Saturday April 12, 2003

KEEP ON ROCKIN' IN THE FREE WORLD. "Kurds Looting Sweeps Across Liberated Kirkuk" says the Washington Post. The Red Cross and others are asking the U.S. to do its duty by its newly liberated charges, the same paper reports. But to no avail. Hospitals in Iraq are crowded with the dying (dying? in our surgical strike? how did that happen?), with the lights out and the water run dry. From the Guardian:

The man had been dumped near the rubbish bins at the back, blood spreading across his chequered shirt. An orderly, who had been burying bloated corpses in a mass grave in the hospital grounds, recited the Muslim last rites. "Dead, dead, he's died, what can we do?" and returned to his shovel. But the man was breathing, in slow laborious gurgles, and his flesh was warm.

Forty-eight hours after Baghdad was liberated - as President George Bush would call it - by American forces, the city yesterday was in the throes of chaos. Men with Kalashnikovs dragged drivers from their cars at gunpoint, babies were killed by cluster bombs, and hospitals that had carried on right through the bombing were transformed into visions of hell.

But ignore that. Ignore the officially-unnumbered dead. Look at the fallen statue of Saddam! Read the propaganda that tells you how grateful you should be for this sweeping victory of freedom, bought with blood and billions. Learn to hate those that objected. Got fuel to burn, got roads to drive. Keep on rockin' in the free world.