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August
1, 2003
Joanne
Mariner
Stopping Prison Rape
Alex Coolman
Who Moved My Soap: Trivializing
Prison Rape
Steve
J.B.
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Stan Goff
Injury and Decorum: The Missing Wounded in Iraq
Wayne
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Europe Unplugs from the Matrix
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Wolfowitz the Censor
Elaine
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Ashcroft Loses Big in Puerto Rico
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July
31, 2003
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August
2, 2003
Sons
of Paleface
Pictures
from Death's Other Side
By DAVID VEST
George W. Bush's current adventure in Iraq began
with a missile fired wildly into a Baghdad neighborhood, based,
the president told us, on "darn good intelligence"
that Saddam Hussein was on the premises.
We now know how much that "darn
good intelligence" was worth.
The missile take-out order was to be
the first of several numbfumbling blunders, or miraculous escapes,
depending on your point of view, all of them accompanied by the
deaths of innocent civilians cut down in the hunt for the Ace
of Spades. While "coalition" troops complete with embedded
journalists (and embedded corporations) scoured the countryside
for him, Saddam turned up regularly on Iraqi TV, wading into
adoring suburban crowds and smiling.
Bush, meanwhile, had it on very good
intelligence that he had better not wade into any crowds, anywhere
on earth, that hadn't been hand-picked by Karl Rove.
Then came the statue-toppling photo-op
and Saddam was said to have escaped into Syria. Next he was in
a tunnel somewhere between Baghdad and Tikrit, like Dr. No or
 Goldfinger. Or driving a taxi
in Mosul. Or moving from house to house, every two or three hours.
Wherever he is, he has been releasing
more bootleg recordings than Dylan and the Dead combined, turning
up almost every other day with a taped commentary on events.
Think about it: he's the object of an incredibly intense manhunt,
yet he manages to be quoted on the news almost as often as Bush.
The Great Unificator, as if jealous of
the spotlight, held a rare news conference this week and heroically
came out ... against gay marriage. Excuse me? Did we elect Pat
Robertson president while I was out looking for Osama and Saddam?
No, right, I remember now -- we elected Al Gore.
Whoever claims to be president in Washington,
Saddam was still at large as of this morning, and said to be
wearing an exploding belt which he plans to activate whenever
U. S. forces get close enough to kill or capture him. I know,
it sounds a little like the time O.J. ran off in his white Ford
Bronco and threatened to kill himself on the freeway. But if
I were an Iraqi mail carrier, I'd tread lightly on my rounds.
With every day that passes in Iraq, the
odds increase that unless he fastens a bad buckle getting dressed
Saddam will leave this world, whenever it happens, on his terms
and not on George W. Bush's. Although the Pentagon has shut down
its online terrorism futures trading board, the smart money says
that the death of Saddam will be an even greater public relations
fiasco than what happened with his sons Uday and Husay.
With those two, whatever the reality,
millions of Iraqis were left convinced that the U.S. had hired
Igor away from Dr. Frankenstein's lab and sewn together some
body parts until they vaguely resembled human beings. Did no
one remember that Iraqis had seen these two on TV almost daily
for many years and knew what they looked like? Not to mention
the ruckus we raised when Arab TV showed pictures of American
casualties just a few short weeks ago.
With Saddam the problem will be infinitely
more complex. For one thing, he may escape yet again. For another,
he may blow himself to smithereens, leaving the U.S. with no
way to prove that he's dead. If he is killed "cleanly,"
reasonably intact and still recognizable, Iraqis will believe
it's one of his many body doubles who bought it. (Or he may have
escaped long ago, leaving us to chase shadows and stand-ins through
the back-alleys of Baghdad.)
In any event this parading of corpses
on TV is bound to have unintended consequences, not merely in
Iraq and abroad but in our own national psyche. Televising the
stitched-together versions of Uday and Husay broke new boundaries
of savagery, presenting us with the kind of archetypal images
that burn right down into the unforgetting areas of our brains,
not to say our souls. It is one thing to show us war's casualties,
an armless boy, a blinded Marine, a weeping mother. It is quite
another to display trophy pelts and blood-spattered human heads.
It reminds me of the scene in "The
Last of the Mohicans," where the last image the dying British
general takes with him into eternity is the sight of his slayer
Magua, sitting astride him, eating the general's own heart, freshly
ripped from his chest.
Yes, Saddam's sons were despicable monsters
whom no one will miss. Nor will anyone mourn Saddam if we are
able to get him. But we are supposed to be Americans. We don't
display the mutilated corpses of our enemies and crow about it.
Even James Baker, who can stomach almost anything, now wants
no part of an assignment to Baghdad.
I will never see the face of George W.
Bush again without also seeing those horrifying photos of Uday
and Husay. They are Dubya's sons now, more than they were ever
Saddam's, the indelible images of a presidency that brought us
a futures market in terrorism, a loss of civil liberties and
new levels of barbarity.
David Vest
writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. He and his band,
The Willing Victims, just released a scorching new CD, Way
Down Here.
He can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com
Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com
Weekend Edition Features for July 26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
NYT's Screws Up Again; Uday and
Qusay Deaths Bad for Bush; Gen. Hitchens at the Front
Gary
Leupp
Faith-Based Intelligence
Saul Landau
A Report from Syria
Stan
Goff
Bring 'Em On Home, Now!
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Book Cooking at Boeing
Andrew
Cockburn
The Sons Are Dead; Now the Blood Feud
Begins
Jason Leopold
CIA Points the Finger at the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans
Robert
Fisk
The Power of Death
Joanne
Mariner
Monsieur Moussaoui
M. Shahid
Alam
The Global Economy Since 1800: a Short History
Harry
Browne
Northern Ireland: the Other Faltering Peace Process
Fidel Castro
Moncada, 50 Years Later
Lula
Democracy Requires Social Justice
Edward
S. Herman
Refuting Brad DeLong's Smear Job on Noam Chomsky
Ron Jacobs
Guided by a Great Feeling of Love: a Review of Gordon's The Company
You Keep
Julie
Hilden
A Photographer, an Offer and Cameron Diaz's Topless Photos
Adam Engel
Man Talk
Poets'
Basement
Keeney, Witherup, Short, Nimba, Guthrie and Albert
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