Official Whining

It is said in America "nobody likes a whiner."

I'm thinking I could not possibly agree more.

Having spent the many months since September 11 crafting a framework to justify an invasion of Iraq, then using and discarding every accepted standard of international behavior to get other nations to sign on (and failing miserably), the Bush administration pushed ahead with its war. The opening salvos were so bold, ingenious, exciting, and made for good TV. No one seemed to be getting killed on either side at first, and for an America so casualty-averse, what else could be better? Alas, it did not last. The inevitable accidents began taking lives, then soldiers were actually killed by an enemy thought and said to be hapless and helpless in the face of American technology and know-how. Next thing we as a nation know there are prisoners of war appearing on TV stations that our giant media conglomerates don't own, so we can't make them stop running the tapes. Gruesome images are allegedly shown - dead bodies in American military uniforms - immediately said to have been "executed," later discovered to have been killed in battle. The prisoners have cuts and bruises and appear shaken.

No shit.

And the whining begins. First the Iraqis are berated for violating the Geneva Conventions by filming prisoners of war and showing them on TV. The US attempts to use the same Conventions they went through so many bizarre legal contortions to avoid in taking prisoners in Afghanistan and elsewhere purely for propaganda purposes. Too bad, so sad. I remember the pictures of those prisoners on their knees, hands cuffed behind their backs, eyes covered, gagged, out in the sun. Maybe they were bad folks, maybe not. The treatment they were getting at Guantanamo violated the Geneva Conventions then and now, so quit fucking whining.

An additional note about this subject: there are still over 650 people being held at Guantanamo, some of them for well over a year. It is also worth noting that in the larger "War On Terror" (or "Tara" as our Fearless Leader would say), the government has stripped USA citizens of their citizenship rights in order to advance its own agenda, arresting and detaining them. In one case, blowing one up in the back seat of a car without so much as an apology later.

That, my friends, is summary execution without a trial.

More Whining:

They Don't All Wear Uniforms

Apparently some Iraqi soldiers are not wearing uniforms, which CENTCOM seems to think is patently unfair. How dare they deviate from the script? Not only have they failed to wear the appropriate costume, but they have also gone so far off the rails that they refuse to stand in front of the oncoming tanks and get flattened or simply surrender in droves and on cue. Shocking, I say. No, some have chosen to get out of harm's way as the mechanized divisions race across the desert, then ambush supply trucks, hampering the American forces as much as they can. While it will only delay the inevitable, from the crying coming out of CENTCOM and duly repeated in the lapdog media, one would think that these ragtag bunches of fighters had summoned big bad Satan hisself to repel the invaders, rather than applying the time honored tactics of a vastly overmatched force. The Russians did this sort of thing during the Wehrmacht drive to Moscow and it worked to some extent. Other forces have done the same thing.

Oh, yeah, I seem to recall how put out the British military once was when Americans refused to stand in picket lines and fire their weapons.

Quit fucking whining.