Who Threatened The Pampered Sheiks?
The war was a cakewalk after all: the path paved by the bodies of Iraqi civilians and conscripts, who died defenseless against a storm of remote control bombs … The three week invasion offered barely a battle to speak of: a few small arms firefights, a couple of wobbly Scuds launched harmlessly into the Kuwaiti desert, an ambush or two … The Americans killed nearly as many American and British soldiers as the Iraqis did. This begs the question: if it was so easy, why was it necessary? How big of a threat was the Beast of Baghdad, after all? Did his rusting army, even the supposedly fearsome Republican Guard, really pose any kind of the threat to the US? Or even the pampered sheiks of Kuwait? Why was it necessary? Who benefits? What will happen once the military moves on? … These are questions that will never get serious answer over here. Indeed, the questions may even never be asked, in the scripted kabuki shows that are passed off as Bush press conferences … Why did Rumsfeld make the assassination- by-bunker- buster-bomb of Saddam and his family such an unyielding obsession? The bungled hits cost tens of millions each, put US pilots at risk and slaughtered dozens of nameless innocents. It seems obvious that the Bush gang desperately wants to avoid a war crimes trial, where the legitimacy of their invasion might be put to a fatal legal test.
From the New York Times:
“Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN’s Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard — awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.
For example, in the mid-1990’s one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government’s ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency’s Iraq station chief. CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world about the torture of one of its employees would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk. …
Then there were the events that were not unreported but that nonetheless still haunt me. A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for “crimes,” one of which included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family’s home.
I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein’s regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely.”
To answer one of the questions posed, the war is almost over in 3 weeks because of the professionalism and training of the US military. We were taking on what might be a great army in the arab world but in the real world they weren’t even to be taken seriously. But just because we were able to defeat their military in short order doesn’t mean they didn’t pose a threat in other ways. You don’t need a huge military to use terrorist tactics. In fact the opposite is normally true. A few terrorists with WMDs can do alot of damage. Luckily we haven’t had a hard time with the Iraqi military so now we can get down to business finding and removing the WMDs.