It All Stinks
Ivins, Molly
Small Favors Molly Ivins It All Stinks As a matter of actual fact, it's quite difficult to convince people you are killing them for their own good. A hard sell. That's where we are in Iraq. What...
...Only then will the Middle East start to change...
...If we go back and try to rectify our initial mistake, which was not going in with enough troops, we have several problems...
...For those like Tom Friedman who bought the idea that Iraq was the key to saving the Middle East, it is high time to return to the same old boring, difficult conclusion all the other Administrations, diplomats, and scholars settled on: First we have to find an Israeli-Palestinian accord...
...First, we need about 500,000 troops to establish security in Iraq...
...The June 30 hand-off is a joke, as The Wall Street Journal has reported extensively...
...Retired General Anthony Zinni suggests we largely retreat to border camps and go to countries in the region asking for five or six American-trained Arab officers for each battalion...
...and it's just silly to pretend that it's all the work of Zarqawi or old Ba'athists or of crazy Shiite clerics...
...Violence continues to beget violence (duh...
...These officers would then be put on the planning staffs of each unit, finally providing some cultural sensitivity...
...Neal Johnston, a New York City lawyer, wrote Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with some interesting questions: "When next you testify in front of a Congressional committee, would we be more likely to get the truth out of you if you were stripped naked, strapped to a board upside down, and occasionally dunked into a vat of water until you thought you were drowning...
...If you can't stop yourself from saying "I told you so," say it very quietly...
...I saw an interview with a West Point cadet about to graduate who said, "Our instructors tell us what happened at Abu Ghraib was leadership failure...
...And, of course, we have damaged ourselves there, too...
...In the middle of this charming mess along comes Abu Ghraib...
...All right, what else...
...What is to be done...
...We don't have 500,000 troops...
...If the low-level soldiers who are being court-martialed are "the morons who lost the war" and "poor white trash" and all this ugly stuff they've been called, then what does that make the men who gave them their orders...
...We are occupying a country brutally and clumsily and creating the opposition as we go...
...Would you be more likely to tell the truth at your next press conference if a rolled up copy of the Bill of Rights were stuck up a delicate portion of your anatomy...
...And as though everything else were hunky-dory, the neocons' favorite con man Ahmad Chalabi is now under suspicion of spying for Iran...
...Our only chance of getting 500,000 is to convince the allies to chip in that much and it appears to be too late for that...
...No, we are not nearly as brutal or clumsy as others have been, but we carry with us the entire weight of imperialist history...
...Yep...
...From the initial announcement that we would not observe the Geneva Conventions, which we signed to protect our soldiers, you could tell we were in trouble, and the evidence has been accumulating...
...Paul Bremer's CPA has been busy picking the Iraqis and their American advisers down to low levels who will be "running" Iraq once it regains "sovereignty...
...I don't want to hear anyone saying, "Nyah, nyah, you were wrong, go eat worms...
...The sovereignty adviser will be John Negroponte, a man complicit in one of the worst human rights excesses in Central America in the 1980s...
...Molly Ivins, co-author of "Bushwhacked," writes in this space every month...
...The men in nice suits with big salaries and big titles: What does that make them...
...There's not much material for comedy in all this and still less for snotty, partisan sniping...
...The fact that the prisoners at Gitmo were being denied lawyers, that there was a seventy-two-point procedure for putting pressure on them signed off on by high authorities . . . it all stinks...
Vol. 68 • July 2004 • No. 7
