This Space for Rent

Evil Party Moral Values (pt 8)

About 14 years ago, the dictator of Iraq got his first 15 minutes of being as bad as Adolf Hitler! when he stupidly believed that the US government wouldn't really care if he took over the nasty little petrodictatorship of Kuwait. And, to make matters worse, while he was being spanked out of Kuwait by the United States, et alii, he decided to allow his intelligence agencies to torture any American soldiers that happened to fall into Iraqi hands.

Saddam Hussein is a really stupid man, worse even than Maximum Leader Genius, but he ran a country where people had to be really good at being evil to prosper in the government. So the Iraqi ministry of torture was really good at torture, and at particularly savage sorts of torture; one of the American soldiers was described as so battered, it was later reported that his body looked like it had been dipped in indigo ink. But, as everyone knows, Iraq lost that war and, aside from being spanked back into being about as powerful militarily as Westby, Wisconsin (during hunting season, when a large part of the town decamped for the woods to look for deer), had to free their surviving American prisoners.

Who, being Americans, sued Iraq's pants off, to the tune of US$1,000,000,000.

Fast forward a decade, when the Coward in Chief decided to distract attention from one of his miserable failures by invading, yes, you guessed it, Iraq. After the smoke cleared, here was this tiny matter of a $1,000,000,000 lawsuit against the invaded and almost completely conquered carcass of Iraq. Did the B*sh junta instruct their viceroy to scrape a billion dollars out of the Iraqi government coffers to pay off this debt? Fuck, no. Instead, they refused to pay the bill.

Sure, it's par for the course, but why? Arthur Silber thinks that it's because the US government is siding with the torturers, probably out of professional courtesy. I think it's a little more devious than this; if the US government allows the precedent of liablity for torture against American citizens by the unelected dictator of Iraq, it opens the door for liability for torture for the unelected dictator of the United States. It's no professional courtesy at all. Honor Among Thieves is an important part of how the B*sh junta works -- if an ally is down, Maximum Leader Genius will be right up at the head of the line putting the boot in. But protecting the B*sh family estate, now that's something worth protecting, and if it means pissing on the heads of American soldiers, shoot, that's nothing out of the ordinary for the families of fascist thugs that control the Evil Party.

(lots of links from Arthur Silber)