April 13, 2003
'seeing Rumsfeld shake hands with our oppressor'

Sinan Antoon: "I fled the country after the 1991 Gulf War and Saddam was still in charge (thanks to the US which had bombed Iraq back to the pre-Industrial age, but left Saddam in place)... Alas, tyranny is now replaced with colonialism. Let us not be intoxicated by that image and let it erase the fact that this "liberating" power itself was complicit in propping and supporting Saddam throughout the 1980's when he waged his war against Iran and killed one million Iraqis. All those Iraqis were not worthy of liberation back then, because they were serving another function: fodder for weapons and for containing Khomeini's Iran. I remember seeing Rumsfeld shake hands with our oppressor on Iraqi TV back in the early 1980's and both Bush I and Reagan supplied him with weapons and military intelligence while he was gassing Iraqi Kurds. No wonder it was difficult to topple him without his original sponsors who came uninvited and with ulterior motives that have become painfully obvious by now."

Arab News: "The father of the two boys imports used cars from Canada, buying them there and then shipping them back to Iraq to sell. His children have not known a life without UN sanctions, which killed as many as a million of Iraq’s infants. 'Kids in other countries had places to go and have fun,' the father said. 'But all these two had were old bumper cars, and even they didn’t work most of the time. Suddenly the world is starting to care about us, but what it made us suffer over the past 12 years!'"

Ha'aretz interviews Sharon: "'But there is one thing that I told President Bush a number of times - I made no concessions in the past, and I will make no concessions now, or ever make concessions in the future, with regard to anything that is related to the security of Israel.'"

Arab News: "The explosive mix of fuel and air traveling at speeds exceeding the speed of sound leave behind a vacuum that sucks all air and other materials, creating a mushroom cloud. These explosions cause cerebral concussion or blindness, blockage of air passageways and collapse of lungs, tearing of eardrums, massive internal bleeding and displacement and tearing of internal organs, and injuries from flying objects. These are aside from the injuries mentioned above which result from inhalation of this poisonous ethylene oxide cloud. It is for these reasons that human rights organizations consider these [massive ordinance airburst bombs] to be weapons of mass destruction."

posted by dru in war
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