blood of trained killers on Blair's hands

Byline: crass, vindictive soldier's father says Blair has blood on his hands for Iraq war

[pic- St. Paul's, I think]

I was walking past the Cathedral last night,
After having watched a (London Film Festival) Balkan film* about
the short period between a local war and WW1
"St. George shots the dragon"
and I remembered the memorial held last week
for the fallen(#) British soldiers of the Iraq invasion.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, who is so well-educate,
used exquisitely-indirect language which tried
to say that the government threw those men
into the fray for no reason.

He said something to the effect that
nobody considered the cost in lives
of invading Iraq. Point well-made.

What a nice way to package the rapacious
willful intent of the invaders
to control land and people, and
to steal oil.
If you put it Archie's way,
it seems almost worthy of a Nobel. And the winner is...
Being that this seemed to be a Christian memorial,
nothing was said about the hundreds of thousands
of Iraqi dead.
Apparently, they were
an optical illusion on our tv screens,
like on a Wii game.
The victors (us) never see the victims as people.
Our media whitewashes that for us.
Bless 'em. Guilt sucks.

[UPDATE: if you want to see blood, starvation, death, sorrow and no al Qaeda in Afghanistan, find Rethink Afghanistan, a new documentary. .]

So, as I continued to walk,
I thought, what a great strategy they'd spawned.
Politicians, doing the bidding of BP, Shell and (fill the blank)
took professional soldiers who were trained and paid 'well'
to do their dirty work for them**.
[poor boys have always fought the rich man's wars.]
That's terrific! Those boys knew
the potential cost of their choice to join an army.
If they didn't, they were too stupid to live anyway.
So, the 'insurgents'
(otherwise known as the butcher, the baker & the candlestick maker)
did us all a favour by culling some idiots
who would've amounted to nothing***.
[British expression: "cannon fodder"]
If they have spouses, or civil partners,
then the soldier's pension goes to the widow(er)
Queen Liz gives them medals, too!
They get 30 seconds of fame on the nightly news,
a picture and a short eulogy:
"beloved, brave, nice smile....beautiful corpse."****
You'll hear about the good they did for Iraq, e.g.
think of the rebuilding of the colonial economy generated
by coffin-making alone!
___
Update: Don't you just love Remembrance Day 2009 becoming Remembrance week. That should keep the complaining to a minimum. The argument on tv was "there's a time for debating, and ..." (so shut up and pay your respects). The insecure nation loves its pageanty, which reminds it of the empire long since gone.
___
Things could have been very different.
Imagine a different, less-affluent, less-educated world
where the political classes of various countries
are feeling their oats (or their privates)
and want to show that their country is better than all others.
If they want to use the Earth as their chessboard,
they just dream up^ a scenario of evil foreigners
raping, or eating our young,
then general conscription is hardly even necessary.
That was WORLD WAR 1. Millions dead.
So, the victors take revenge
on the losers (as if anybody wins in mutually-genocidal war).
Anyway, Germany was bankrupted and
forced into economic servitude; people dying of hunger,
until a certain sociopath cooked up his final solution.
Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.
Evil must be stopped. Let's save the world.
There's WW2 explained. Millions more dead.
See? we'll fight for queen, country, ideals & cigarettes. Nice & cheap lives.

So, unlike that crass father, above,
I think our politicians are behaving rather gentelmanly
in not asking us all to go to war.
HERE's what you do if you ever do get drafted:



You see, the rest of us have more important things to do

than getting blown up or riddled with bullets.

Our job is to create wealth for the rich
and save a few crumbs for ourselves (in bank accounts)
in order for the financial wizards
to pocket that wealth
leaving us without even
the social-democratic benefits
that our forefathers all FOUGHT for:
Health care, freedom of speech, pensions, education, universal suffrage.
And you can bet we're all suffering... (Groucho Marx, I think.)
See? no blood. nice and clean.
Unless, some of us get desperately hungry...
then all bets are off.

-Costick67 (8^P
pics from fotosearch.com

the media interpretation:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/09/rowan-williams-iraq-war-memorial

NOTES:

* the film was made by a Serbian, Bosnian & Bulgarian crew, with S. Dragojevic directing. It was actually fairly overaught, but they've got some demons to exorcise.
#if only they hadn't fallen into working for the army, they wouldn't have died.
** Of course, realising that you're running security ops for the oil barons doesn't make dying any easier.
***That's been an excuse for war at least since the Crusades. Lookitup
**** I'm most concerned by the corpses' carbon footprint. Sending a transport plane 12 000 klicks for a few funerals? Is that really justifiable? If they're planted in Iraq, then Iraq can become a tourist destination. and if the graves are inside their permanent barracks, the locals won't piss on them, either.
^Here's Goebel's speech about that. It's chilling how easy it is to get one nation to kill another's people. We're lustful beasts, after all. Ya, baby!