🚀 go-pugleaf

RTO Trainer wrote:

> 
> Our reputation is quite intact.
> 

An eccentric notion, at best.  Consider this, out of a major British paper:

_______________________________________________________________________

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1357345,00.html

http://tinyurl.com/6ry3y   (alternate URL)


No one is taken in by the US lies 
The graves of Falluja show the reality of Iraq's occupation 
 
Rana Kabbani
Tuesday November 23, 2004
The Guardian 
 
In an ideal world, the US-appointed interim prime minister of Iraq, Ayad
Allawi, would find himself answerable for his craven obeisance to his
American overlords, instead of using this week's Sharm el-Sheikh conference
as an excuse to condemn those who are fighting back against occupation.

A year and a half ago, CIA wings wafted him and his ilk back to
long-suffering Baghdad, the ancient capital of a resilient Arab people, who
had somehow survived two devastating wars, 13 years of history's most
punitive sanctions, the all-consuming degradations of life under a
totalitarian regime, the destruction and occupation of their country by a
motley crew of US soldiers, British tag-alongs, "a coalition of the coerced
and the bribed" - to use John Kerry's once radical phrase - and the harpies
and carpetbaggers in the form of American private contractors, corporate
swine, exiled Iraqi fraudsters, and professional torturers. Iraqis watched
helplessly as their country's infrastructure was destroyed - electricity,
sewerage, houses, hospitals, schools, libraries, bridges, roads - and as
their national treasures were allowed to be looted, and their natural
resources robbed.

Now they are bankrupt, riven with preventable disease, chafing under
emergency laws and watching as respectable political figures are roughed up
and arrested for their party's stance on the methods of the occupation.
There has been a regression to Saddamite tactics - one Islamist
politician's daughter and grandchildren were reported to have been arrested
when he could not be found. Press freedom is muzzled, and directives are
issued to the media to follow the interim-government line on Falluja, or
else. But the graves of Falluja speak for themselves: "Ya Allawi, ya jaban.
Ya 'ameel al-Amercaan. Sheel idak, sheel idak. Hatha shaabak mai reedak!"

This rousing chant, in Iraqi vernacular, which calls on Allawi to make
himself scarce for being a coward and an American agent, is being chanted
throughout the cities of Iraq in furious demonstrations. Al-Jazeera showed
one of these last week, which may explain why Allawi scurried over to the
more supine al-Arabiyya satellite station (which most Arabs sneer at,
although not quite as hard as they do at al-Hurra, the Pentagon-financed
and controlled propaganda station). There he denounced al-Jazeera yet
again, having already closed down its offices more than three months ago,
and harassed and insulted their journalists.

In this, he was merely following in the footsteps of his American
taskmasters, who sought to blow al-Jazeera off the face of the earth, first
in Kabul, then in Baghdad, for allowing Arabs to see what the US was up to.
What with embedded journalists giving us asinine reports on all other
stations, using marine-corps terms as though there were no others ever
taught them, and with Tony Blair forbidding anyone to parody Bush,
al-Jazeera has become more necessary than ever, simply because it lets
Arabs speak their minds freely, with eye-witness reports of the most
uncensored and unpackaged sort.

The fighting feminism on its For Women Only programme puts institutionalised
western feminism to shame. All that manufactured outrage over the burka,
which rose to a climax precisely as bombs fell on Afghanistan; where are
the cries of outrage now, when Iraqi women are being incarcerated and raped
in US dungeons, where tens of thousands of their menfolk are also being
held; when they are being starved, denied drinking-water, bombed, buried
alive in the rubble of their homes, maimed and killed? It will prove to be
America's dirtiest war by far, and the one that destroys forever its sense
of purpose and pride.

Three million people had to die in south-east Asia before that arrogant
American imperial misadventure ended. How many now?

In this newspaper, Allawi's deputy prime minister called Falluja a necessary
exercise, to root out "Saddam loyalists and foreign fighters", parroting
Donald Rumsfeld's pathetic line that all the "terrorists" come from across
the border, or are "dead-enders" from Ba'athist days. But the only deadly
dead-ender is someone who could mendaciously argue thus.

All Iraqis watch as their homes and mosques are desecrated by soldiers who
shoot injured men in the stomach in pre-emptive lunacy that mirrors that of
their leader. They and a billion Muslims watched as Americans forbade
families from burying their dead, and allowed stray dogs to gnaw the
corpses of pregnant women and toddlers on the mean streets of what was once
Falluja, during Id al-Fitr, Islam's Holy Feast. No one is taken in by the
lies and arrogance and greed of this racist war.

Iraq is an occupied country, with a proud and stubborn people, who will
never cease fighting till they are finally rid of their unspeakable
latter-day oppressors.


� Rana Kabbani is a writer and broadcaster



-- 
Triratanam sharanam gaccami
Dharmananda

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