I wonder if the torture incident in Iraq will become this generation’s My Lai?
I’ve little to say except that, by providing fodder for anti-American propaganda, what these morons did certainly had the effect, if not the intent, of providing aid and comfort to the enemy. Given that this occurred in the land of Hammurabi, I’m tempted to suggest that they get the same treatment, with live broadcast rights to Al Jazeera, but it would actually be too good for them.
[Update a few minutes later]
It’s already happening, in Pravda. Note the headline.
The scale of the UN Oil-for-Fraud programme is way beyond any of the corporate scandals that so excite the progressive mind. Oil-for-Food was designed to let the Iraqi government sell a limited amount of oil in return for food and other necessities for its people. Between 1996 and 2003, Saddam did more than $100 billion of business, all of it approved by Kofi Annan’s Secretariat.
In return, by their own official figures, $15 billion of food and health supplies was sent to Iraq. What proportion of this reached the sick and malnourished Iraqi children is anybody’s guess. Coalition troops discovered stockpiles of UN food far from starving moppets. But let us assume there is an innocent explanation. Even so, by the UN’s own account, Oil-for-Food seemed to involve an awful lot of oil for not much food.
So where’s the media that couldn’t get enough of the Enron scandal?
Robert E. Lee once remarked that it was good that war was so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it. Some apparently want to make war too terrible for us, so that we are no longer able to make it terrible for those who wish to end us.
“The Islamic and Arab world … expected the Palestinian Fatah and Hamas resistance movement combatants to take revenge for the bloodshed of martyr Sheikh Ahmed Yassin immediately,” he told the agency. “But [they] are unaware of the limitations and [the] amount of pressure imposed against the Palestinian combatants.”
Isn’t it a shame to disappoint “the Islamic and Arab world”? Not to mention their apologists in the west, who assure us daily that Israel’s tactics will just create more terrorism?
And this was interesting as well:
A leading Arab expert on Palestinian militant movements said in an interview that Hamas also might be deterred by the fear that a large-scale attack inside Israel would provoke Israel to kill Mr. Arafat
…Chirac was defending something quite different when he sent his erstwhile foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, around the world to buy votes against America at the United Nations. Chirac was determined to maintain Saddam Hussein in power so that two extraordinarily lucrative oil contracts, negotiated by the French, could go into effect…
…during the first seven years alone, it would earn the French around $50 billion. Elf-Aquitaine negotiated a virtually identical deal with Saddam to expand the gigantic Majnoon oil field as well. Put together, those two deals were worth $100 billion to the French. That
As Glenn points out, Fallujah isn’t Tet, and it’s not Mogadishu either. It does appear that the next attempt at dressing it up in old clothes (though not so old this time) will be to resurrect the myth of the Jenin “massacre,” and to try to make it appear of similar kind.
Many (including me) were wondering how, given Al Jazeerah’s record of running the most brutal films on air, they could have found the snuff film of the murdered Italian too gruesome. Tim Blair has the answer.