The Dusty Dog

Crimes Against Humanity?

Votes Counted. Deals Made. Chaos Wins. That's the title of today's New York Times online article, accompanied by this photo above. Not very encouraging at all. We..... no, not we....... the neocons heading up today's US government have turned Iraq into a miserable place to be. The article goes on to state about the tent city that has been created:

According to the Iraqi government, about 14,000 families — probably close to 100,000 people — have been displaced by the violence. More than 80 percent, the government said, are Shiites. About 2,000 Iraqis have been killed since the Askariya Shrine, a holy Shiite mosque in Samarra, was destroyed in a bombing two months ago.

That's one thousand (1000) people per month; two hundred fifty (250) people each week; eighty plus (80+) people every day. Then, a number of paragraphs later, is this:

Full-fledged civil war, with widespread ethnic bloodletting and mass migrations, has not yet come to Iraq. But a week's worth of conversations with ordinary Iraqis leaves one wondering if the government, even with American help, can any longer prevent this from happening.

Am I missing something here? At what number of dead and displaced will this qualify as a civil war? Why are we dancing around the term?

Iraqis are ethically divided now in a way that appears to be similar to the ethnic bloodshed that took place in Yugoslavia during the 1990s. It's not just divided neighborhoods in Iraq; it's now cleansing on a massive, murderous scale. This is what Milosevic was tried for as war crimes as the leader of the Serbian state. Per Wikipedia, "He was one of the key figures in the Yugoslav wars during the 1990s and Kosovo War in 1999. He was indicted in May 1999, during the Kosovo War, by the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and genocide in Bosnia. Charges of violating the laws or customs of war were added a year and a half after that." Is this what George W. Bush will be tried for as the Commander in Chief who brought on this Iraqi ethnic cleasing?

The buffoon in chief destroys everything he ever touches. He may not be in charge of the ethnic cleasing itself, but he instigated it. He set aside sane policies to enable this mess. He lied like a rug to allow it to happen. Were it not for him, as the buck-stops-here guy in chief, Iraq would continue to be the only secular and progressive country that it was under Saddam, albeit with his iron fist. Now, it's becoming a predominantly islamist stronghold, complete with ethnic cleansing and the harboring of terrorists, something it was not under Saddam. Iraq is just another of the buffoon in chief's failed ventures. But, he doesn't care. He's so freakin' enriched monetarily over this fiasco, that he'll just return to his drugged out oblivion after he steps down, hopefully via impeachment, and takes up the next venture to drive into the ground. Unless, of course, he's sent to prison for his crimes against humanity. One can only hope.....

I hate George W. Bush. I thought I hated Nixon. I thought I hated Reagan. I didn't even know what hate was when they were presidents. This cockroach in chief has really showed me what hate really is. May he rot in hell...... but, in prison first.

posted by Dusty Dog at 4/30/2006