Thursday, February 28, 2013

Good riddance--hopefully for the last time!


They’re reporting that General Norman Schwarzkopf is being laid to rest today at West Point. He died last year but they haven’t been able to get his stinking corpse to go away. Nobody wanted it buried near them & even hell wasn’t willing to receive him. So let us repeat our anti-eulogy & hope the worms get him before Satan does.

General Norman Schwarzkopf is dead. You might think of him as the Pentagon’s own General Omar Suleiman. Schwartzkopf was the US commander of the first US war against Iraq in 1990-1991, codenamed Operation Desert Storm by the Pentagon. Many refer to it as the “video game war” since that is precisely how the media treated it to distance viewers from the barbarism of that siege against the people of Iraq. It was a war noted for the US use of depleted uranium & other chemical weapons. The weapons caused a debilitating, incurable illness among US combatants called the Gulf War syndrome. But most importantly, it left a legacy in Iraq of unimaginable human suffering, especially for the children. Hundreds of thousands died or have since been born with deformities & disabilities--& without resources to cope since so many hospitals were bombed.

Civilians were a deliberate target of the thousands of sorties flown against Iraq cities, civilian shelters, hospitals, schools, factories (including those for medical supplies), roads, power stations, & the entire infrastructure of the country. (Now we know where Israel learned its tactics in Gaza!) There were tens of thousands of civilian casualties & no possible accurate accounting since the intention was to bring the Iraqi people & any possible resistance to their knees.

The sanctions against Iraq as a result of this war led to the death of 500,000 Iraqi children. Then US secretary of state, the despicable Madeleine Albright, notoriously made the statement on the 60-Minutes TV program (in 1996) that the US considered the price paid by these innocent children “worth it” to accomplish US goals.

The war was so daunting in its barbarity that it had a dampening affect on antiwar activity in the US & weakened a vibrant, active movement--from which it is still recovering. But be assured it will.

There’ll be eulogies galore for this war criminal. Our only regret is they weren’t written decades ago & delivered to his prison hospital. May he rest comfortably in the fires of hell. And we look forward to writing the obituary for Madeleine Albright.

(Caricature by Gene Haas)

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