'There was no one left to kill', declared General Norman Schwartzkopf [View All]

[madfloridian]

We don't talk about Iraq anymore. Not even at DU. It is almost a non-topic.

This is an article written in January. It refers back to the first Gulf War. It is unrelenting in its telling of that war. The media has been so complicit in presenting these two invasions of Iraq that it could be called a white wash.

'There was no one left to kill', declared General Norman Schwartzkopf

It was titled Operation Desert Slaughter. That seemed too graphic for the subject line.

Remember, this was the first invasion of Iraq. Only God really knows the reality of what we did this time.

It is seventeen years since America and Britain embarked on their 'Final Solution' for the population of Iraq. The forty two day carpet bombing, enjoined by thirty two other countries, against a country of just twenty five million souls, with a youthful, conscript army, with broadly half the population under sixteen, and no air force, was just the beginning of a United Nations led, global siege of near mediaeval ferocity.

Having, as James Baker boasted they would, reduced 'Iraq to a pre-industrial age', the country was denied all normality : trade, aid, telecommunications, power, sanitation, water repairs, seeds, foods, pharmaceuticals, medical equipment.

The Blitzkrieg on Iraq deliberately targeted all 'indispensable to survival'. Within twenty four hours, most was destroyed. The electricity went off within two hours, leaving patients on life support machines and vital equipment, babies in incubators, or those on oxygen to die. Refrigerators defrosted, all medicine needing refrigeration, blood banks and vital saline solutions for the injured were destroyed. Food rotted and between the bombing and the bank closures (latter for fear of looting) replacements were scarce to unbuyable.

It was the plan, they say. This is the war that was televised and sanitized all over our TV. It was made to look like we were heroes.

This was the plan by US Central Command, it seems, all along. The destruction of Iraq's water system has been described by Professor Nagy and Stephanie Miller as: 'a slow motion holocaust'. Few could have put it better.

We saw nothing of this on TV. The rest of the article is even more tragic. Yet our congress voted to invade them again in 2003. Why?

Did we not break them enough the first time?

I need to add one more statement.

'There was no one left to kill', declared General Norman Schwartzkopf after the Basra Road bloodbath, where even the injured holding white flags, and doctors accompanying them were obliterated.

But we had to go do it all over again. I don't want excuses or platitudes anymore. All of them knew what we did the first time. It was a vote of convenience.