Melville Cooke "Their forces committed suicide by the hundreds... The battle is very fierce and God made us victorious. The fighting continues. Yesterday, we slaughtered them and we will continue to slaughter them."
Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, April 7, 2003, Fox News website.
'The more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity that's available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become.'- George Bush, the unelected occupant, White House, Washington, USA, on the four Baghdad suicide bombings, October 26
The Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf was the comic relief during the brief assault on Iraq, and more specifically Baghdad earlier this year.
The US press had a rollicking good time, as he spoke about the Iraqi forces beating back US and British troops, even as he had to speak above the roar of said troops that were beaten back and defeated.
If you thought that was funny, though, check Georgie's response to the co-ordinated suicide bombing attacks in Baghdad on October 26, which targeted the Red Cross and Iraqi police stations.
In addition to the quoted comment he made another typically profound observation, which said in essence that the attacks were a sign that the 'terrorists' are getting desperate, as they were taking on 'soft' targets.
(I saw it on television, I have been unable to locate the exact quote on the web).
Soft targets? About two days later the desperate 'they' took care of an Abrahams tank and cooked a US soldier and on Sunday it was the Chinook helicopter, with 16 dead. Soft targets? The man must be soft in the head.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast, but George the lesser one must have as many breasts as the KFC outlet nearest you. While the deaths of American soldiers take the headlines, they are the least of what is happening in Iraq.
The Guardian and Independent out of the UK give a much fuller picture of what is happening, including Iraqi civilian casualties, which the US forces simply do not count. They do not keep track of how many innocent people they kill.
Just when you think it cannot get worse than the Jamaican police, Uncle Sam goes one better. Or a couple thousand. Well, they don't seem to count the British troops either 19 of them have died since Bushie's 'Mission Accomplished' farce on May 1.
It takes either a very perceptive or very stupid person to find a positive security situation in the co-ordinated suicide bombings in Baghdad of October 26, coming on top of the continued potshots and explosive greetings US troops are getting. And, from where I sit, that son of a Bush is as close to genius as Jesus is to coming back to Earth in 2000.
So the more things change, the more they remain the same. One more comic insisting that things are going well in Iraq, this time from the other side of the farce of a conflict. And this time, it isn't even remotely funny.
He has not kept up with his movies, though. There is a scene from 'Godfather II' in which Michael Corleone is in Cuba. He sees a policeman in the Batista regime (US-backed, of course) attempting to arrest a Fidelista, who simply detonated a grenade, killing himself and the policeman. It was then that Michael Corleone knew the US' happy go lucky days in Havana were over.
You cannot beat down a people of whom significant numbers are quite willing to die to take out a few or many of the enemy. Not if they have access to weapons. And Iraq has plenty of that a lot of it US made. Now that is what you call return to sender.
We do have this tendency, though, to get caught up in the details of this ongoing conflict and forget the fundamentals, which have not and will not change. George Bush is an unelected leader - a squatter in the presidential position if you will - who led an illegal and unjustified invasion of a country to depose a man who was in that position as a friend of the United States. That is the bottom line, not how well things are going in Iraq.
Things cannot go well in Iraq. What dressed up flatulence which passes for US press coverage there hardly reports of the successful targeting of Iraqis who are collaborating with the occupying forces. If they leave now, there is a civil war. If they stay, there is protracted killing. If they try to turn over to an Iraqi government and stay in the background (as if they know how to do that) it is still mayhem, because how democracy runs in the US' view is that elections are fair only as long as their man wins.
INSURGENCY IN IRAQ
There is lots of talk of foreign fighters and terrorists carrying out an insurgency in Iraq. So what, pray tell, are US and British troops who leave all the way from their country to overthrow a government because they have the ability and the desire to do so? Are they not foreign to Iraq? Are they not terrorising a civilian population, at least 6,000 of whom they killed during the heavy bombing? Did they not carry out an insurgency, overthrowing a government against the express wishes of the world's majority?
It is the right of a people to resist an illegal and immoral occupying force and if their friends choose to help them, then more power to said friends, wherever they come from.
And frankly, a suicide bomber is a patriot who cannot fly.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
