After the Pledge of Allegiance

Another long article and the best on Iraq I've read yet. Eliot Weinberger, using the words of those responsible, creates a timeline detailing the fraud and travesty the invasion was and still is. I found it in the London Review of Books. If nothing else, it shows how flawed human memory fails to connect the dots--one of the prime vehicles for George Bush's political success. As far as I'm concerned, every single person in the USA should be forced to read this, not that it would change the deranged thinking of those who have their heads firmly lodged in their asses.

Actually, it just occurred to me how this would lend itself to a dramatic reading. Three or four voices reciting the following would be quite dramatic. There would be a few hurdles (Weinberger's permission, and so forth), but it could be done. Just imagine, Eliot Weinberger, playwright.

My quotes are only a fraction of the original article. The whole thing must be read.

In 1992, a year after the first Gulf War, I heard Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, say that the US had been wise not to invade Baghdad and get `bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq'.

I heard him say: `The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is: not that damned many.'

In July 2001, I heard Condoleezza Rice say: `We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.'

On 11 September 2001, six hours after the attacks, I heard that Donald Rumsfeld said that it might be an opportunity to `hit' Iraq. I heard that he said: `Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.'

I heard that Condoleezza Rice asked: `How do you capitalise on these opportunities?'

Step by step he convicts the players in their own words.

I heard the president, in the State of the Union address, say that Iraq was hiding materials sufficient to produce 25,000 litres of anthrax, 38,000 litres of botulinum toxin, and 500 tons of sarin, mustard and nerve gas.

I heard the president say that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium - later specified as `yellowcake' uranium oxide from Niger - and thousands of aluminium tubes `suitable for nuclear weapons production'.

I heard the vice president say: `We know that he's been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.'

I heard the Pentagon spokesman call the military plan `A-Day', or `Shock and Awe'. Three or four hundred cruise missiles launched every day, until `there will not be a safe place in Baghdad,' until `you have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes.'

I heard the spokesman say: `You're sitting in Baghdad and all of a sudden you're the general and thirty of your division headquarters have been wiped out. You also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power, water. In two, three, four, five days they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted.'

I heard him say: `The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never contemplated.'

I heard Major-General Charles Swannack promise that his troops were going to `use a sledgehammer to smash a walnut'.

Relentlessly he proceeds.

I heard an American soldier say: `There's a picture of the World Trade Center hanging up by my bed and I keep one in my Kevlar. Every time I feel sorry for these people I look at that. I think: "They hit us at home and now it's our turn."'

I heard about Hashim, a fat, `painfully shy' 15-year-old, who liked to sit for hours by the river with his birdcage, and who was shot by the 4th Infantry Division in a raid on his village. Asked about the details of the boy's death, the division commander said: `That person was probably in the wrong place at the wrong time.'

I heard an American soldier say: `We get rocks thrown at us by kids. You wanna turn around and shoot one of the little fuckers, but you know you can't do that.'

I heard the Pentagon spokesman say that the US did not count civilian casualties: `Our efforts focus on destroying the enemy's capabilities, so we never target civilians and have no reason to try to count such unintended deaths.'

I heard him say that, in any event, it would be impossible, because the Iraqi paramilitaries were fighting in civilian clothes, the military was using civilian human shields, and many of the civilian deaths were the result of Iraqi `unaimed anti-aircraft fire falling back to earth'.


As the riots and looting broke out, I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: `It's untidy, and freedom's untidy.'

And when the National Museum was emptied and the National Library burned down, I heard him say: `The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it twenty times, and you think: "My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?"'

I heard that 10,000 Iraqi civilians were dead.

I heard the vice president say that the war would be over in `weeks rather than months'.

I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: `It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.'

I heard Donald Rumsfeld say there was `no question' that American troops would be `welcomed': `Go back to Afghanistan, the people were in the streets playing music, cheering, flying kites, and doing all the things that the Taliban and al-Qaida would not let them do.'

I heard the vice president say: `The Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami predicts that after liberation the streets in Basra and Baghdad are "sure to erupt in joy". Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad. Moderates throughout the region would take heart. And our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced.'

I heard the vice president say: `I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators.'

I heard Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi foreign minister, say: `American soldiers will not be received by flowers. They will be received by bullets.'

Their own words convict them.

I heard that air force regulations require that any airstrike likely to result in the deaths of more than 30 civilians be personally approved by the secretary of defense, and I heard that Donald Rumsfeld approved every proposal.

I heard the marine colonel say: `We napalmed those bridges. Unfortunately, there were people there. It's no great way to die.'

I heard the Pentagon deny they were using napalm, saying their incendiary bombs were made of something called Mark 77, and I heard the experts say that Mark 77 was another name for napalm.

I heard a marine describe `dead-checking': `They teach us to do dead-checking when we're clearing rooms. You put two bullets into the guy's chest and one in the brain. But when you enter a room where guys are wounded, you might not know if they're alive or dead. So they teach us to dead-check them by pressing them in the eye with your boot, because generally a person, even if he's faking being dead, will flinch if you poke him there. If he moves, you put a bullet in the brain. You do this to keep the momentum going when you're flowing through a building. You don't want a guy popping up behind you and shooting you.'

I heard the president say: `We're rolling back the terrorist threat, not on the fringes of its influence but at the heart of its power.'


I heard the president say: `Today, on bended knee, I thank the Good Lord for protecting those of our troops overseas, and our Coalition troops and innocent Iraqis who suffer at the hands of some of these senseless killings by people who are trying to shake our will.'

I heard that this was the first American president in wartime who had never attended a funeral for a dead soldier. I heard that photographs of the flag-draped coffins returning home were banned. I heard that the Pentagon had renamed body bags `transfer tubes'.

I heard a tearful George Bush Sr, speaking at the annual convention of the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, say that it was `deeply offensive and contemptible' the way `elites and intellectuals' were dismissing `the sowing of the seeds of basic human freedom in that troubled part of the world'. I heard him say: `It hurts an awful lot more when it's your son that is being criticised.'

I heard the president's mother say: `Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? Why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?'

I'll stop quoting here, but by all means read the whole article.