War Madness


It’s the cars.

Have you noticed them? Blasted, blackened hulks, sometimes still flaming, in the backgrounds of many photos from the Iraqi war front. They’re new cars—much newer than I can afford—and my first thought is always, What a fucking waste! as I realize how bad I’d feel if that were my car crisped to cruise-missile black.

And what if that were my brother? My father? My lover? My son? Reduced to clumps of carbonized atoms on the roadside half-in/half-out of those cars….

Shit, I am so cozy in my U.S. of A.-feathered nest, the mere thought of missing a meal—one meal—say, ‘cause my favorite taco-stand gets torched by an errant HARM missile, is enough to send me off to Trader Joe’s tout de suite to stockpile more frozen taquitos.

Then I imagine…Trader Joe’s hit during the weekend rush, when lines of shoppers and carts stretch far down the aisles. Or Peet’s Coffee, on a Sunday morning, customers in shorts and sandals sipping their lattes, chatting, reading the paper. Or, the towering, top-heavy ziggurat that houses the main library on the local campus of the University of California. Imagine, that elegant, whimsical structure pancacked into a mountain of shattered glass, crumpled concrete, twisted rebar, fluttering pages of books carried away in the wind.

Waging our conflicts far off as we Americans prefer to do, our biggest war-related concerns revolve around the economy. Not a small matter, but a luxury compared to what Iraqis must confront. A caller to NPR several days ago asked "Where can I invest my money safely during war?" While Iraqis fight tooth-and-nail over bottled water, we are spared worrying about our favorite landmarks being reduced in an instant to human-remains-laced rubble.

Yes, I know it already happened. In lower Manhattan, Washington D.C., and let’s not forget, Oklahoma City. The former two tragedies provide the royal rationale for bombing the crap out of Basra, Baghdad, Tikrit, Karbala, Aziziya and other towns and villages with quaint-sounding Iraqi names. Naturally, we’re not bombing Pendleton, New York, birthplace of Timothy McVeigh. Which would make about as much moral sense, considering the utter lack of evidence linking Iraq or Saddam Hussein to 9-11. The very idea that a secular, quasi-socialist regime would be in bed with Islamic fundamentalists is ludicrous and insulting to the memories of the thousands of persons who perished on 9-11.

Although, now that we’ve bombed Iraq back to the Stone-Age, a truce may well be in the works between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

Back to the Stone-Age. Remember that phrase from Gulf War I? Along with descriptions of university professors, doctors and artists joining rank-and-file Iraqis trekking with buckets down to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to fetch drinking water?

And now, King George and his court are heating up the rhetoric against Syria and Iran. Have you noticed? Ah, ya jest can’t keep them Bush boys down on the ranch!

A consistent theme runs through their madness. Three letters, beginning with "O" and ending with—you guessed it!— "L."

Yes, extending the war to Syria and Iran makes sense when you realize that plans are being resurrected to build an oil pipeline from Iraq to Israel. (Thanks, Digby, for the link to Ha’Aretz.)

[Israeli] National Infrastructures Minister Joseph Paritzky has requested an assessment of the condition of the old oil pipeline from Mosul to Haifa, with an eye toward renewing the flow of oil in the event of friendly post-war regime in Iraq.

[...]

Hanan Bar-On, then the deputy director-general of the Foreign Ministry, confirmed Sunday that Israel was involved in talks during the mid-1980s on a plan for an Iraq-Jordanian pipeline to the Red Sea port of Aqaba. Among the participants in these talks was Donald Rumsfeld, then an adviser to U.S. president Ronald Reagan and currently secretary of defense. The American corporation Bechtel was slated to build the pipeline. According to the deal, which eventually fell through, Israel was to receive about $100 million a year via former Israeli businessman Bruce Rappaport in return for a commitment not to oppose the construction or operation of the new pipeline. [Emphasis mine.]

More here…


A person I knew who worked at Bechtel in the days before Gulf War I, let slip at a party back then that the privately-owned financing, engineering and construction giant had plans already in place to rebuild Kuwait before the U.S. had gone in and destroyed it while kicking Hussein’s troops back to Baghdad.

I guess Bechtel had its finger in many pies in that era. Wonder what they’re up to now….