A maldi��o de Sanpaku
His supporters, known as the Mahdi Army, continued battling U.S. and Iraqi forces. And on Thursday, three mortar bombs hit a Najaf police station in quick succession, killing seven police and wounding at least 21 others. Police said Mahdi militiamen fired the mortars.
Following the attack, Al-Sadr vowed to seek "martyrdom or victory," according to the AP.
Things that seem obvious to me may not to you. That's part of what this is, or what it should be. So I'm taking a little time to dissect this yeoman bit of deceit. Plus I have to purge the image of Chandrasekaran from my optical memory. This twit was on PBS tonight, that bastion of liberal sensibility, and he was presented as being as close to the fighting in Najaf as he could get without actually picking up a weapon, though I think he was in Baghdad. They don't have the transcript up at PBS yet, just the prelim text linked above. He talked a lot about how bad the al Sadr stand has been for shopping, how people are angry at him [al Sadr] for disrupting their lives and the "reconstruction" of their country, and like most of the rest of the hired guns in the media now, he did these verbal entrechats that are supposed to make the unwary think that al Sadr has no spiritual claim to the Imam Ali Shrine, that he's just hiding there because he's a coward, and disrespectful of holy places.
Of course they don't actually say that, because it's laughably absurd, but this isn't about truth anymore, it's about keeping the main bulk of the American public asleep long enough to get the power supply connected to the world machine, then the gloves will come off and it won't matter what anyone thinks. Until then the money's coming from America; and Americans, even now when they're so bloated up with bad food and cheap hypnotism they can barely move or think, they're still basically decent folks, and they'd never stand for what's being done with their money and their soldiers if they knew.
So little dogs like Chandrasekaran make good money walking on their hind legs and speaking the party line. At the end of his segment this grin came across his face. It's the grin I imagine the Israeli soldiers wearing as they barbecue outside the cells of the Palestinian hunger strikers.
It's that image I need to purge, that and his Sanpaku eyes blinklessly staring into the camera. His eyes were literally bugging out of his head, and that grin at the end. I expected some deep baritone "bwah-ah-ah-ah-hah-hah" to segue into the transition music.
I really wonder sometimes if this isn't all being done just to torment me. I wonder that maybe there isn't anything happening in Iraq at all, that Palestinians aren't being blown out of their houses in pieces, that it's just a show, it's not real.
But it seems real, other people think it is, so I'm going with my initial impression, which is that Chandrasekaran's a word-whore, giving relatively expensive oral service to off-camera men we never see or hear about.
Somewhere back there it became taboo to kill people for being morally repugnant, yet at the same time it became permissible to lie to the public in such grave matters as the causes of war, even when by doing so thousands of people die.
Reducing that a little we see that it says:
We can't kill anyone / they can kill anyone they want.
That is exactly what's happening here. People are being killed who should not be. Al Sadr and his men are defending their lives and the lives of their families against invaders who have no moral strength at all, only the power that selfishness endows its worshippers.
Which is not to say the kids in the humvees are as culpable as Chandrasekaran, they're dumber than he is for one thing.
If you read the linked piece carefully, looking for color as well as sense and meaning, you'll see that al Sadr's name is physically close to most of the negative terms in it, and that much of what the writing puts forth is implied rather than stated. It's Propaganda 101. It was really effective in getting the public to accept the sudden disappearance of Howard Dean from the Democratic primaries.
It's like food additives, once you get used to them you hardly notice they're there.
And that stress in the video segment on the NewsHour tonight, how bad this "insurgency" has been for shopping, how the nice Iraqis are trying to open their stores and the bad Iraqis won't let them...that should get the American public motivated.
The truth is that shrine is holy to al Sadr and his fighters, and their families. They're defending it from people who have been proven before the eyes of the world to be debased and immoral. They saw those .jpg's from Abu Ghraib too you know. That's who they're shooting at, and that's who's shooting at them.
The truth is they represent people who suffered under Saddam Hussein, suffered much more than the current hand-held puppet government. The truth is al Sadr's father was murdered by Saddam. The truth is al Sadr's a bigger threat to Israel than any other leader in the Middle East, and he's been marked for assassination, of one kind or another, for over a year.
Allawi is a gangster; a soulless, evil man. Al Sadr is a holy man. It really is that simple.
