Friday, May 21, 2004
The Rot Spreads... posted by Richard Seymour
Juan Cole reports violent demonstrations in Bahrain, of all places, against US actions in Karbala. Why? Cole says:You wonder whether, when Bush gave the order to get Muqtada "dead or alive", initially to the Spanish and then to the US military, whether he even knew that a majority of the population in Bahrain, where the US has a major naval base, is Shiite or that they would mind if the US army demolished much of the Mukhayyam Mosque in Karbala trying to get at Muqtada's militiamen.
In all probability? No.
Moreover, it's not likely to stop there:
The other shoe? Will the Shiites of al-Hasa in Eastern Arabia, where the oil is and where there are 90,000 Americans at Dhahran, be the next to riot?
Meanwhile, Michael Berg has some gracious words of contempt for the Bush administration, and linguist Geoffrey Nunberg pleads with us to stop using euphemisms like "abuse" when what in fact took place was torture,
not just by the definitions of the Geneva Conventions, but by any ordinary standards of decency. Torture is torture is torture, as Secretary Powell put it - it isn't a place to be drawing fine semantic distinctions.
And it would be a good thing to acknowledge that "torture" is not quite as exotic an activity as the movies make it out to be.
That should suck the fun out of it.
9:53:00 pm |
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