Imbecile Americans Empower Brutal Anti-American Fanatic
In Baghdad alone, whose vote is decisive in the election, Sadrist candidates, many of them political unknowns, were 6 of the top 12 vote-getters.
This tiny factoid is buried in the eleventh paragraph of an article in the New York Times with an already unpleasant headline...
Followers of Sadr Emerge Stronger After Iraq Elections
What does it mean?
If you want to cast a vote that says "I hate America," there is nobody in the world you could vote for and say "I hate America" more clearly than you can say "I hate America" by voting for Moktada al-Sadr, and Moktada al-Sadr just swamped all other parties in Baghdad, in an election that's supposedly the triumphant outcome of our genocidal occupation of Iraq.
Congratulations, imbeciles! You just spent at least a trillion dollars and killed more than 1,000,000 Iraqis and more than 5000 American soldiers to make a brutal anti-American fanatic the king of Baghdad!
Harharharhar!!!
This is what the imbecile George W. Bush created in 2003!
This is what the imbeciles John Kerry, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton, and 26 other Democrats and 48 Republican Senators voted for in 2002!
This is what the imbecile Senator Barack Obama voted to fund in 2005 and 2006 and 2007 and 2008!
This is what the imbecile President and Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama has been commanding for the last 14 months!
Congratulations, imbeciles! You just spent at least a trillion dollars and killed more than 1,000,000 Iraqis and more than 5000 American soldiers to make a brutal anti-American fanatic the king of Baghdad!
Harharharhar!!!
http://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=13383
March 17, 2010 8:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
Funny, but it's impossible to connect with "defense.gov"
March 18, 2010 3:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
Signed the petition noted, Ruta. Thanks for your tireless effort to make this issue matter.
March 17, 2010 9:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
Fine post.
It was decided some time ago that an American military force would be stationed in perpetuity in the middle of the Middle East. This worked (or seemed to work) to the advantage of a number of interests. Violence in Iraq is a fine excuse for keeping troop levels at combat-strength, so Sadr is more advantage than bane.
The architects of our tortured occupation are soulless and evil, of that I'm sure. But imbecilic? They've achieved just about everything they wanted. We the people are imbeciles for allowing this atrocity to continue.
March 17, 2010 9:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
Warmongers like this electoral result. It means they have yet another excuse for more bloodletting, more violence and more profits.
March 17, 2010 10:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
It is no surprise that the same people who brought us Iran-contra brought us this, in which a former health minister accused of running death squads is depicted as being adored by the Baghdad masses- presumably there was a death panel running these death squads? (there always is).
Cheney's minority opinion on Iran-contra, justifying its crimes, should have been used by Gore against him in 2000. But Democrats- I've wasted too many expletives against them already. And it was as true then as it is now that a blowjob is considered worse than a blowtorch to someone's face, and Gore was understandably reluctant to challenge this little prejudice on the part of the electorate, and it would have raised the specter of public officials being held accountable for breaking the law, or justifying thereof. John Yoo was taking notes.
March 17, 2010 11:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
Sadr is the future of Iraq and has been since this sorry mess started. We set fire to Fallujah, blew up Sadr City and for too long empowered Allawi to send out Sunni brute squads to kill Shia resistors.
But Sadr's continued empowerment is not an excuse for America to prolong its disastrous occupation. Sadr has proven himself as a diplomatic asset because his word actually makes changes and settles disputes. When he calls for a cease fire, there's a cease fire. When he lets loose the hounds, they bark and bite. He may be a soft Iranian asset due to religious beliefs, but he is a leader who is above all an honest broker.
If I were to make an educated guess, we are still going to leave. There is an unspoken risk right now in the region. Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are all growing unstable. The more we grip, the more tenuous our "allies" become. The noise in Israel is a byproduct of an internal debate. The debate is whether we go all in and tear the region apart, or we feint and move into a more dovish appearance while relying on our client states to act in our stead. The doves appear to be winning for now.
March 17, 2010 11:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are growing more unstable, as a direct consequence of our prolonging of these illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So i agree we need to get out of Iraq asap (and persecute those who got us there). The same logic applies to Afghanistan. Apologists for the Obama Administration sold the prolonging of the Afghan Occupation as a means of keeping Pakistan stable. Oh well, who cares about Pakistan here, or Jordan, or Iraq itself. if we did give a fuck about these places, we wouldn't have set out to wreck them one by one, even if it bankrupted us in the process- sheer inability to pay for more wars, and the associated collapse of our power, is the only thing that will allow the region to reach equilibrium- after a lot of bloodshed that's on our heads, whether we know it or not.
March 17, 2010 11:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
What's the evidence that Sadr is brutal? I haven't heard anything other than that he has opposed (even militarily) the occupation. If I were in his place, I would do that, too. Where's your evidence, Rootie? Reliable links, please?
March 17, 2010 11:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Your link on Al Sadr doesn't substantiate either the 'brutal' or the 'fanatic' Rootie. Nice try. Now, if you'd said that they just voted strongly for someone that the US largely disapproves of, you'd have had a decent argument going there.
Quit distorting a good argument's facts to try to make an extremely good argument that the facts just don't support. It makes you into a serial exaggerator, just like here.
March 17, 2010 12:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Who, then, was responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad which was what made Petraeus' "surge" such a political success for his boss?
Al-Sadr, and Iran, have done us plenty of favors, depending on how you define "us." And these favors were done in a brutal fashion. Most, if not all, of our wars of the last decade would have been impossible without Iranian encouragement.
I can't even decide if anti-Americanism isn't Americanism these days. After all, al-Sadr told his followers to use the political process we championed, unlike the followers of some blacklisted Sunnis who supported the glorious 'Awakening.'
Expecting the NYT to sort this out is asking too much. But that Sadrist health minister ended the article on a disturbing note, I think.
March 17, 2010 12:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
There are multiple links to Moktada and the Mehdi Army in my diary, and if you had followed them all, especially the link from the word "brutal," moron, you would have found this story...
And likewise elsewhere...
But if you actually gave a fuck about Iraq, you would already know all about the Mehdi Army, asshole.
And of course shit-head apologists for the US Occupation can always claim that nobody really knows how those drill-holes got into so many Sunni bodies in neighborhoods controlled by the Mehdi Army.
Maybe it was ants! Maybe pigeons pecked out the eyes of Sunni victims, and magically contrived to make it look like drill-holes.
Who really knows?
March 17, 2010 1:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree that the rise of Sadr is just one of many long term and unpleasant outcomes we will face from the invasion of Iraq. I also don't think any benefit we will gain from the invasion will be outweighed by the cost to us or Iraq.
However, I have to note a bit of irony in the 1 million plus casualty figure you are referring to. These numbers are derived from an opinion poll conducted in a war zone at the height of the fighting. Based on your rabid attacks on opinion polls that show Afghan support for the US role in Afghanistan, I thought you deepest held conviction about that war was that polls conducted in war zones are absolutely unreliable.
I am inclined to think that very possibly a million or more Iraqis may have died directly and indrectly due to this war, so I am not debating that number.
March 17, 2010 12:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is a lie.
The dim-witted promoter of genocide $#@ "mistakenly" claims that the two epidemiological surveys which are described in my link, and more fully in further links from that site, are really just "opinion polls."
$#@ probably hopes that his lie will have some semblance of credibility because ORB, one of the groups, in addition to Johns Hopkins University, which conducted the epidemiological surveys, also conducts opinion polls for numerous state and private clients, and virtually every other sort of survey all over Europe and the Middle East.
March 17, 2010 1:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
OK...opinion poll was a poor choice of word, but the technique was the same.
People went into areas of conflict and conducted surveys of households. If you can ask questions about deaths, you can just as easily ask questions of opinion.
Perhaps had the Afghan pollers asked about deaths, you would support that data and discount the opinion data collected at the same time.
Furthermore, the scope and intensity of the conflict in Iraq when the Lancet work was done was much greater than Afghanistan last year. This would seem to imply that it would be EASIER and SAFER to get reliable data in Afghanistan in 2009 than it was to do the same in Iraq in 2006.
It is obvious that your acceptance of data is tied more to how it supports your personal opinion than it is to how it is collected.
March 17, 2010 2:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
Nearly 60 million Americans voted in 2008 to continue the same policies in spades, instead of in clubs, while also voting to put a nitwit gold digger from Alaska a heartbeat away from the presidency.
They don't know and don't care about Iraq or who runs it, in fact, they never did care.
They just went along for the entertainment value of it all, and the thrill of watching their guy, George W. Bush, look War President tough, while he ordered Americans to their deaths looking for non-existent WMD in an unnecessary war.
Those 60 million voters are the real problem.
These voters supported, and still support, the politicians and policies that have done more damage to this country than anyone outside its borders.
March 17, 2010 1:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Got no game at all today, Ruta, but Rec.
March 17, 2010 2:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks, wendy. You've been working really hard lately digging around about drones and other grim subjects, while I yukked it up with my "martial arts" diary, so you totally deserve a vacation.
I wish I could send you here!
March 17, 2010 2:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
Aw, honey; it made me cry. I will use it as a desktop, and dream of floating in that warm salty water, healing and melting...thank you so very much, Ruta.
(blow, wipe, sniff.)
I've been working on a story in between, hopefully it'll be funny. WW's reading it; i had to ask her, "Uh...would this be a story? What IS a story?" Gotta love a true Meathead.
I frigging wore myself out laughing over Martial Arts. I was satire Extraordinaire! Ya got me laughin' again. Thanks, dear. I'll be better tomorrow. A big pack of crows are outside yelling...
March 17, 2010 4:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Reporting the people you know to have died is much less controversial than reporting you dislike the government.
March 17, 2010 7:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Both the article and our Rutabaga are a bit misleading.
About Rutabaga: the number do not suggest any "landslide" but project 40 seats, probably less than 1/4th of the Shia seats in the parliament.
So while definitely a "recovery", it is an incremental change in the political landscape.
About the article: it mentions more than twice that Sadrist were "rejecting the political process" in the past. This is quite misleading, if I recall. Basically, at least twice Sadrist were slanted for political, and perhaps physical eliminations, once by American offensive against them, once by Maliki with our assistance. Maliki also prohibited them once from participating in elections.
Apart from "sectarian violence" which is definitely vicious, internal Shia politics resemble Montagues and Capulettis of Verona. Basically, in middle ages, in each Italian city that was major enough to have its politics, each family of note was either Gibelline or Guelf, and bloody feuds were invariably aligned with that division (or vice versa). Both sides had some lofty ideas, like supremacy of Empire or Papacy or some such. In the same vein, Iraqi Shia clans tend to be Sadrist or Badrist, and for reasons that are hard to phatom Americans on the scene supported Badrists against Sadrists.
Perhaps our partiality is very easy to understand: Badrists are more modern, moderate, have leaders who actually speak English etc. On the other hand, both Badrists and Sadrists are aligned with their favorite Iranian grand ayatollahs. The patron of Badrist merely hates USA, while the patron of Sadrist is a fire breathing holocaust denying type. (Ahmedinejad seems to take the middle course.)
Each side has a more than fair share of brutal thugs, but the style is different. As noted above, electric drill is a Sadrist trademark. Badrist prefer gentler methods, like torturing in the dungeons of Interior Ministry. Or packing captives so tightly that they suffocate.
Iraqi politics was never for faint-hearted, and there is no gentle soul left that has any political influence. Why we should support ANYBODY over there, apart from the fear of some little domino effect, I do not know.
A poll:
Suppose that Iran would propose a deal: they give us uranium centrifuges etc. and we evacuate Iraq.
a. would you support that
b. would our government support that
c. would Israeli government support that
March 17, 2010 11:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for your semi-literate comment, piotr, with "phatom" for "fathom," "Gibelline' for "Ghibelline," "Capulettis" for "Capuleti," and, in general, your hash of pseudo-erudition and Italy and Iraq, as well as your outright distortions and misquotes of what I wrote.
Those quotes quote nobody, and I didn't employ the word "landslide" in my diary.
But piotr's ludicrous inability to read or write English or Italian wouldn't really matter if he knew fuck-all about Iraq, and didn't make ludicrous mistakes like analyzing Sadrism according to clan allegiance, when it's really a cult of personality centered on Moktada and originating in the vast slum and melting-pot of Sadr City, which is exactly the place in Iraq where clans are least influential.
March 18, 2010 4:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
And your deep knowledge of international affairs comes from your work as the National Enquirer bureau chief in the Middle East??
Your penetrating analysis is wasted at People and the Enquirer. You should move up to the Weekly World News.
March 18, 2010 6:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
Readers who don't read the National Enquirer should know that Hollywood paparazzi named Palinator "Worst Impersonator of the Year," because of "her" see-through dress.
Harharharhar!!!
It's scary!
March 18, 2010 1:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Why do you behave like this, Jacob?
March 27, 2010 1:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yao!! I've been outed!!! He figured out that I am a dirt ball parasite just like him. BTW, the dress leaves much too much to the imagination to be counted as see through.
March 27, 2010 9:17 PM | Reply | Permalink