Atheist Meditations

A tank just drove down the middle of my street. I looked out the window - stupidly, I suppose - I was in shock. A soldier sitting on the tank pointed his weapon at me, I stopped looking out the window. The nice people in military uniforms are on my television instructing us not to leave our homes until further notice. That's the only T.V. station, and they cut off my internet last week.


Alright, that didn't happen to me yet this week, but it happened to somebody today in Burma.

I'm finding my melancholic humors a bit stirred from the contemplation required in that first paragrab. If I suddenly switched bodies with a similar Burmese soul . . . that's not very fun thoughts. Being an Idealistic sort I'm sure I would have been at those protests, cheering on the actions of those Buddhist monks. ( men of religion, it is true, but this atheist holds a special exemption for the intellectually complex variants of Buddhism; I perceive those Burmese monks
on a pedestal of awe and respect) Just like China after Tienanmen Square, they are going to round up just about everybody they think had something to do with the protests. Just having been active on the internet will surely be a flag for Burmese Security Services that have been tasked with gouging out the eyes, tongue, and heart of this Demonstration Movement.

As they take you into custody, that's when you have to come to grips with the fact that The Suck will not end until they say so. It may well last for the remainder of your life.

Perhaps I'm a tad preoccupied with imaginings of atrocity, since I spent the morning reading the Wikipedia entry for List of War Crimes. Surprising how many just involve a village and a few dozen men and boys. Rounded up by invading soldiers and executed. That's the sure way to crush a resistance or stifle an uprising.

I'd intended to base this post around Sovereignty. The underlying principle of much modern international law whose conceptualization dates at least as far back as 1513 when Niccolo Machiavelli wrote. The Ruling Class, whether it is a sociopathic dictator, a group of military leaders, or an infighting club of capitalist elites; they do what they like within their own borders. Hear anybody talking about invading Burma and charging those 'Generals' with crimes against humanity? Why not? Where is the George W. Bush who connived so relentlessly to get our nation to overthrow Saddam and give the Iraqi's a chance at peace and democracy? You want to talk about a people who would greet us with flowers as liberators: we should invade Burma.

The contrast between Iraq and Burma are dramatically salient.

From what I understand Burma actually does have exploitable oil resources. Yet that is China's backyard and we have learned from the Korean and Vietnam wars not to mess with China's backyard. The Middle East, however, is territory we have declared our long term interest in. I think you could argue that WWII was decided by who controlled the Middle East.

The first rationale for invading Iraq was the fantasy that Saddam possessed 'Weapons of Mass Destruction.' That meant that he could finish the Holocaust with the push of button, America had to preemptively act. That's how the Bush Administration hoped to dance around the war crime of 'war of aggression', which, not too long ago when we were trying war criminals at Nuremberg, our nation described as "essentially an evil thing...to initiate a war of aggression...is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." (Wikipedia, "War of Aggression")

Now it is completely obvious that the majority of international commentators, the U.N.A.E.C., and progressive news sources in America were saying all along was completely right. The notion that Iraq was producing 'WMD' during the U.N. inspection regime was absurd. Not only that, but we now have a shitload of evidence that Bush's marketing campaign to hype the threat of Saddam knew that the WMD case was phony and intended it merely as a means of 'selling' it to the public. They knew they were promoting bunk intelligence, and they combined that with a policy of devastating any skeptics (remember Valarie Plame?)

Now those same spinarbeiters want to tell us that the main motive in attacking Iraq was to liberate Iraq from the evil Saddam and 'provide an example of Arab Democracy that would soon bring about the reincarnation of civility to that backwards people.'

Saddam was a bad person, no doubt about that, but that couldn't have been the reason to invade. Or else we would have a carrier battle group in the in the Bay of Burma right now.

Labels: current events, Iraq War, Realpolitik