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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (170296)	5/31/2003 2:02:28 PM
From: TGPTNDR	Respond to of 1580056

An interesting Blog from Baghdad. dear_raed.blogspot.com An excerpt: 17/4 Too much has happened the last couple of days but my head is as heavy as a lead boulder. Hay fever time. The sexual life of palm trees makes me weep. I still can’t bring myself to sleep upstairs, not that anything too serious happened after that night but I rather sleep under as many walls and roofs as possible, fist size shrapnel gets thru the first wall but might be stopped by the next, seen that and learned my lesson. So the million dollar question is of course “what the fuck happened?”. (Syrian/Lebanese/Iraqi) Fedayeen were somewhere in the area. It has become a swear word, dirtyfilthy and always followed by a barrage of verbal abuse. Syrian, Lebanese and of course Iraqi sickos who are stupid enough to believe the Jennah-under-martyrs-feet rubbish. They want to die in the name of Allah, so what do they do? Do they stand in front of “kafeer infidel aggressor”? No they don’t because they are chicken shit. They go hide in civilian districts to shoot a single useless mortar shell or a couple of Kalashnikov shots which bounce without any effect on the armored vehicles. But the answer they get to that single shot is a hell of mortars or whatever on all the houses in the area from where the shot came. This has been happening all over Baghdad, and in many places people were not as lucky as we have been here in our block. Sometimes you didn’t even know that those creepy fucks have moved into your street for the night. All over Baghdad you see the black cloth with the names of people killed during these things. It is even worse when the Americans decide to go into full battle mode on these fedayeen, right there between the houses. I have seen what has happened in Jamia and Adhamiya districts. One woman was too afraid to go out of her house hours after the attack because she had pieces of one of these fedayeen on her lawn. Now whenever fedayeen are seen they are being chased away. Sometimes with rocks and stones if not guns. If you have them in your neighborhood you will not be able to sleep peacefully. The stupid fucks. For some reason the argument that if he wants to die then he should do it alone and not take a whole block down with him does not hit home. As if the crazy loonies from Syria are not enough Iraqis are doing quite the damage themselves. Looters. How to explain this? Does anyone believe those who go on TV and say no-not-us, must-be-from-abroad (they mean Kuwaitis but they are scared to say it) explain all the looting that has been going on. How much can we blame on “the systematic destruction of Iraq by foreigners” and how much on the Iraqis themselves. I heard the following on TV don’t know who said it: “if Jengis Khan turned the Tigris blue from the ink of the manuscripts thrown in it, today sky has been turned black by the smoke rising from the burning books”. Try to rationalize and fail. The same crowd who jumped up and down shouting “long live saddam” now shouts in cameras “thank you Mr. Bush” while carrying whatever they could carry. Thank you indeed. This is not the people reclaiming what is theirs, these are criminal elements on the loose. So how clean are the hands of the US forces? Can they say “well we couldn’t do anything” and be let off the hook? Hell no. If I open the doors for you and watch you steel am I not an accomplice? They did open doors. Not to freedom but to chaos while they kept what they wanted closed. They decided to turn and look at the other side. And systematically did don’t show up with their tanks until all was gone and there was nothing left. We sealed ourselves away. There is nothing a voice calling for restraint can do in front of a mob. Oh and thanks for the tank in front of the national museum. And the couple of soldiers on it lounging in the sun while the looting goes on from the back door. Since we’re talking about looting, Do you know who was the biggest smuggler in recent years was? Arshad, Saddam’s personal guard for a very long time. He even tried once to get the head of one of the winged minotaur in Nineveh out of the country some years ago but it turned to a fiasco and he had to get back to the smaller things, and a Tikriti officer offered G. 70 pieces from the National Museum a couple of days after the reported looting, he and his other Tikriti friends had 150 pieces plus other pieces from a much later period. (They turned out to be not the real thing but copies, at least that is what the Americans told G. when he showed them photos of the stolen pieces but that is another story). A ten minute walk from the National Museum, the Saddam Arts Center is showing now white stains on its walls instead of the collection of modern art it used to have. Some of the paintings were not stolen, they were slashed or shot. Now that is a nice concept for you, hate a painting? Go shoot it. Strange thing. There are places where if you are seen with a weapon these days and shoot it you end up dead, but it seems that if you are shooting paintings or blowing up vaults no one minds the weapons. The worst is of course that idiot Al-Zubaidi and his so called Civil Administration. Did you see on TV those police cars and police men he supposedly got to work. I saw them on TV too, that is about the only place I have seen them. People in districts with a strong social fabric took over the police stations themselves and were stopping and arresting the criminals themselves. Police, don’t make me laugh. Too depressing. I see Raed and G. every couple of days. G in one of his impossible and crazy adventures ended up working with a Guardian team. I am just too glad that I see them again. The whole issue of American presence and Iraqi government makes us argue until we are too tired to talk. Usually Raed ends up calling me and G. pragmatic pigs with no morals and principles. He wants to stick a sign on my forehead saying “Beware! a Pragma-pig”. He talks of Invading forces and foolish loonies (me) who believe that the US will help us build a democracy. But what we all agree upon is that if the Americans pull out now we will be eaten by the crazy mullahs and imams, G. has decided that this might be a good time to sell our souls to the (US) Devil. ============ It reminds me of the Buchanan editorial titled something like 'Have we hit the Tar Baby'. The world is watching, and I think the Bush administration is losing credibility. Most folks, I think, now believe the WMD story to have been pure excuse. -tgp