One hundred persons demonstrated against the continued failed US policies in Iraq. President Bush has timed the forced elections in Iraq to correspond to the period just before his state-of-the-union address, and there is little doubt he will take full advantage of the opportunity to extol the virtues of his policy. But it will take more than positive sound bites to convince the US population that the war in Iraq is going well. Previous comments left by visitors to this site have questioned the small number of participants appearing at protests claiming they represent an insignificant minority. A recent poll shows that that is not true. Fifty-eight percent of Minnesotans believe the war is going badly compared with 38% who believe that it is going well. “And by 56 percent to 33 percent, the Minnesotans polled said it would not be possible to hold a fair election in Iraq today, and by 52 percent to 42 percent, a majority predicted that Iraqis would not accept the legitimacy of the government that would be formed after Sunday's elections.”

Well, are the people of Minnesota right or are the elections in Iraq a “grand moment in history” as President Bush claims? Lets look at some facts.
Iraq is in chaos. It’s been that way since the occupation began. In many respects, the country is less ready for elections than when the US first conquered Baghdad. The US, which has the responsibility for maintaining law and order, cannot even keep Americans safe behind a walled fortress in Baghdad called the Green Zone. Today, just hours before the election, the US embassy was attacked and two Americans were killed. Meanwhile, the US is asking Iraqis to risk their lives to vote. How will the US protect Iraqi voters and the international election observers? Well, the US doesn’t have to worry about the election observers because they are not at risk – they are safe in Amman, Jordan where they intend to stay for the entire election. Iraq is just too dangerous for them to operate (and the US-run government will not let them enter the country).

What are the Iraqis voting for? Anyone reading this probably knows as much about the Iraqi elections as Iraqis do. There were roughly 7000 candidates represented on the ballot, but individual names are not listed. Instead, the names of political parties appear on the ballot. Within the last few days many of the candidates have dropped out of the race making the elections even less transparent. Further, the polling places are not being announced until the day of the election. No wonder numerous Iraqi groups are boycotting the elections. Most of these groups want elections to be held after the occupying forces leave Iraq.

Secular Iraqi groups argue that the appearance of political parties on the ballot rather than individuals raises the chance of dividing the country even more. Parties have developed around tribal, geographic and religious groups. Robert Fisk, a journalist and expert on the Middle East, reports that Sunni Muslim leaders throughout the region fear that the outcome will place Shiites in power and threaten their regimes, ones that are not democratic yet are friendly to US interests. Isn’t it ironic that the US supported Saddam Hussein to reduce the likelihood of a Shiite fundamentalist government taking root in Iraq and now the US will spend more than 300 billion to install that Shiite-fundamentalist government?

The cost to the US taxpayer has been enormous, but the cost to Iraqis is even more dear. Estimates are that more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, half of whom are women and children. Isn’t it wonderful how the US responded to the natural crisis of the Tsunami? Why then do Iraqi children die in silence? Is that liberation? Is that bringing the Iraqis freedom? Indeed, it’s shameful and it doesn’t represent family values.
Besides the friendly-fire deaths of innocent Iraqis, the US has soiled its reputation by promoting torture. We learned this week that in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the place where terrorist suspects have been held for years without trials, a group of women was assigned to use sex to threaten devoutly religious Muslim men. Because a group of women was ASSIGNED for this purpose, this is evidence that the torture represents policy rather than low-level, rogue personnel. The report says that the tools of these women representing the US were miniskirts, thong underwear, and fake “menstrual blood.” The fake menstrual blood was smeared on the face of a victim. Asking US women to act like prostitutes in an attempt to gain information from suspected terrorist suspects does not make us safer. To the contrary, it forces moderates in the Muslim world to move more toward the positions of the Muslim fundamentalists. Who in the Middle East would want to import THESE US “values” of democracy? Further, nominating the men who allegedly approved this torture to the Attorney General’s office and to the head of Homeland Security solidifies these awful acts as US policy. This sends the wrong message to the rest of the world about US values and its views on “freedom.” In the US that I believe in human rights apply to all persons of the world, not just Americans. Pre-emptive wars based on fabricated evidence fall into the same category. It’s clear that this is not a “great moment in history” but rather a shameful one.

This protest was sponsored by the Anti-war Committee and WAMM. Neither group was advised about the content of this commentary prior to submission to IndyMedia.

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Why the Children in Iraq Make No Sound When They Fall

By Bernard Chazelle

01/27/05 "Information Clearing House" -- No one said that dying had to be dull. "Screaming with fear, paralyzed children at a shelter for the physically disabled and mentally ill in Galle, Sri Lanka, lay helplessly in their beds as seawater surged around them." The CNN report read like the screenplay of a horror film. A crippled girl grows up destitute in a home for the deaf, the blind, the insane, and, for good measure, the disabled elderly (what more could a kid wish for?) At the end of a short life spent wondering why no one ever looked out for her, the child reaches the final punctuation mark of her blessed existence and drowns glued to a wheelchair.

Tragedy should not be too clever. Mourning embraces the solemnity of death but recoils at an overzealous script. When fate appears to cross the thin line between cruelty and sadism, grief turns to anger. We expect the church organist at the funeral mass to interrupt Bach in mid-measure, look up to the sky, and shout "Come on!"

Voltaire had his "come on" moment in the wake of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, suggesting that God's supreme goodness perhaps was not all it was cracked up to be. Religious irreverence is not much in fashion these days. But piety was not always so docile. History has been improbably kind to all sorts of figures who've had cross words with the Almighty. Think of Job, Jonah, Jeremiah, and Jesus on the cross—and that's only for the J's. Once or twice, the dispute even got out of hand: Nietzsche killed God; and Richard Rubenstein saw in Auschwitz confirmation of his death. Admittedly, to reconcile the Holocaust with a just and omnipotent god is an interesting variation on squaring the circle—or, since Miklós Laczkovich actually succeeded in doing just that [1], let us say, merely a reminder that gods may die but theological debates just never do.

My own reaction to the CNN report was not nearly as elevated. "Why would God behave like Don Rumsfeld?" I wondered. As the crippled child writhed in agony, I pictured God murmuring "Stuff happens."

Woe unto me. To compare God to Rummy is worse than blasphemous: It's unfair. After all, God did not cow the media into decorating our TV screens with the beatific smiles of preening peacocks reassuring us that smart waves drowned the terrorists, spared the innocent, amused the children, and provided much needed water to drought-prone regions. God gets accused of many things, including being dead, but lying is rarely one of them.

Mendacity, on the other hand, is the reserve currency of this administration. Its marketing hook: "You give us your votes; we give you our lies." From the fictitious Saddam-al Qaeda axis to the rosy updates on the Switzerlandization of Iraq, from the bogus tales of WMD to the assurance that democracy is the future of the region (and always will be, would add the cynics), the giving has been, shall we say, generous.

The taking has been no less effusive. Although the hysterical rantings of prowar voices rarely exceeded, in dignity, the yapping of a chihuahua attacking a meatball, they met only the meekest resistance from an oleaginous mainstream media. The war hawks found powerful enablers in The New York Times, which was more than happy to echo the delusory yarn spun by the White House and pimp for Judith Miller's Best Little Whorehouse in Babylon (where bling bling spells WMD).

Pimping being the fickle business that it is, it won't be long before the In-Bush-We-Trust media gets in touch with its inner peacenik and points an accusing finger at the posse of visionary mediocrities who gave us a nasty case of Iraq syndrome. No doubt some of the neocons will balk at going to their graves with the word "loser" carved on a brass coffin plate; so watch for them to pull a McNamara on us and humbly beg for forgiveness. Being good souls, ie, suckers for smarmy group hugs, naturally we'll oblige.

Were it so simple.

The abject surrender of the media fed a slew of illusions to the public, none more craven than the belief that he whom we kill must be killed. Yeah, yeah, we occasionally obliterate the wrong house and incinerate its occupants, but that's just "friendly fire." (A lovely phrase if there's one: Let's hear the surgeon who amputates the wrong leg inform his patient of his "friendly amputation.") Minus the friendliness, however, our whiz-bang weapon wizardry never fails to separate the wheat from the chaff, the nursing mother from the crazed beheader. So goes the creed, anyway.

The Lancet—that well-known freedom hating rag—begs to differ. It estimates that our high-IQ, mensa-schmensa bombs have killed 100,000 civilians [2]. Iraq Body Count, which plays the lowballing game by shunning projections, reports the deaths of 600 non-combatants during our latest goodwill tour of Fallujah (by now primed to be renamed Grozny on the Euphrates) [3].

And then there is the Iraqi girl,hands soaked in her dead father's blood, whose little brother does not yet understand that his childhood has just come to an end. Fearing for their lives, US soldiers killed the parents in the front seat of the family car. Demons will likely haunt their nights. Stuff happens. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, bless their souls, will sleep well tonight.

Wars never fail to produce their share of pithy lines. Tommy Franks made sure this one would be no exception. "We don't do body counts," crowed the general, who really meant to say that he does not do "dark-skinned body counts" (he counts the others just fine). Lucky for us that he doesn't run a Swedish newspaper, or it would have splashed the headline: "Tsunami kills 2,000 Swedes—and a few locals." To be fair, Franks remembered the last time he did body counts, Vietnam, and how well that ended. But today's tactical thinking packs a wallop of self-righteous denial. We don't tally the children we kill for the same reason monsters don't buy mirrors: That's how they go through life thinking they're angels.

We've snuffed out innocent lives in numbers that insurgents and terrorists could only dream of. But we avert our eyes. We bury our heads in the sand and turn a blind eye to our moral cowardice, thus pulling off the amazing feat of being ostriches and chickens all at once. We owe this marvel of ornithology to the inexorable fragility of human illusions. To quote James Carroll, "we avert our eyes because the war is a moral abyss. If we dare to look, as Nietzsche said, the abyss stares back." George Bush, the philosopher, has updated Berkeley's riddle: Do Iraqi children scream when the bombs fall if there is no one in the White House to hear them?


The celebrity of the month, the tsunami victim, has hogged newspaper headlines nationwide with stomach-churning photo spreads of wailing mothers and floating cadavers. Like his unsung Iraqi brethren, the victim has reminded us that calamity always strikes the poor, the sick, and the helpless first. It's invariably those with the least to lose who lose the most. At the great banquet of cataclysms, rich Westerners get served last. Bush would have us believe that we've suffered so much from terrorism the world owes us undying compassion. In truth, our induction into the Misery Hall of Fame is still a long way off. With our sustained assistance, however (coddling Saddam while he was gassing Iranians, slapping sanctions that killed half a million children, and fighting two wars in twelve years), Iraq made it on the first ballot. Who ever said that we didn't have a big heart?

Not Condoleezza Rice: "I do agree that the tsunami was a wonderful opportunity to show not just the US government, but the heart of the American people, and I think it has paid great dividends for us" [4]. And I just can't wait for the next one, our top diplomat might have added.

While watching Colin Powell, pocket calculator in hand, add up the geopolitical benefits of our generosity and tell us how shocked, shocked he was by the tsunami's devastation, I could almost hear the Beatitudes from The Gospel According to Dubya: "Blessed are the children whom the sea swallows, for they shall tug at our heartstrings. / Cursed are the children whom our bombs blow up, for they shall roam the dark alleys of our indifference." We've been Iraq's tsunami. But expect no charity drive, no minute of silence, no flag at half-staff: nothing that would allow shame to rear its ugly face.

With Bush's reelection, America now has the president it deserves. And should you find that Lady Liberty, all dolled up with the latest in fashion from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, looks a bit like a used up hooker, you won't need to ask who hired her pimp: We did.

The liberation of Iraq began with smart flying bombs crashing over Baghdad. We should have known better. Liberations that start with a reenactment of 9/11 rarely end well.
Copyright © Information Clearing House. All rights reserved. You may republish under the following conditions: An active link to the original publication must be provided. You must not alter, edit or remove any text within the article, including this copyright notice.
Bernard Chazelle is Professor of Computer Science, Princeton University. Email - chazelle (at) cs.princeton.edu
[1] Laczkovich, M. Equidecomposability and discrepancy; a solution of Tarski's circle-squaring problem, J. Reine Angew. Math. 404 (1990), 77-117.
[2] 100,000 Civilian Deaths Estimated in Iraq, by Rob Stein, Washington Post, October 29, 2004.
[3] Iraq Body Count Falluja Archive, www.iraqbodycount.org, 2004
[4] Dr. Rice's senate confirmation hearing, Agence France Presse, Tuesday, January 18, 2005.
Copyright: Bernard Chazelle