Author: Muninn

“Good riddance, the world is a better place without you,” says Bush about the recent capture of one of world’s tyrants, Saddam Hussein. There is indeed much cause for celebration. While I agree wholeheartedly with the US president’s statement, we should remind ourselves of a number of things:

1) My government has put into power, funded, and supported militarily far more tyrants than it has overthrown (including Saddam). Let us not, in our euphoria, believe for a second that we are a benevolent empire.

2) There are hundreds of cruel men holding power in infamous regimes all over the world. These include many of America’s regional allies and Saddam’s neighbors. It once included Saddam himself. As has been the case throughout history, we befriend evil men when it suits the interests of our empire and we destroy them and denounce their atrocities for the same. Whatever the motives of the individuals who fight and die for them, nations are not and never have been the agents of justice.

3) The security of the Middle East is better without Saddam than with it. However, it is not entirely clear if the security of the region is net increased by the new presence of a US client state. It may well be that the new configuration will be ultimately more destabilizing, but this depends on a number of as yet unresolved variables.

4) If we rejoice for the capture of Saddam, let us at least not fool ourselves into thinking that we have attained the US goals of the conflict (though a personal goal of the Bush family and the dreams of millions of others have been realized). We have not found WMDs and more importantly, we have almost singlehandedly self-fulfilled the prophesy of violent opposition on almost a civilizational level. We have literally fed the flames of terrorism. We might as well have been spraying oxygen instead of water.

I’m back in the US until the end of the month spending time with family.

I was sitting in the airport in Houston, Texas (at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport no less) yesterday and getting my first taste of American media in a long time via airpot CNN. On the debate program “Crossfire” a CNN correspondent describes how he drove across Iraq to get to Baghdad. On the way, his team stop for gas, where there are 4 miles of gas lines.

He describes how his group of American ex-special forces CNN mercenaries pull in front of the line of Iraqis waiting to get gas, commandeer the gas station and keep everyone else away as they fill up with gas and drive on to Baghdad.

The fiery democrat debater (I don’t know his name) asks the correspondent the exact question that was on my mind when I heard this: Isn’t this exactly the kind of behavior that is stirring anti-American sentiment in Iraq?

Yes, he answered, but as a Westerner in a dangerous country, there was no other option…

What right does a bunch of American reporters and armed mercenaries have to cut in front of miles of waiting Iraqis and, by force of arms, commandeer an Iraqi gas station?

The answer is not, I believe, that this was some blatant act meant as an insult to the Iraqi people or that anyone there necessarily believed they were more important than anyone else in line.

It is the law of the jungle. In the absence of security provided by a state with a monopoly on organized violence, all parties, including but especially prone foreigners who are most likely to be targeted for attack, will act in such a way to protect themselves and achieve their goals.

However, let there be no illusion that the United States of America gives a damn about the Iraqi people, their rights, or their future. Also, let there be no surprise as to why we are despised by the people of Iraq as self-serving hypocrites.

A Taipei Times article mentions the results of a new survey which includes a question about Taiwanese identity:

“…given the choice of identifying themselves as Taiwanese, Chinese or both Taiwanese and Chinese, the proportion of people identifying themselves as Taiwanese had risen from 37 percent in late October to 50 percent.

Those who considered themselves both Taiwanese and Chinese had dropped from 48 percent in late October to 38 percent.

The poll did not, however, show the figures for people identifying themselves as Chinese.”

I suspect this trend will only continue.