US declares ‘War on Love’; France invaded
US declares ‘War on Love’; France invaded
President denounces France, Italy, Brazil as “Axis of Love”
Ann Arbor
2007-03-15 17:41:00 UCT
by Henry Edward Hardy
US President-for-Life George W. Bush today declared war on France, saying:
“We have fought the War on Terror, and been victorious. Today nobody dares to be scared of anything, no matter how bad it may be.
“But our task is not done. There is another, even stronger emotion which represents a threat to our nation. I am referring to ‘loverism’. Our war on love begins with France, but it does not end there. We will pursue the loverists wherever they may seek to spread their deadly loverism.
“He (Jacques Chirac) is what we would call a prime suspect … If he thinks he can hide from the United States, and our allies, he will be sorely mistaken.”
Bush said that military operations against France were continuing as he spoke, although he acknowledged that, “France had surrendered before our troops had arrived,” he added that the French had deployed a secret weapon labeled WMD, or “Women of Massive Doudounes.”
“Our troops are taking hold of the situation with both hands, and we expect them to be victorious before sunrise,” said the President.
Regarding France, Italy, and Brazil, Mr. Bush said,
“States like these, and their loverist allies, constitute an axis of love, disrobing to threaten the war-loving people of the world. By seeking women of massive doudounes, these regimes raise a hard and growing danger. They could provide these women to loverists, giving them the means to match their affections. They could seduce our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.”
Invest in deadly weapons
And those little cotton flags
Invest in wooden caskets
In guns and body bagsYou´re invested in oppression
Investing in corruption
Invest in every tyranny
And the whole world´s destruction…There´s a war on our democracy
A war on our dissent
There´s a war inside religion
And what Jesus might have meantThere´s a war on mother nature
A war upon the seas
There´s a war upon the forests
On the birds and the beesThere´s a war on education
A war on information
A war between the sexes
And every nationA war on our compassion
A war on understanding
A war on love and life itself
It´s war that they´re demanding…Sting, This War
Copyright © 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
A Marine’s Poem leads to US Representative David Obey’s anti-liberal tirade
Survivor’s GuiltI stare at this paper and don’t know what to say
I don’t feel right saying “happy memorial day”
I don’t find anything happy in the price you’ve paid
We’re both just pawns when this game called
war gets played
My body came home but my spirit just stayed
That hot Iraqi day when you were slayed
Watching my back so I could sleep unafraid I
heard the explosion from where I laid
And instantly I watched the skies go grey
I watched my life just float away
How could things go this way
You were my brother in arms and you took my place
But not like the way that car bomb took your face
And blew off your limbs
When I think about it my head starts to spin
I get noxious when I think of your family
I want to tell them I truly am sorry
I’m sorry your son died protecting me
This isn’t the way things were meant to be
You see that day your son took my duty
Your brother sacrificed four 4 hours of sleep
So he could go guard a gate for me
Your fiancée took my fate from me
I’m sorry your father took my place for me
I’m sorry I can spend memorial day with my family
Today should have been a memorial for me
At least then the survivor could have lived guilt-
free–Cpl. Cloy Richards
When Tina Richards, the mother of Corporal Cloy Richards, who is returning to Iraq for a third tour, encountered Representative David Obey (D-WI), Chair of the House Appropriations Committee, Richards mentioned her son was a Marine who was returning to Iraq and that she had just been to Obey’s office to drop off her son’s poem, “Survivor’s Guilt”.
Obey became infuriated and went into a tirade against, “idiot liberals” who call for an immediate cutoff of war funding:
It doesn’t. The President wants to continue the war. We’re trying to use the supplemental to end the war, but you can’t end the war by going against the supplemental. It’s time these idiot liberals understand that. There’s a big difference between funding the troops and ending the war. I’m not gonna deny body armor. I’m not gonna deny funding for veterans hospitals, defense hospitals, so you can help people with medical problems, that’s what you’re gonna do if you’re going against that bill.
When Tina Richards and the other members of the Occupation Project, an anti-war group, suggested that all that was necessary was not to pass any more war appropriations, Obey seemed to become unhinged, accusing one man of “smoking something illegal” and pointing to his empty inner coat pocket and almost-shouting, “do you see a magic wand?”
Obey’s office has been one of several around the country where anti-war sit-in’s and other forms of non-violent protest have been taking place.
Obey’s Tirade youtube link from Grassroots America
See also: Congressman’s video blunder shows Democrats split on war Washington Times
Tina Richards, A Mother of a US Soldier Crosses Paths With Rep. David Obey Al-Jazeerah
Protests target state’s lawmakers: Activists urge Obey, Kohl to vote against funding for war Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Copyright © 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
Human Rights Watch: Ghost Prisoner: Two Years in Secret CIA Detention
Human Rights Watch has compiled a comprehensive report about the case of one of the “disappeared”, Marwan Jabour. Most of the docile and pathetic British and US press have ‘reported’ on this publication without managing to link to it or even so much as mention the name of the report!
Here’s a bit from the Summary:
When Marwan Jabour opened his eyes, after a blindfold, a mask, and other coverings were taken off him, he saw soldiers and, on the wall behind them, framed photographs of King Hussein and King Abdullah of Jordan. He was tired and disoriented from his four-hour plane flight and subsequent car trip, but when a guard confirmed that he was being held in Jordan, he felt indescribable relief. In his more than two years of secret detention, nearly all of it in US custody, this was the first time that someone had told him where he was. The date was July 31, 2006.
A few weeks later, in another first, the Jordanians allowed several of Jabour’s family members to visit him. “My father cried the whole time,” Jabour later remembered.
Marwan Jabour was arrested by Pakistani authorities in Lahore, Pakistan, on May 9, 2004. He was detained there briefly, then moved to the capital, Islamabad, where he was held for more than a month in a secret detention facility operated by both Pakistanis and Americans, and finally flown to a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) prison in what he believes was Afghanistan. During his ordeal, he later told Human Rights Watch, he was tortured, beaten, forced to stay awake for days, and kept naked and chained to a wall for more than a month. Like an unknown number of Arab men arrested in Pakistan since 2001, he was “disappeared” into US custody: held in unacknowledged detention outside of the protection of the law, without court supervision, and without any contact with his family, legal counsel, or the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The secret prison program under which Jabour was held was established in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, when US President George W. Bush signed a classified directive authorizing the CIA to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists. Because the entire program was run outside of US territory, it required the support and assistance of other governments, both in handing over detainees and in allowing the prisons to operate.
–from the Summary of Ghost Prisoner: Two Years in Secret CIA Detention
See also: BBC Report: ‘Sleaze alleged in CIA’
European Union: Report on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transportation and illegal detention of prisoners
Copyright © 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
The Guardian: US commanders admit: we face a Vietnam-style collapse
An interesting article in the Guardian says that General Petraeus and his staff have concluded that the US faces a collapse of political and public support for the war in Iraq within the next six months. In addition, due to low morale, poor readiness and the high morale and level of experience of the resistance groups, the US faces a military collapse similar to the French collapse in Viet Nam in March-May 1954 or the collapse of US forces in Korea in October-December 1950.
US commanders admit: we face a Vietnam-style collapse
Elite officers in Iraq fear low morale, lack of troops and loss of political will
Simon Tisdall
Thursday March 1, 2007
The GuardianAn elite team of officers advising the US commander, General David Petraeus, in Baghdad has concluded that they have six months to win the war in Iraq – or face a Vietnam-style collapse in political and public support that could force the military into a hasty retreat.The officers – combat veterans who are experts in counter-insurgency – are charged with implementing the “new way forward” strategy announced by George Bush on January 10. The plan includes a controversial “surge” of 21,500 additional American troops to establish security in the Iraqi capital and Anbar province.
But the team, known as the “Baghdad brains trust” and ensconced in the heavily fortified Green Zone, is struggling to overcome a range of entrenched problems in what has become a race against time, according to a former senior administration official familiar with their deliberations…
US commanders admit: we face a Vietnam-style collapse The Guardian
Battle of Chosin Reservoir (wikipedia)
Battle of Dien Bien Phu (wikipedia)
Copyright © 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
Snips of Ike: Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight
Snips of Ike:
Why We Fight
by Henry Edward Hardy
Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight takes as its framework snippets from President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famous televised farewell to the nation in 1961, often called the “military-industrial complex” speech. Jarecki is best known for The Trials of Henry Kissinger.
One may or may not be sympathetic to the premise of the film, that the United States has become an American Empire, and as such, is behaving badly in the world. Why We Fight makes clever use of icons of the Republican Party such as John McCain and Eisenhower and neoconservatives such as William Kristol and Richard Pearle to make its points.
Why We Fight is also the title of a series of films made for the U.S. government by Frank Capra during World War II. They were commissioned in response to the Nazi use of mass media in films like Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Since then the title has been (mis-)appropriated a number of times, such as the book by former “Drug Czar” William J. Bennett subtitled “Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism”, and the name of a popular Danish rock band.
Jarecki’s Why We Fight has not been widely seen in the U.S. It was shown on the BBC in March 2005 and won the American Documentary Grand Prize at Sundance in 2005. The film would be stronger if it were better-organized and had a less transparent point to make. For those unfamiliar with some of Eisenhower’s later and more progressive thinking, this film is an interesting introduction.
A version of this article appeared previously in Current Magazine and on Electric Current
Copyright © 2006-2007 Henry Edward Hardy
About Scanlyze
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Scanlyze is an online magazine of essays, commentary, satire, and analysis. Were we half as clever, for inspiration we would take Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Swift, Montaigne, or Seneca.
“The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.”
John F. Kennedy, October 26, 1963
Show your support for Scanlyze!
Click the “Make A Donation” link below to make a donation through PayPal using either your PayPal account or any major credit card.
This site is semi-archival. I actively post on @hhardy01@mastodon.social.
Paypal or credit card donation
Copyright © 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 Henry Edward Hardy.
Recent Comments
Scanlyze 