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CYNDYLEE
I’d like to be embedded with MSNBC’s Dana Lewis.
TV reception was better than '91 but producers
neglected to add a rousingly schmaltzy musical soundtrack.
The Iraqi minister of information will take the Emmy
away from Ari Fleisher.
I would have appreciated live feed of U.S. troops
showering in Saddam’s bathroom.
The looting segments made me nostalgic for the garage
sales in Southern California — but that's another war far, far
away
sean mcmullin
I don’t understand why people are so surprised the war
in Iraq is happening. It seems that all the signs of its coming
have been around for quite awhile.
It’s not the beginning or the end of this conflict. This is
just the imperialists coming out into the open. They’re not hiding
like they did before because their strength has grown and they
don’t have as much to fear.
They have figured out it's easier when people support
you rather than having them fight you all the way.
I think we have been pacified We don’t even perceive
we have to change things in this country anymore — we don’t
even perceive we have to.
That is what happens when all our information comes
from the imperialist media. Why should they want to tell us the
truth?
On a slightly different subject: Is there someone in
charge? Someone head of this? When we speak of empire it’s
as much us as it is our leaders. The conspiracy side of me says
someone is manipulating all of this. The other side says no one
is in control — we are all involved. This is neo-imperialism,
which can’t exist without our participation.
And as I always say, George Bush is only one person
and we can all remove him
SARAH CHRYSTAL
It makes me sad.
BUCKY BARNETT
EDWARD SOREL
WHY IRAQ?
FROM PAGE 1
citizens believing that “supporting the troops” means “supporting
the war.* I see mass marketing, monopoly, deregulation, stratifi
cation, people saying the governments should live within their
means while they themselves continue to rack up debt on their
plastic cards, driving huge vehicles over once-pristine land. I
see prisons going up and schools closing down and a voluntary
military composed mainly of the poorest in our land because
it’s the only way out of poverty. I see regimes all over the world
whose brutality makes Saddam's look pale, ‘good friends and
allies* in countries where people are still punished by limb and
head-severing, where “suspects’" bones are routinely broken and
children throwing rocks are killed almost daily by soldiers. I see
a New World Order taking place, led by an usurped government,
apparently hell-bent upon plunder while my fellow citizens seem
more concerned with basketball scores. I see complacency. I'm
concerned.
When I was a child I saw holocaust films and I could not
begin to understand why the people of Germany allowed such
horrendous, inhuman things to happen. What really disturbs me
now, some 50 years later, is that I’m beginning to understand it
as I look around.
I'm hoping there will be another election and that there
will be someone for whom to cast my vote.
War? There was no war.
JODY G. GRAMSON
I don't think we had any business doing what we did.
The only reason we did was because of Iraq’s oil. If they hadn’t
any oil, we wouldn't have been there.
We didn't stay to fix Afghanistan. We destroyed it and
left.
You notice that oil prices went down since the war.
CHRISTIAN GRAMSON (Age 8)
Lord knows if Saddam Hussein is in Iraq — so why are
we attacking Iraq?
I think he's alive.
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»'III Ml'ORARY WORKS C)i ARI
UNTIL JULY 16
MARION HANEY OMAN A JENNIFER WILLIAMS
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JACK GUYOT, EVELYN TOWNSEND
A TIM DALRYMPLE
RECEPTION 5-8
11M COMMERCIAL STREET, ASTORIA
What I think about the war in Iraq is that organized
religion is pretty much the root of all evil'.
In this country, I resent the waste of resources that has
increased during the war — cutting funding for research, budget
cuts in parks and wildlife management, trying to exploit more
resources (ANWR, USFS plan revisions, etc. etc.) just to
support our fat silly lifestyle.
In the Middle East one hardly ever hears a voice for
whatever life is left over there.
I’m pissed at their moron extremists for stirring up our
moron extremists, and pissed at our 'opposition forces’ (Demo
crats, etc.) for floundering around without any sense of righteous
outrage.
The only optimistic comment I have is that perhaps
since the fools running this country are demonstrating such a
flaming bad example of how to do almost everything that even
the slowest witted members of the voting public will surely
realize that things must change.
JIM HEDFORD
V. O. BLUM
Having no reliable source of information regarding the
war in Iraq “the sequel", my only hope is the Freedom of
Information Act is still intact 25 years from now so that we can
find the true perpetrators of the war crimes committed against
the people of Iraq
Portable nuclear weapons are not merely Pentagon
paranoia — sometime in the coming decades they may very
well become accessible to NGO cells and a chaotic threat to
legalist civilization. I do not, however, currently support serial
U.S./U.K. invasion and occupation of rogue states (Iraq, Syria,
DPR Korea, etc.) for the same reason one might have opposed
Augustian empire in ancient Rome: remote garrisons, no matter
how initially reassuring, in time corrode the republic internally —
legally, economically, strategically. Because there is no uniform
genetic basis for the U.S. polity, its rationale has always been
its domestic and global respect for law, inducing it last century
to campaign against Hitlerist and Stalinist imperialism. But if the
republic proves flagrantly unable or unwilling to uphold consti
tutional and international norms in a WMD context, its raison
d’être becomes questionable.
TOM DUNCAN
War in Iraq?
Makes no sense now.
Made no sense before they started.
— Unless the purpose is something different than what
is advertised.
Iraq has no capacity to threaten the U.S., militarily or
economically.
Iraq has no WMDs — and hasn’t for years.
Iraq does have a lot of oil, and a strategic position geo
graphically.
Obvious control of Iraq is key to breaking OPEC and to
containing a united Europe.
Chaos in Iraq is necessary to provide an excuse for U.S.
to control Europe, East Asia and Oceania.
Perpetual war for perpetual peace.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Of course the real power is global corporations using
national governments to fight their proxy wars.
PARADOXICAL FEELINGS
OF A PEACENIK
I don’t believe in killing
even mass murderers —
the bastard in the White House
even though life is too good for him.
I will impeach the world’s most dangerous bushwhacker,
the enemy of humanity, the illegal usurper
of executive power
aka KGB (King George Bush),
currently the most destructive life form
known to humankind.
the one who prays for war everyday,
the one who glorifies military might
and calls it right in the name of God
to subjugate the rest of existence
unto his control.
I don’t need a gun.
The law the way it stands now
gives us the power of impeachment,
the power to prosecute
our national tyrants
as unjust lawbreakers
and war criminals!
-ARTHUR HONEYMAN
VALERIE LINDHOUT
On reflection I think there was no possibility there would
not be war.
There is an antidote factor to war-thinking, which is
nurture. But whoever heard of running for office as a nurture
candidate? Whoever heard of a nurture budget? That’s a stupid
joke, right? Even the word nurture is dismissed as nuisance
intrusion into serious discussion. The nurture party? Ho, ho, ho.
Bob Dylan absolutely speaks for my feelings in his
‘Masters of War’, but sadly now I would say to him, it is still we
who totally deride and omit nurture as a valid subject, study and
50% value from our systems. Instead we still assent to the 100%
way of maximum competition in adversarial systems and vote
purely viscerally for fighters, for winners, for charisma, and for
the top-gun excess testosterone Masters (male or female).
We vote for nature's own uninterrupted most savage
way, call ourselves sophisticated superpower and our minds