Melville Cooke
These days, I treat the current United States administration's lies, fantasies and grandstanding on Iraq much as I do the passion for passivity which passes for Christianity, with grim amusement at its failures.
Bush and Blair (foreign and local) will never change; they will keep trotting out the standard rot and to respond to each of them is to be like a tennis player being pulled left and right, to the net and back, expending energy to no avail.
So while I do keep up with the speeches of that dumb president of a generally dumb nation, I am much more interested in the activities of those people in Iraq who are as influenced by his speeches as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is by the needs of Jamaica's poor people. And are they making their voices heard.
With a bang. Many loud bangs. Which is the only thing that has an effect on the blithely rapacious progression of conquest and colonialism.
You see, in this business of domination and exploitation, where one people live the content life of the minority tick in the wide hide of the cow, then curse the cow for being stupid and stink, talk is a waste of time. It always comes down to gunshots, or bombs, or stabs, or whatever the choice of inflicting violence is.
MAN OF THE YEAR
When Haile Selassie spoke to the General Assembly of the League of Nations in 1936 after Italy invaded Ethiopia, using chemical warfare, he asked, pleading for protection, "What answer am I to take back to my people?" He landed on the cover as Time magazine's 'Man of the Year', but the Italians were free to do as they wished.
And they did. What do people who use chemical weapons against civilians care about pictures anyway?
The USA obviously does not. In the middle of last month, a Lt. Col. Barry Venable told the BBC that white phosphorus was used against the people of Fallujah in November 2004. (Of course, there was the usual disclaimer that it was not used against civilians. How do you target a chemical agent, anyway?) This was after an Italian television station named Rai had aired a documentary entitled 'Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre', which not only showed the bodies of people killed by white phosphorus (known in the U.S. Army jargon as 'Willy Pete'), but also quoted a soldier who had taken part in the massacre.
He said: "Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone ... I saw the burned bodies of women and children. Phosphorus explodes and forms a cloud. Anyone within a radius of 150 metres is done for."
Asafa Powell could not be mobile enough and sprint away from the effective killing radius before being charred.
The cruel irony of this 'Willy Pete' is that it leaves the clothes intact, so what remains is a well-clad, totally charred body. So last Wednesday, when a well-clad Bush gave the usual speech about "we will never back down, we will never accept anything less than complete victory", I was grimly amused by the effect the rising U.S. death toll is having on the polls, even though I have no hopes that it will ever be enough to move a man in his final term in office.
But I have news for you, pops. There are some very determined people in Iraq who feel the same way. And they ain't afraid to die.
Apparently you, Cheney and Rumsfeld are, because when you go to Iraq it is a very secret, very quick and very, very protected affair.
You see, speeches are fine, but in the beginning and the end, violent people are not moved by words. They understand only violence, and only stupid people try to communicate with their attackers in a language they do not wish to learn.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
