9.5.04
Sunday Business Post
UGLY AMERICANS PART OF BUSH'S 'NO RULES' WAR
09/05/04 00:00
By Tom McGurk
They should be on the Jerry Springer Show. They probably will be yet. This, folks, is a good old country boy meets girl love story with a sting in the tail.
Or even an Iraqi on a dog lead if you like. Folks, meet Miss Lynndie England and her beau, Charles Graner.
Lynndie is a trailer-park queen from Appalachian country who used to work in a chicken factory, but went off to Iraq with 372 Military Police Company to do her bit in the war on terrorism. All week, Lynndie's mom has been on the steps of their mobile home, telling the media about how her girl was just doing her job.
Anyway in Iraq, Lynndie met big Charlie, a former prison officer from Uniontown. Charlie, seemingly, is a good God-fearing boy too.
Journalists report that he even has a quote from the Book of Hosea painted on a stone outside his house. It reads: "Sow for ourselves righteousness, reap the fruit of unfailing love and break up your unplowed ground."
Thing was, both these young folk were kinda lonely over there in Iraq, having just both been divorced before they left. And what do you think but didn't they just fall in love in that prison there called Abu Gharib.
Yes sir, as they had a hootenanny every night with them there naked Iraqis, Lynndie and Charlie kinda got sweet on each other.
What a swell time too they had at their engagement party in the prison. Man, was that old jailhouse rocking! Not content with hanging her knickers on one of them naked Iraqi's heads, Lynndie then got herself a big dog lead and played ``hound dog'' with another.
Meanwhile, Charlie was sort of arranging more naked Iraqis in a big pile so that the good folks at home could see what a real bunch of assholes these guys were.
I suppose liberating these folks requires intimate knowledge, because then Lynndie got real playful and lined them all up, naked as they were born, so that she could see those Arabs in all their glory.
Then Charlie suggested that these Arab boys might go beating their meat and everybody got their digitals out for snaps for the good folk back home.
My, oh my.
Well, the good news is that love triumphed, and now Lynndie is in the family way, thanks to big Charlie.
The bad news is that she's in a cell, all alone up there in Fort Bragg Detention Center back in the States. Seems them folks up there in Washington don't see the joke. Seems somehow that they got the calculations wrong.
It's a year since George Bush announced "mission accomplished," so let's make that calculation. In Iraq, a secular murderous Arab despot - a potential brake on fundamentalism in the region - has been overthrown and the real possibility of Iraq coming under the power of fundamentalist mullahs grows by the day.
Daily the whole of southern Iraq is coming under Iranian influence. The reconstruction effort of the last year now lies in ruins. The reconstructed Iraqi army and police force, who recently refused to fight insurgency, cannot resolve the law and order problem.
Two of Iraq's major cities have now ceded from direct US control - Falluja, whose siege ended in defeat for the US marines, and the holy city of Najaf.
The price, in terms of lives and the global impact on US influence, is appalling.
An estimated 12,000 Iraqis, the vast majority civilians, have been killed, and American troop losses in the last month were greater even than those sustained during the three-week invasion.
But of even greater concern is the growing sense that for all its superpower military might, the United States has got itself into a political and military quagmire that it is unable to win, contain or easily withdraw from.
The grim parallel is actually not with Vietnam, but with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
That conflict eventually destroyed the morale of the Red Army, and its crippling aftermath in wider Soviet society became a significant factor in the collapse of the entire Kremlin system (Come to think of it, who better to relate the moral of this tale to the White House than their former friends in the Taliban, and even Osama bin Laden himself, whom the US armed and supported in that war with the Soviets?).
Given the growing evidence of the systematic use of torture and sensory deprivation in the Iraq and Afghanistan spheres, another covert American military mission has also blown up in their faces.
Throw in Guantanamo Bay, and a policy of capturing and holding hostages, thousands of mostly non-combatants, for intelligence-gathering on Iraq and Afghanistan. It raises a truly terrifying spectre.
Further, given that Guantanamo is a legal no-man's land and the US has "occupying power" legal status in Iraq, the Bush administration is actually secretly making war on thousands of civilian non-combatants - beyond any of the normal rules of justice.
Bush's refusal in 2001 - before 9/11 - to allow the US to come under the auspices of the International Court of Justice now points up the long-term ambitions of this administration.
Given the American conduct in Vietnam, there is nothing surprising about their behaviour in Iraq. In Vietnam, two million Vietnamese civilians were killed, mostly by American bombing and the extensive use of chemical weapons like Agent Orange and napalm.
Meanwhile, the use of torture and sensory deprivation was widespread.
General Westmoreland famously decorated his desk with the shrunken heads of Dead Vietcong, and many Marines collected ears, penises and teeth as trophies from the dead on the battlefields.
To kill and torture civilians you first have to dehumanise them, and en route to Vietnam, American recruits were taught that the Vietnamese did not have the same attitudes to life and death as westerners.
One could not look at Lynndie and Charlie's pictures without sensing that the same dehumanisation process is under way again.
The chilling message is that America is gearing up for its war on terrorism by inculcating in its troops a racist attitude to Arabs and the Muslim world in general.
Even the extensive use of torture and sensory deprivation on Iraqi non-combatants, whose useful information would be minimal, suggests that experimentation may be the real purpose.
Experimentation with techniques (particularly their sexual subtext) designed to break down Muslim sensibilities, and therefore to develop specific techniques for the torturers, for wars ahead.
Presumably, Lynndie and Charlie's wedding plans are on hold at the moment - like a lot of other things in America at the moment.
UGLY AMERICANS PART OF BUSH'S 'NO RULES' WAR
09/05/04 00:00
By Tom McGurk
They should be on the Jerry Springer Show. They probably will be yet. This, folks, is a good old country boy meets girl love story with a sting in the tail.
Or even an Iraqi on a dog lead if you like. Folks, meet Miss Lynndie England and her beau, Charles Graner.
Lynndie is a trailer-park queen from Appalachian country who used to work in a chicken factory, but went off to Iraq with 372 Military Police Company to do her bit in the war on terrorism. All week, Lynndie's mom has been on the steps of their mobile home, telling the media about how her girl was just doing her job.
Anyway in Iraq, Lynndie met big Charlie, a former prison officer from Uniontown. Charlie, seemingly, is a good God-fearing boy too.
Journalists report that he even has a quote from the Book of Hosea painted on a stone outside his house. It reads: "Sow for ourselves righteousness, reap the fruit of unfailing love and break up your unplowed ground."
Thing was, both these young folk were kinda lonely over there in Iraq, having just both been divorced before they left. And what do you think but didn't they just fall in love in that prison there called Abu Gharib.
Yes sir, as they had a hootenanny every night with them there naked Iraqis, Lynndie and Charlie kinda got sweet on each other.
What a swell time too they had at their engagement party in the prison. Man, was that old jailhouse rocking! Not content with hanging her knickers on one of them naked Iraqi's heads, Lynndie then got herself a big dog lead and played ``hound dog'' with another.
Meanwhile, Charlie was sort of arranging more naked Iraqis in a big pile so that the good folks at home could see what a real bunch of assholes these guys were.
I suppose liberating these folks requires intimate knowledge, because then Lynndie got real playful and lined them all up, naked as they were born, so that she could see those Arabs in all their glory.
Then Charlie suggested that these Arab boys might go beating their meat and everybody got their digitals out for snaps for the good folk back home.
My, oh my.
Well, the good news is that love triumphed, and now Lynndie is in the family way, thanks to big Charlie.
The bad news is that she's in a cell, all alone up there in Fort Bragg Detention Center back in the States. Seems them folks up there in Washington don't see the joke. Seems somehow that they got the calculations wrong.
It's a year since George Bush announced "mission accomplished," so let's make that calculation. In Iraq, a secular murderous Arab despot - a potential brake on fundamentalism in the region - has been overthrown and the real possibility of Iraq coming under the power of fundamentalist mullahs grows by the day.
Daily the whole of southern Iraq is coming under Iranian influence. The reconstruction effort of the last year now lies in ruins. The reconstructed Iraqi army and police force, who recently refused to fight insurgency, cannot resolve the law and order problem.
Two of Iraq's major cities have now ceded from direct US control - Falluja, whose siege ended in defeat for the US marines, and the holy city of Najaf.
The price, in terms of lives and the global impact on US influence, is appalling.
An estimated 12,000 Iraqis, the vast majority civilians, have been killed, and American troop losses in the last month were greater even than those sustained during the three-week invasion.
But of even greater concern is the growing sense that for all its superpower military might, the United States has got itself into a political and military quagmire that it is unable to win, contain or easily withdraw from.
The grim parallel is actually not with Vietnam, but with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
That conflict eventually destroyed the morale of the Red Army, and its crippling aftermath in wider Soviet society became a significant factor in the collapse of the entire Kremlin system (Come to think of it, who better to relate the moral of this tale to the White House than their former friends in the Taliban, and even Osama bin Laden himself, whom the US armed and supported in that war with the Soviets?).
Given the growing evidence of the systematic use of torture and sensory deprivation in the Iraq and Afghanistan spheres, another covert American military mission has also blown up in their faces.
Throw in Guantanamo Bay, and a policy of capturing and holding hostages, thousands of mostly non-combatants, for intelligence-gathering on Iraq and Afghanistan. It raises a truly terrifying spectre.
Further, given that Guantanamo is a legal no-man's land and the US has "occupying power" legal status in Iraq, the Bush administration is actually secretly making war on thousands of civilian non-combatants - beyond any of the normal rules of justice.
Bush's refusal in 2001 - before 9/11 - to allow the US to come under the auspices of the International Court of Justice now points up the long-term ambitions of this administration.
Given the American conduct in Vietnam, there is nothing surprising about their behaviour in Iraq. In Vietnam, two million Vietnamese civilians were killed, mostly by American bombing and the extensive use of chemical weapons like Agent Orange and napalm.
Meanwhile, the use of torture and sensory deprivation was widespread.
General Westmoreland famously decorated his desk with the shrunken heads of Dead Vietcong, and many Marines collected ears, penises and teeth as trophies from the dead on the battlefields.
To kill and torture civilians you first have to dehumanise them, and en route to Vietnam, American recruits were taught that the Vietnamese did not have the same attitudes to life and death as westerners.
One could not look at Lynndie and Charlie's pictures without sensing that the same dehumanisation process is under way again.
The chilling message is that America is gearing up for its war on terrorism by inculcating in its troops a racist attitude to Arabs and the Muslim world in general.
Even the extensive use of torture and sensory deprivation on Iraqi non-combatants, whose useful information would be minimal, suggests that experimentation may be the real purpose.
Experimentation with techniques (particularly their sexual subtext) designed to break down Muslim sensibilities, and therefore to develop specific techniques for the torturers, for wars ahead.
Presumably, Lynndie and Charlie's wedding plans are on hold at the moment - like a lot of other things in America at the moment.
