<in 1980 Saddam was one of the nicer guys in the ME>
OK, that makes it clearer. Your definition of "nice guy" depends entirely on whether someone is willing to be useful to the U.S. government. "Nice guys" can do torture, mass murder, founding a totalitarian state (all of which Saddam had a long track record of doing, by the time of his smiling Rumsfeld photo-op). He only fell out of the category of "nice guy" (or "fairly nice guy") when he invaded Kuwait (without permission from Washington). Everything is forgiven, all sins are overlooked, until then. Saddam's war of aggression against Iran was "nice", but his war of aggression against Kuwait was "not nice", because Kuwait was part of the American Empire, and Iran wasn't.
As Arundhati Roy says:
Most nations have adequately hideous family secrets. So it isn't often necessary for the media to lie. It's all in the editing--what's emphasized and what's ignored. Say, for example, India was chosen as the target for a righteous war. The fact that about 80,000 people have been killed in Kashmir since 1989, most of them Muslim, most of them by Indian security forces (making the average death toll about 6,000 a year); the fact that in February and March of 2002 more than 2,000 Muslims were murdered on the streets of Gujarat, that women were gang-raped and children were burned alive and 150,000 driven from their homes while the police and administration watched and sometimes actively participated; the fact that no one has been punished for these crimes and the government that oversaw them was re-elected...all of this would make perfect headlines in international newspapers in the run-up to war.
Message 19725231
It's all in the editing... |
