The bizarre US diplomatic practice of backing oddball losers and megalomaniac lunatics has again paid off. We got a boy in Iran who is spoiling for a fight just when we need one.
I’d like to suggest that it’s a Republican practice. The elephant crowd were the bunch who supported Hitler in the 30’s. Pinochet certainly owed his ascendance and survival to the mad power-mongers of the corporate right (and fuck you Dita Beard). Noriega couldn’t have done it without the Torrijos plane crash, a Republican political technique both offshore and on, those plane crashes, and I know this because the BAD GUYS DO NOT DIE IN PLANE CRASHES, ONLY THE GOOD GUYS DO. Hussein must have been baffled when the US Republicans who empowered him turned on him. The guys who had him killing Kurds like Miz Muffet putting away a jug of whey turned on him like jackals and invaded, and tore down the very statues of him they had paid to erect. There are dozens of these globally powerful goons, enabled by the corporate right, supported by the full faith and credit of the US, then torn from power when it becomes expedient.
Consider the Ayatollah Khomeini. Making the best of a bad situation, it seems likely that Ronald Reagan’s corporate cronies intiated their twelve years of uninterrupted rape of the world’s economies with treasonous sabotage of the helicopters Jimmy Carter deployed to rescue the Americans held hostage in Iraq, thus assuring the election of the hideously incompetent old movie actor.
Only somebody who could suspect foul play by the right in the matters of Torrijos, Carnahan, Wellstone, the Kennedy scion, the Kennedy elders, and Martin Luther King could suspect that the Reagan/Bush regime began with high treason. It has of course been proven in the matter of the Iran-contra scandals that the regime – after the 1980 elections – certainly continued to operate from a moral, ethical, and legal swamp… that their actions ultimately constituted treason and without pardons many would still be in jail. These are facts.
With my consciousness wounded by events long past and cauterized by the day-to-day experience of reading a newspaper during these parlous times I may be desensitized to whatever strange street theater is emerging with the under-currents of discontent around the Persian restrictions on free speech. Memer sent me a link.
It’s about more than the Persian restrictions of course. We’re talking about the bad Burmese, and the easy to criticize Chinoisie. I recommend that everyone sign on. I’ve long been an Amnesty International supporter, much as they, the AI folks are probably embarassed by my calling top US leaders names like “treasonous scumbag Rumsfeld” and so on.
But I’ve been focusing on the voices raised against Persia, voices that seem to include their own. How the virtually unspellable Mahmoud Ahmadinejad thinks he can get away with holocaust denial in the Spiegel interview is beyond me. This has all the earmarks of somebody being played by an excellent espionage service. This reminds me of the time when Hussein drove deep into Kuwait. Oops. Papa George liked that! Kicked up the global warming a degree or two and got Meg Thatcher all wet. Like slant drilling the oil out wasn’t fast enough for Hussein. These guys only step on their own dicks like that when somebody is playing them. I think it’s Dan Brown. I think he ran across a couple of gnostic Koran scrolls and he’s threatened to write a novel about the prophet, a belly dancer and her Meccan floor show if they all don’t go out into the streets and dance the hootchie kootchie with Adolph.
Anyway, this guy Ahmudinyoureye is in office only because George Junior is in office and Ahmudinyoureye is only as weirdly twisted in his politically motivated jingoistic chauvinistic sick religious fundamentalism as his arch rival George Junior, and between them they have a pretty good sense of what goes on in the pitiful minds of the nauseatingly faithful of there own particular cults, but the problem is this…
George Junior has huge fucking bombs that will kill us all and poison the planet forever and the sad little fuck is stupid enough to use them. Ahmadinejad’s days are numbered because we need a good turn-out on the right for the aught-six elections, and only the religious faithful will be venturing out of the fallout shelters to vote, them being protected by Jesus and all. Does anybody see what’s wrong with this picture????
Maybe Ahmadinejad’s smarter than he sounds. “Holocaust” was once a perfectly good word, though it holocausting describes what was done to the inhabitants of Jericho by the army of Joshua and, like the Gillotine, ended up being applied to its inventor and … look whose been doing it since 1948! How history keeps rhyming… But I digress. Talking nukes and anti-Zionist is a good way to bump up the price of oil. Not a dumb thing to do if oil is what you sell.
Dumb if you want to profit from selling it.
Frank –
On Carter’s rescue mission: I seem to recall that it was not sabotage, but the (as far as I know) still-unaccounted-for use of helicopters which could not be used in the desert without their engines becoming clogged.
Add to that the mysterious substitution of the highly-trained and thoroughly-drilled crews with inexperienced ones only a few days before the mission, and “something funny is going on here”.
On slant drilling: I’ve found no references to slant drilling by Iraq into Kuwait, but many for the other way around; in fact, that was Hussein’s justification for his invasion.
Sergei
p.s. on the “oddball loser” list: Let’s not forget how Reagan kept the Soviet Union going by forcing Gorbachev to walk away from the Reykjavik summit through his insistence on keeping SDI, thus in effect backing the hardliners who said the US didn’t really want peace, and thereby extending the life of the USSR some five years by my estimate (this on top of cranking up the arms race, which had the same result). Very convenient….
SR
Sergei… both slant drilling and the Carter rescue mission needed unbiased research and reportage when there were still primary sources available for evaluation. Carter had no clue how the right wing played its games. He was an honest farmer – a simple man. Regarding slant drilling. Kuwait had but to stick a shovel in their little patch and they had a gusher every time. Seems unlikely they were actually doing it. On the other hand, seems quite likely that Saddam was doing it (this on the rubber/glue and liar-liar pants on fire principles).