Chris Floyd: 'The fifty-percent solution: Catastrophe by the numbers'
Two telling stories came over the transom this week - seeminglyunrelated, except tangentially, as both deal with different aspects ofthe fiasco in Iraq. Yet together they provide an illuminating glimpse -like a discarded corpse revealed by a lightning flash - of the moralhorror that George W. Bush and his sycophants have wrought both in Iraqand the United States.
First, from the Catholic News Service: "Half of All Christians Have Fled Iraq Since 2003, Says Baghdad Bishop." Excerpt:
Chaldean Catholic Auxiliary Bishop Andreos Abouna of Baghdad saidthat before the invasion there were about 1.2 million Christians in thepredominantly Shiite Muslim state. Since then the overall number hasdropped to about 600,000, he said. "What we are hearing now is thealarm bell for Christianity in Iraq," the bishop said. "When so manyare leaving from a small community like ours, you know that it isdangerous -- dangerous for the future of the church in Iraq."
...About 97 percent of the country's total 27 million Iraqis are Shiiteand Sunni Muslims; Christians make up the majority of the remaining 3percent. The Chaldean Catholics speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus.
....Manypeople were unnerved by the lack of security and confidence in thepolitical process that was supposed to usher in a new era of peace,democracy and rule of law following the removal of President SaddamHussein by coalition forces, Bishop Abouna said.
......Bishop Abouna said he thought it was unlikely that many of those who had emigrated would return.
The destruction of Iraq's Christian community - one of the oldest inthe world - is no mean feat. The religion took root in the land in thefirst generation after the Romans executed the troublesome of Nazareth,and has flourished there for almost 2,000 years. Now it is being wipedout before our eyes. Half gone already, it will certainly disappearaltogether in the next few years, as civil war consumes the nation, andsects devoted to the most fanatic and retrograde distortions of Islam -empowered beyond measure by the Bush Faction's war of aggression -impose their draconian rule. Surely the oh-so-Christian Coalition ofBush and Blair will record this with their many high and worthy deeds.
As the story notes, Iraq's Christians still speak the language thatJesus spoke, a fragment of which is preserved in the English Bible thatwe're told Bush reads every day - the cry from the cross: "Eloi, Eloi,lama sabachthani?" My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It's alament of utter existential despair that is no doubt echoed every dayby his followers in the "liberated" land.
But of course Bush doesn't speak the language of Jesus, literally ormetaphorically. (With the possible exception of the world-devouringPantocrator portrayed in the Book of Revelation, a work of genocidalfrenzy well-described by Martin Luther: "Christ is neither taught norknown in it." Naturally, this Grand Guignol is a great favorite amongthe sects devoted to the most fanatic and retrograde distortions ofChristianity - i.e., Bush's loyal "base.") No, the itinerant preacherwho denounced the rich and served the poor is incomprehensible to theCrawford Caligula. Bush speaks only the language of Caesar: bruteforce, adorned with preening, self-serving lies.
This imperial mendacity undergirds the second story in our lightning flash. This is an AP report - an excellent piece of work by Charles Hanley --on the alarming poll showing that fully 50 percent of all Americans nowbelieve that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction at the timeof the Bush invasion. This number represents a hefty increase incredulity from the 36 percent of Ostrich-Americans who held this samefalse belief just last year.
As Hanley notes, one major factor in this higher heaping of horseshitwas the codswallop disgorged last month by a pair of greasy pols: theswiftly sinking, sex-obsessed, K Street corruptocract Sen. Rick"Saneless" Santorum and his House-mate, Rep. Pete "Huckster" Hoekstra.With great, Fox-fueled fanfare, the dimbulb duo released an "intelligence report" claiming that WMD had indeed been found in Iraq - fully "justifying" Bush's Babylonian conquest.
What they had "unearthed," of course, was the decidedly unsecret factthat over the course of three years, Iraq's occupiers had come across afew old chemical weapon shells scattered here and there around thecountry. These were remnants of the once-great arsenal of deadly toxinsthat Saddam had amassed with the direct and ample aid of a U.S.president named George Bush, who explicitly ordered American agenciesto approve the shipment of weaponizable poisons and other "dual-usetechnologies" for WMD to his favorite tough guy, Saddam. But Sanelessand Huckster were trumpeting was not a noble casus belli but simply thefetid leavings of a former Bush Family crime.
As Hanley points out, "the Pentagon and outside experts stressed thatthese abandoned shells, many found in ones and twos, were 15 years oldor more, their chemical contents were degraded, and they were unusableas artillery ordnance. Since the 1990s, such 'orphan' munitions, fromamong 160,000 made by Iraq and destroyed, have turned up on oldbattlefields and elsewhere in Iraq, ex-inspectors say. In other words,this was no surprise."
What was the truth of the situation? Hanley again: "The reality in thiscase is that after a 16-month, $900-million-plus investigation, theU.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraqhad dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in1991 under U.N. oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work ofU.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals inIraq."
The story makes clear that is not just the Congressional con-men andthe knowing liars on Fox News hoodwinking the public. In this case, asin so many others in our fetid day, the fish rots from the head:
"I think the Santorum-Hoekstra thing is the latest'factoid,' but the basic dynamic is the insistent repetition by theBush administration of the original argument," said John Prados, authorof the 2004 book "Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush SoldUs a War."All of them --- Bush, Rice, Hoekstra, Santorum, the warmongering nabobsat Fox News - know they are peddling lies. The truth is too glaringlyobvious to ignore, even for a pathologically incurious, spoon-fed twitlike Bush. But they don't care. Hanley's story is one of the very fewin the mainstream press to have ever laid out the facts alongside theirlies in a calm, straightforward fashion. It's clear, concise, quietlybut utterly devastating - and it won't make a damn bit of difference.
Administration statements still describe Saddam's Iraq as a threat.Despite the official findings, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hasallowed only that "perhaps" WMD weren't in Iraq. And Bush himself,since 2003, has repeatedly insisted on one plainly false point: thatSaddam rebuffed the U.N. inspectors in 2002, that "he wouldn't let themin," as he said in 2003, and "he chose to deny inspectors," as he saidthis March.
The facts are that Iraq -- after a four-year hiatus in cooperating withinspections -- acceded to the U.N. Security Council's demand andallowed scores of experts to conduct more than 700 inspections ofpotential weapons sites from Nov. 27, 2002, to March 16, 2003. Theinspectors said they could wrap up their work within months. Instead,the U.S. invasion aborted that work.
As recently as May 27, Bush told West Point graduates, "When the UnitedNations Security Council gave him one final chance to disclose anddisarm, or face serious consequences, he refused to take that finalopportunity."
The Bushists know that a wire story buried on page 16 of the TopekaTimes - or even splashed on the front of the Washington Post - poses nothreat to their propaganda machine. They know that the majority ofAmericans get their "news" from TV - or rather, from glimpses at thescrolling headlines rolling by under the bland, blathering, blow-driedheads of the anchors and the fulminating mugs of the countlesshard-right apparatchiks who dominate the screen. The lies will go on -and the corpses will keep piling up, despite the occasional flash oflightning piercing through the dark.
Source: Empire Burlesque
http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=
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