Pawns in the game
I feel bad for the Iraqis.
I mean, really, come on….they’re governed by an asshole. (Yes, I’m only calling Saddam an asshole…the Hitler references are really a bit much.)
As if that wasn’t enough, they’ve lived under awful economic conditions partly caused by horrible sanctions from the West that the Clinton *and* Bush administrations (1 and 2) stubbornly refused to ease. (I blame Clinton more for this, actually; after all he was in office for EIGHT YEARS, during which time somewhere between 500,000 and a million Iraqis died.) They wouldn’t even allow things like syringes and antibiotics to be imported into Iraq, claiming they could be utilized in a biological weapons program.
And now, the Iraqis are once again just pawns in a game.
And who’s playing the game? Well, Saddam, the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, France, China and Russia.
Let’s start with the side of this conflict that’s closer to home. The United States’ interests in this are obvious. Bush has a personal hard-on for Saddam because his father was too impotent to properly finish him off the first time. Secondly, he’s an oil man, and Dick Cheney’s an oil man, and Condoleeza Rice is an oil man…err…woman, and the rest of the cabinet owns oil stock, and Saudi Arabia is one fucked up country on the verge of collapse, so they want to control Iraq’s oil and make a shitload of money for themselves and their college buddies. Imperialism, plain and simple…
…which brings us to the United Kingdom and Spain, a couple of formerly dominant Imperialists that apparently want to reclaim some of the former glory they’ve lost now that both of them have had their asses soundly kicked virtually everywhere in the world, leaving them with their moderately-sized, moderately important, countries. Only this time they’re just riding the Americans’ coattails.
But, with all this uber-evil flowing out of America and Britain and Spain, at least we have the altruistic French, Germans, Russians and Chinese, who are publicly decrying the Americans’ unilateral action, claiming that instead we need to find a “peaceful resolution” to the crisis.
I call bullshit.
France, Germany, China and Russia all have - surprise! - current economic interests with Saddam’s regime. Iraq is one of France’s biggest trading partners, the Germans and Russians and Chinese have helped the Iraqis with things like weaponry, energy and oil refining, among other things.
So, basically, the UN “Security for the Rich” Council revolves around the same old story: the powerful countries of the world are bickering about who should get to control and exploit one of the weaker powers of the world.
Tell me, is there anywhere in this madness where I can actually look for some semblance of…I dunno…fucking humanity?
I’ll be getting into this a whole lot more, because this whole thing just stinks. And it’s not just a minor smell; this is a flat-out, dead fish rotting in a pile of vomit kind of stench that just won’t go away. I’ll put it succinctly: Hussein, Bush, Blair, Chirac, Putin and Schroeder are a bunch of scumbag criminals whose collective actions are going to make the world royally suck (even more than it already does) for the next 20 years or so if they keep this up.