten severely for not participating in the traditional Saddam Birthday dancing, young women having their hair torn out by the fistful for refusing to refer to Saddam as “Papa Saddam”, their arms and legs cut off with chain saws, their soles of their feet burned with hot irons and blow torches, starving wild dogs being sicced on prisoners that are bloodied and bound hand and foot, crucifixion by nailing palms of the hands and ears to the cross, burning of the rectum with boiling water, using heavy hammers to break noses and the long bones of the limbs, be stripped naked and forced to sit on broken bottles or gas heaters, hung from a rotating ceiling fan and struck with pipes, their healthy teeth forcefully removed, their ‘criminals’ bound and forced (feet first, of course) into raging ovens while the family is forced to watch, their tongues nailed to boards as a means of restraint, their eyes sprayed with insecticides, their children stung with wasps spiders and scorpions as the parents are forced to watch, bombs set off in markets far from any military targets in order to attempt to frame the Coalition, their people routinely --sometimes just on the street at a perceived offence – burned with cigarrettes branding irons and sometimes just tossed wholesale into the fire, men and women suspended by rusty iron hooks – or in a pinch, axes driven into the wall – in their lower back for ease of torture, the people deliberately starved as a means of submission while Saddam re-sold the “Oil-for-Food” food for guns golden palaces and shiny torture chambers, electricity running water and medicine withheld systematically from Shi’a and Kurdish regions, the mentally ill handicapped or disabled elderly executed as soon as they were discovered, being imprisoned in conditions so stark (1 meter by 50 cm windowless cells) that prisoners had to fight for the right to use the central latrine pits and the victors slept at the latrine lip like dogs jealously guarding their possessions, being beat with “relay teams” of men wielding heavy electrical cords, eyes gouged out with silverware one at a time, or eyes squeezed slowly until the breaking point… The list goes on (all of the above are directly verifiable).
Now use the above methods to kill TWO MILLION human beings. TWO MILLION.
Bury them anywhere you please, restless, because at this point the bodies are in all sorts of shapes. Some are missing parts like heads and arms and jawbones and legs that are hard to relocate, so they can just be dumped in pits with the rest. Others are to be carefully photographed and then neatly buried in rows of the thousands, often after the bodies have been left to rot (but not be removed) in the city streets as a warning to other ‘criminals’. Since you have a heart, restless, you would agree with the act of cutting down the five and six year olds who were hung on lampposts (in front of their helpless weeping parents, of course) in Baghdad last year and carefully buried in small wooden caskets. But remember, restless, you can’t give these bodies back to the families under any circumstances, and of course there is the aforementioned pesky paperwork to mail the execution labor bill to the families. That is restless, if you even bother to mention the deaths to the families. Most never find out what happens to their son, or four year old daughter, or their husband, or mother.
restless, why don’t you come over here and meet my friends that I went to school with, the Christians driven from Iraq (even though you say he was quite tolerant). They can tell you some more firsthand stories about this subject, since you are so morally certain about how this war was a bad thing. They can tell you about how they are afraid to even say a bad word about Saddam from thousands of miles away, because if Saddam got wind of it their remaining family members in Iraq could be tortured, raped, and killed (see above).
Let them tell you about working (that’s where someone does a task in exchange for money) like madmen and sending their money home to Iraq each month for food and medicine for their families, and only occasionally for any of that money to make it past the various officials. Let them tell you about the brothers and uncles killed in the human wave attacks against the Iranians in a long and horrible and pointless war.
So yeah, “sieg heil Bush”, and “America is the fifth or sixth reich” tough guy, just remember that YOU are the one so RIGHTEOUSLY angry that somebody put a stop to this. Whatever the reasons, misguided or not, as long as the US keeps its word and withdraws how can you be so rabid about stopping this?
I’d think you would want to tend to your own little – less citizens in all of Portugal than Muslims living in the US – country first, lest it slip back into its habitual fascism. I’m willing to bet that the Portugese dissidents in the concentration camps circa 1970 would be opposed though.
Feeling good?