Ted Rall: "America is the Enemy"

Just in case any of you take me seriously, that wasn't an exact quote, but it's pretty close to the sentiments expressed in Rall's latest column. Before you continue to the fisking, I want you to look at this cartoon. See what I mean? Good. Now, on to the column:

CUT AND RUN NOW

Only Lunatics Keep Fighting an Unwinnable War

NEW YORK--We shouldn't still be having this conversation.

Who are you talking to, first of all?

To anyone possessing a milligram of common sense, it has been obvious from the start--before the start--that invading Iraq would be disastrous.

"QUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRE!!!!!!!!"

Any American capable of reading between the lines...

"Don't trust those pesky facts!"

...sensed trouble when the Bush Administration's giddy predictions of flower-throwing Iraqis never materialized to greet our advancing columns.

"Hi, I'm Ted Rall, and I attack straw men for fun and profit!"

"Giddy predictions." Yeah, okay.

Even the silliest Pollyanna must have shuddered a little when it came to light that the war's singular Kodak moment, the toppling of Saddam's statue in Fardus Square, turned out to have been just as phony as the "evidence" recited at Colin Powell's UN speech.

I guess those weren't "real" Iraqis.

A year later, 630 U.S. soldiers lie dead, young lives sacrificed on the altar of the vainglorious ambitions of an insane cabal of neocon morons hell-bent on transforming the Middle East into an American Raj.

If you still consider Rall to be just another critic after reading that sentence, please bash your own skull in with a large rock and raise the collective IQ of the gene pool. Thank you.

Thousands more, some of them so misled by their unelected president that they thought they were avenging September 11...

Wow, 2 lies in one. Impressive.

...lost their limbs and eyes to bullets and bombs fired by people they expected to be their new best friends.

Uh, Teddy, were you under the impression that we had all those guns and tanks just so we could intimidate innocent people? They call it "combat" for a reason.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been murdered by the professional liars illegally occupying the White House in a search for weapons the experts damn well knew Iraq no longer possessed.

"...I also don't differentiate between civilians and enemy combatants, because anything that makes Bushchimpler look bad must be good! I AM TED RALL, AND I AM INVINCIBLE!"

...Whoops. Got a bit carried away there.

The delusional leaders of our occupation army are fond of pointing to signs of progress.

"They're not allowed to acknowledge good things! They've evil!"

Occupation viceroy Paul Bremer likes to rattle off statistics:

"Facts bad! Facts make brain hurt! Rooorgh!"

2,500 renovated schools, three million vaccinated children, 18,000 reconstruction projects underway, healthcare spending up 30 times, a 29 percent increase in the value of the Iraqi dinar.

"It must be a trick! Evil people CAN'T be good!"

Hey, it's the least we can do--after all, Iraq wouldn't need new schools or hospitals if we hadn't bombed their old ones.

If you can show proof that we destroyed everything useful in Iraq, I'd like to see it.

But, in the end, infrastructure doesn't much matter.

So...why did you just spend so much time talking about it?

There are three categories of civilians in an occupied country: patriots, collaborators and opportunists.

I can't wait to see how he figured that out.

In the calculus of hearts and minds, anything short of 100 percent popularity qualifies as total failure.

By those standards, no country in the history of the world has been a success.

It's an impossible standard, which is why no nation has ever successfully invaded and occupied another in the 20th century.

*cough* GERMANY *cough cough*

By the way, it's the 21st century now.

Even if a majority like living under foreign control...

It can't be worse than living under a murdering lunatic and his rapist sons, but please, continue to explain why we suck.

...a dubious assumption at best, an occupation is nonetheless doomed. As long as one percent of the population spends its evenings blowing up enemy convoys, fence sitters will be scared to collaborate. In Iraq, that one percent--or five, or whatever--shows no sign of letting up.

That's why we're killing them, you f**king idiot.

Read and understand: They hate us simply because we're there. Leave, and the hatred goes away.

Only one problem: The hatred is then transferred back into power, and you wind up with someone else like Saddam. Funny how that works, ain't it? Extremism is like that.

If you doubt that, visit Hanoi as a tourist.

I'm sure they wouldn't have a problem with you, Rall.

Exacerbating an impossible situation is the fact that we're playing right into the hands of the insurgency. Last week residents of Fallujah hung the carbonized corpses of ambushed American mercenaries (not, as widely reported, civilians)...

Let's see...they aren't part of the U.S. armed forces...which would make them CIVILIANS.

...from a bridge.

I wouldn't be surprised if Rall joined in the rousing chorus of "screw them!"

This week a U.S. army of retribution has surrounded the city to carry out Peggy Noonan's Wall Street Journal cry for vengeance:

That's an odd person to blame this on.

"It would be good not only for elemental justice but for Iraq and its future if a large force of coalition troops led by U.S. Marines would go into Fallujah, find the young men, arrest them or kill them, and, to make sure the point isn't lost on them, blow up the bridge."

Except for that "blow up the bridge" thing, I'd agree.

The Associated Press reported that a U.S. Apache helicopter gunship, mimicking Israeli tactics on the occupied West Bank, fired missiles into residential neighborhoods.

I'm sure they were aiming at civilians too. The U.S. loves killin' them got-dang A-rabs, right?

The Iraqi resistance wants us to retaliate;

That proves how astronomically dumb they are.

...provoking us into lashing out is why they attack us in the first place. Each act of retaliation kills and injures innocents, proving to the opportunists that we're the monsters the patriots say we are.

WHOA! Wait a minute there, buddy. The "patriots" are the ones calling America monsters? And you agree with them?

... ... ... Sometimes I wish Bush really would crush some dissent. Not all the time, but just at times like this.

We're radicalizing the previously moderate segment of the population.

"It's our fault that they're evil! Blame the Divided Hates of AmeriKKKa!!!!"

Were there some possible future, even 20 or 30 years from now, wherein enough stability had been achieved to allow us to hand off power to a democratic government that truly represented the interests of all Iraqis, I'd argue that we should tough it out no matter the cost. The chance of that, however, is zero.

I like how he just says that as if it's painfully obvious.

"The message to Iraqi citizens," says Bush, "is that they don't have to fear that Americans will cut and run." The Iraqis don't fear our departure; they crave it. Moreover, they count on it.

"Reinstate Saddam! ULULULULULULULULULULULU!!!!!!!!!"

"We can't leave," Newsweek quotes an officer with a major security firm in Iraq (hmm). "If it takes a million f---ing American lives, we have to stay."

I bet you would love that, wouldn't you Ted? A million dead Americans? Sounds like a success for the "moderate Iraqis!"

The hell we do. Sooner or later, one way or another, we're leaving--as defeated and bankrupt and demoralized as we were when we fled Saigon.

Couldn't get through without a Vietnam comparison, could you? I'm disappointed.

The only question now is: how many more people are we going to kill before we cut and run?

I think the real question is: How many more would be killed if we left without eradicating the "insurgents" first?

Oh, wait, they're not Americans, so they don't matter. Silly me.

Posted by CD on April 10, 2004 07:52 PM
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