GOP Vixen

Fewer dropped calls at Gitmo!

This is either:

a) anti-war protesters pretending to be Gitmo/Abu Ghraib hybrids, or

b) an ad for AT&T cellular -- more bars in more places!

Remember Halabja: 20 years ago

So any reader of mine knows that I enjoy crashing protests and reporting from within. But today, I just couldn't do it. I couldn't bear to see the signs stating that deposing Saddam wasn't worth it, that the U.S. was the evil aggressor -- particularly considering that this weekend is the 20th anniversary of Halabja.

I write about the grim anniversary today at Pajamas Media:

"...Being no stranger to crashing war protests, I can bet that if you held a poster bearing one of the infamous images of a man who fell and died at the base of a home’s steps clutching an infant whose mouth was frozen in a vain gasp for air, or the pile of bodies in traditional colorful clothing strewn across an otherwise verdant hill, most demonstrators would assume the grisly images are products of the American war machine. They wouldn’t like to hear that these murders were committed by the dictator we deposed.

On March 16, 1988, Iraqi warplanes bombed the Kurdish town of Halabja with chemical weapons including sarin and mustard gas, targeting civilians as part of the Anfal campaign to rid Iraq of its Kurds. Five thousand — three-quarters of them women and children — died from the chemical cocktail. Children trying to rush home fell in the street, while the insidious gasses claimed those who cowered in basements from what they thought was a traditional bombardment. Thousands were left with chemical burns, blindness, cancers, birth defects, etc.

The Halabja attack was, in Josef Mengele fashion, an experiment to determine which of the various chemical agents worked best on the population, where were the best strategic places to drop the poisonous canisters, where victims would fall and how many. 'These were field tests, an experiment on a town,' Iraqi defector Khidhir Hamza, the former director of Saddam’s nuclear-weapons program, told then-New Yorker reporter Jeffrey Goldberg in 2002. 'The doctors were given sheets with grids on them, and they had to answer questions such as "How far are the dead from the canisters?"'”

Read the whole thing!

Acknowledging Halabja, though, means acknowledging that ousting Saddam served a purpose -- and that the international community turned a blind eye (again) to genocide.

Anything to pad your wallet on 'Redacted,' eh, De Palma?

Brian De Palma's one-man anti-war mission and big-screen gang-rape epic "Redacted" opens in theaters today, and will be met with protesters tonight, 6 p.m. at Laemmle's Sunset 5 Theater at Sunset and Crescent Heights in Hollywood.

But did you know that it's already on the small screen -- for a price? They’re simultaneously offering this movie on Charter On Demand cable in the L.A. area right now. I stumbled across it while looking for “Knocked Up” earlier. “Redacted” has its own special little category called “Pre-Theatrical Run,” and costs a whopping $9.99 to rent for 24 hours (new releases run $3.99).

Being as in love with On Demand stations as I am, this is the first time I've seen a simultaneous release there. Not to mention for more than a matinee ticket. Does this mean Charter's going to offer other advance screenings besides De Palma propaganda? I missed the After Dark Horror Fest this past week -- will they offer those films right now on On Demand? Or do the ghouls and vampires need to protest the Iraq war first?
 

Can Iraq get any worse? Yeah, and maybe soon!

If Turkey invades, which that trigger-happy tank and others poised along the Iraqi border may do soon. From the Guardian:

"Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, came under intense pressure last night to order an invasion of northern Iraq following the deadliest attacks for over a decade on the Turkish military and civilians by separatist Kurdish guerrillas.

Mr Erdogan, who has resisted demands from the Turkish armed forces for the past six months for a green light to cross the border into Iraqi Kurdistan, where the guerrillas are based, called an emergency meeting of national security chiefs to ponder their options in the crisis, a session that some said was tantamount to a war council.

A Turkish incursion is fiercely opposed by Washington since it would immensely complicate the US campaign in Iraq and destabilise the only part of Iraq that functions, the Kurdish-controlled north."

Understatement of the year! Thing is, the Turkish military tends to get its own way, like with, ahem, four coups since 1960. Erdogan's under enough pressure from the military as it is, as the avowed defenders of Turkish secularism call him out on any moves perceived as a slide toward an Islamist state.

Messy, messy, messier...

What does the Arab world hear through our Iraq infighting?

Honestly, they're probably hearing that we're losing our national cohesiveness, that we've lost much of the will to fight -- as Osama predicted in 2001. Read more in my Los Angeles Daily News column today:

"During the week of the 'Petraeus/Betray us' brouhaha, an Arab-language satellite channel asked if I would come on and provide an American perspective on our internal debates over the Iraq war.

As things go in television, the segment was rain checked, but I couldn't stop thinking about the topic and the audience. After two weeks of wrangling over Gen. David Petraeus' testimony, MoveOn.org's discount ad treating the general like Benedict Arnold, congressional squabbling and proposed troop cutbacks, far-left ANSWER Coalition protests and more, how would I explain it all to a Middle Eastern audience?

How would I explain this ugly infighting among Americans to the average viewer in the Arab world?    

As Khalid Sheikh Mohammed compares Osama bin Laden to our great Gen. George Washington, how would they view the barbs Americans have thrown at our four-star general shouldered with the unenviable task of commanding forces in Iraq?

And how can I tell viewers that the venom being spewed across our airwaves and on our streets isn't indicative of America?    

Or is it?"

Read the whole thing!

The real ANSWER

Today, Washington D.C. is filled with dunderheads like the guy above who don't understand the meanings of either "imperialism" or "occupation," folks like Wesley Clark and Cindy Sheehan getting together for a "die-in," which was apparently the next evolutionary step from the 1960s "love-ins." I've been out at far too many of these ANSWER Coalition events, and thus refuse to call them peace demonstrators (because supporting Hezbollah or Hamas is not peaceful, nor is attacking counterprotesters who show up to give a different point of view) or anti-war demonstrators (because supporting Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran and other agitators is not anti-war, and a fanatically isolationist stance is more properly labeled as "avoidance of war at any cost" advocates).

Getting up for work and flipping on the news, the first image they showed was a speaker with a PLO kaffiyeh draped around his neck. And that's the thing viewers should know about the group staging this protest: I was out in downtown L.A. for their disgustingly anti-Semitic display during the Hezbollah-Israel war, where signs hailed Hamas and Hezbollah as "freedom fighters" and counterprotesters with Israeli flags were attacked. ANSWER is pro-Hugo Chavez (currently in the process of squashing freedom in Venezuela), pro-Cuba (no matter how many Cubans have drowned trying to escape Castro's repression over the years), pro-Iran (the current theocratic regime and mad mullahs, that is), anti-Israel and anti-Semitic, and they're featuring the face of murderer Che Guevara on their "Resist Imperialism!" T-shirts.

The freedom to express dissent is a right we enjoy here in the U.S. But when it comes to anti-war demonstrations that are disguised as humanitarian efforts for peace and justice, everyone deserves to know the real story about the organization putting on the event. They are for anything or anybody that opposes America or poses a danger to America. And that is a service to neither peace nor justice.

When MoveOn.org is led by a four-star general...

... then I may start to listen to their advice on military policy, military strategy, and, well, life in general.

U.N. asked to lend a hand in Iraq

Getting the United Nations to do anything but pass flowery resolutions is like getting Boris the hamster to scrub his own cage. According to today's Washington Post, after three years of urging the U.N. to step up and have a greater role in hammering out the sectarian conflict that's made Iraq a mess, the U.S. and UK will push for a vote at the Security Council on a resolution to invite the U.N. to the party. Updating the WaPo article, a source at the State Department tells me this is unlikely to happen Thursday as hoped.

Looking at a copy of the draft resolution, it seeks to extend the mandate for the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq for twelve months to "advise, support, and assist" the government of Iraq on solving political strife (like, perhaps, all the Sunnis walking out of the Cabinet), elections, regional dialogue, reintegrating former militia members, conducting a census, and resolving boundary disputes, like Kurdistan (which is best decided within Iraq before Turkey, its elections now in the past, decides it wants to invade). Not to mention, Kurdistan has been the model for economic development in Iraq, but terrorists are now exporting their bombings to Irbil.

The resolution also calls for member states to pony up the material support to back the UNAMI, and asks for quarterly progress reports to the council. The U.N. is offering to boost its staff in Baghdad from 65 to 95 by October.

I really hope the U.N. will step up and lend a hand in this humanitarian crisis -- and not like they "help" in southern Lebanon, where "peacekeeping force" means peacefully watching as Hezbollah rearms right in front of your eyes.

How quickly they forget...

Iraq's national soccer team beat favorite Saudi Arabia 1-0 today to win the Asian Cup. No word on whether this win will make the Iraqi team attractive to David Beckham, taking Posh from the Woodland Hills TGI Friday's to a falafel stand in Baghdad...

However, one quote after the victory from Younis Mahmoud, who scored Iraq's goal:

"I want America to go out. Today, tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, but out. I wish the American people didn't invade Iraq and, hopefully, it will be over soon."

How quickly he forgets how Uday Hussein tortured soccer players after losses or draws.

Obama: Iraqi genocide? Oh well!

Yesterday Barack Obama said that, yeah, genocide could likely happen if we leave Iraq, but that's life.

"Well, look, if that's the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven't done," Obama also told the AP.

I'd argue that an American life is worth just as much as a Congolese or Iraqi or Vietnamese life, and wonder if we'd learned lessons from Rwanda -- where 800,000 were murdered in about 100 days in 1994. When the U.N. wouldn't intervene, Rwandan representatives who escaped the slaughter came to the White House to beg the most powerful country in the world for help -- and were rebuffed, told that the U.S. didn't have enough interests in Africa.

When you can end or prevent genocide and do nothing -- or leave -- how far does that put us away from the lessons of World War II, and how much does our inaction equal complicity in the crimes against not one people, but against humanity?

"The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference." -- Elie Wiesel