Brondbyfan
Senior Squad
That was an excellent post Rhizome. And I think Elder's muddled, confused ramblings in this thread are representative of the ignorance of the Bush administration.
You see, for Elder and for George W. Bush, there can be only black and white. There is good, and there is evil. There is us, and there is them. The idea that certain bad guys may have nothing to do with each other, or may even dislike each other, is completely beyond their grasp. Thus three completely different entities, a secular dictatorship, a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy, and a communist cult of personality become one, an "axis of evil." Disregard the fact that Iraq and Iran fought an eight year war that obliterated their people, that is too much for their simplistic world view. Elder is doing the same thing here. He's conflating Saddam, Zarqawi, and bin Laden, blaming this tragedy on all three despite the impossibility of that. Really, the best word to describe what he's doing is "exploitation," using these people's suffering to feebly save some face for his insistence on the long-disproven Saddam/Al Qaeda/9-11 link, which even Rumsfeld has given up on.
What part of henry#14's recounting of the incident suggests Zarqawi was directly or indirectly involved? What even suggests this was religiously motivated? Some people just like looting. I remember the WTO riots here years ago. Some guy was up on top of Niketown kicking down the swoosh sign . . . while wearing Nike sneakers. Sounds like a real devoted opponent to the excesses of global capitalism. Now obviously neo-liberal capitalists would like to exploit that rioting to demonize the opposition, but the fact is that there are a lot of unscrupulous people who will take advantage of a situation of chaos or, as rhizome astutely pointed out, a power vacuum. Did you even consider that possibility Elder? Or did you just see an opening for some anti-Islam rhetoric and impotent conflation of Saddam and Zarqawi and bin Laden and run with it?
Ultimately there are a lot of factors involved, but I think it boils down to the fact that when you don't have enough people on the ground to maintain order, when you have a power vacuum, the door is opened for anyone, be they Islamic fundamentalists, Baathists, or just plain assholes.
You see, for Elder and for George W. Bush, there can be only black and white. There is good, and there is evil. There is us, and there is them. The idea that certain bad guys may have nothing to do with each other, or may even dislike each other, is completely beyond their grasp. Thus three completely different entities, a secular dictatorship, a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy, and a communist cult of personality become one, an "axis of evil." Disregard the fact that Iraq and Iran fought an eight year war that obliterated their people, that is too much for their simplistic world view. Elder is doing the same thing here. He's conflating Saddam, Zarqawi, and bin Laden, blaming this tragedy on all three despite the impossibility of that. Really, the best word to describe what he's doing is "exploitation," using these people's suffering to feebly save some face for his insistence on the long-disproven Saddam/Al Qaeda/9-11 link, which even Rumsfeld has given up on.
What part of henry#14's recounting of the incident suggests Zarqawi was directly or indirectly involved? What even suggests this was religiously motivated? Some people just like looting. I remember the WTO riots here years ago. Some guy was up on top of Niketown kicking down the swoosh sign . . . while wearing Nike sneakers. Sounds like a real devoted opponent to the excesses of global capitalism. Now obviously neo-liberal capitalists would like to exploit that rioting to demonize the opposition, but the fact is that there are a lot of unscrupulous people who will take advantage of a situation of chaos or, as rhizome astutely pointed out, a power vacuum. Did you even consider that possibility Elder? Or did you just see an opening for some anti-Islam rhetoric and impotent conflation of Saddam and Zarqawi and bin Laden and run with it?
Ultimately there are a lot of factors involved, but I think it boils down to the fact that when you don't have enough people on the ground to maintain order, when you have a power vacuum, the door is opened for anyone, be they Islamic fundamentalists, Baathists, or just plain assholes.
