God Bless Those Niggers!

Donald H. Rumsfeld may have sunk to a new low during his visit to Iraq earlier this week.

Complaining that, "Syria and Iran have not been helpful to the people of Iraq. Indeed, they've been unhelpful. They've allowed people to move from their countries to Iraq to engage in terrorist activities against the Iraqi people," because, let's face it, "the powers that be in Syria and Iran are not wishing the free Iraqi people well." Rumsfeld also blamed "terrorist networks, plus the former regime elements, plus some criminals" for the miserable security situation in Free Iraq.

Not all is lost, though, as, according to Donald H., "Instead of responding by acquiescing, we see that volunteers are still in line to join the police. They're still in line to join the army. Instead of retreating, they are leaning forward and taking losses, and God bless them for it."

Now, as this blog has discussed before now, those pesky Geneva Conventions mandate the occupying power to maintain security in an occupied nation. We've also discussed the reason that volunteers are "leaning forward and taking losses": "Why do you think we work with them? There are no other jobs." It's also been fairly widely reported that the Iraqi resistance is mostly home-grown.

But to gauge the degree of hypocrisy and racism in Rumsfeld's worldview, we could ask ourselves what the expected reaction might be if, noting that extremists abroad were slamming aeroplanes into New York skyscrapers on a weekly basis, official reaction were to decry the unhelpful nature of the countries from which the attacks were staged while praising American people for continuing to show up at their high-rise workplaces to "take losses" in the name of freedom -- but not removing a finger from its collective ass to try to prevent the all-too-predictable next attack.

In other H. Rumsfeld news, twenty years and two months after his December '83 visit to Iraq, the Donald was in Uzbekistan this week re-enacting his infamous handshake with the then-beloved Saddam Hussein. Now, as then, Rumsfeld was despatched to the Asian continent to "discuss the growing military partnership between the United States" and a murderous dictator.

That Uzbek President Islam Karimov submerges his prisoners in boiling water, among various and sundry other grisly misdeeds, underscores "the delicate and difficult nature of U.S. support for Uzbekistan." In other words, it might force McClellan to do a bit of tapdancing at some point -- but the handshake can proceed as planned.

Update: Continuing his World Tour, Rumsfeld next stepped up to the mic while in Kazakhstan. Demonstrating that he's been drinking from the same pixie water that has so bamboozled his Commander in Chief, Rumsfeld allowed that

It's interesting when one thinks about Iraq and their unwillingness to disarm, that Kazakhstan stands as an impressive model of how a country can do it. If Iraq had followed the Kazakhstan model, after 17 U.N. resolutions, and disarmed the way Kazakhstan did, there would not have been a war.

In a "related development", Shell Oil has inked a deal to "develop" a Kazakh oil field. This would be the same Shell Oil which has already wreaked havoc upon indigenous communities in Nigeria, Colombia, Peru, and elsewhere.

Yeah, a "military-to-military partnership" and a rapacious multinational are "related" all right. We mustn't forget, however, that if Shell weren't to put down stakes in Kazakhstan, then "the sound and ethical business practices synonymous with Shell, the environmental investment, and the tens of millions of dollars spent on community programs would all be lost."

Posted by Eddie Tews at February 25, 2004 06:14 PM