Brought Low By a Gang of Cretins

by Chris Floyd
by Chris Floyd

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Only Six Fluent in Arabic at U.S. Embassy in Iraq (Reuters)

Among the 1,000 people who work in the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, only 33 are Arabic speakers and only six speak the language fluently, according to the Iraq Study Group report released on Wednesday.

This tells you pretty much all you need to know about the American debacle in Iraq. Imagine the arrogance and stupidity of conquering, occupying and trying to run a country without being able to speak its language. A nation of 26 million people – and your embassy has only six people who can actually understand what is being said, written, and broadcast there. This is a folly that amounts to a monstrous crime in itself, aside from the inherent evil of launching an unprovoked war of aggression.

Evil is the only word to describe the willful ignorance at work throughout the entire process of the Iraq War, from its inception to its execution to the catastrophic endgame now unfolding before our eyes. The reality of the situation is almost unimaginable, almost unendurable: that the most powerful nation in the history of the world has thrown itself, deliberately, for no compelling reason whatsoever beyond the selfish interests of a few elitist cliques, into a cauldron of mass murder and moral ruin, whose financial, political and spiritual costs will be felt, with deep suffering, for generations.

And that such a fate should come at the hands of such third-rate fools! Not only the gibbering idiot hugging his stolen presidency and "Decider-in-chiefship" to his chest like a baby with a blanket, but the whole rogue's gallery of dullards and brutes whose rat-like cunning in the service of their own lusts for pomp and power has been mistaken for genuine intelligence and substance: Dick Cheney, bumbling factotum of two failed presidencies – Nixon's and Ford's – and now the guiding light of a ruinous third; Don Rumsfeld, corporate bagman and lifelong blowhard (also a minion in the failed Nixon and Ford regimes), who began his career with vicious lies and has ended it with the blood of half a million Iraqi civilians on his lily-white hands; Douglas Feith, the utter nonentity well-described by General Tommy Franks as the "fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth," an empty suit who nonetheless had a far greater role in pushing the war and designing its lunatic aftermath than most people realize; Paul Wolfowitz, the comb-licking weirdo whose much-alleged, never-proven "brilliance" has disguised a lifelong record as an apologist for repression and mass murder, from Indonesia to Iraq… and on and on, through the whole sick crew.

To have been brought low by this gang of vicious cretins only adds to the shame of America's immeasurable crime in Iraq. Yet every single one of them will leave the regime for fat, well-paid sinecures and honored retirements, living on in luxury, surrounded still by sycophants and apologists, cheating the justice they so richly deserve until the final judge comes round for them at last – as he did this week for their comrade in murder, Augusto Pinochet.

December 12, 2006

Chris Floyd [send him mail] is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.

Copyright © 2006 Chris Floyd

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