"I AM a penis reference, Mary!"
This is a lie.
And it'll only cost U.S. taxpayers at least a staggering $350 billion along with the complete gutting of our foreign policy and our national treasury and the appalling blood sacrifice of our national pride and our international status and global sense of self-respect.
This is a lie.
And now, long after his political usefulness to us has expired, we up and invade his unhappy nation and lay waste to the entire region
This is a lie.
Dubya secretly flew to Iraq a few weeks back to spend 2.5 hours pretending to serve a fake, inedible plastic turkey...
This is a lie.
By the way, from Bush Sr. forward (and, yes, that includes Clinton), the U.S. has to date killed far, far more Iraqi civilians than Saddam ever could.
This is a lie.
Not to mention the more than half a million Iraqi children who've died from lack of medicine or decent health care since the brutal, U.S.-backed U.N. sanctions were imposed 12 years ago.
This is a lie.
I'll quit there - it's just too tiresome. Miss Morford isn't even entertaining when he attempts the complexities of politics, and he certainly isn't original. This is a regurgitation of a fair percentage of already discredited posturings - it fills the page, but that's about it. First Morford column I've read without a penis reference, too. He's slipping.
"I AM a penis reference, Mary!"
This is a lie.
That's not the half of it.
Even before the war UNESCO complained that Saddam was prohibiting the distribution of medicines readily available, in quantity, in U.N./NGO warehouses located in Iraq. Coalition forces found these warehouses full, for instance, of rehydration salts, used to treat dehydration resulting from dysentery and other diseases causing diarrhea, especially deadly to children because of their small bodies.
Saddam's government pursued policies like this that were designed to produce child corpses for his anti-sanctions propaganda parades. Saddam also inflated the numbers, for instance by stocking the corpses in warehouses for weeks or months at a time (a sacrilege under Islam which calls for rapid burial of the dead) until enough were collected for a more impressive show.
Now, in Iraq, children do not die from diarrhea, and the hospital pharmacies are filled with medicines, but it's worth remembering why Saddam intentionally engineered the needless death of thousands of children.
It was done for the sake of Mark Morford, and others spewing propaganda similar to his. They responded exactly as Saddam hoped they would and intended them to, and they were thereby incentivizing Saddam's policy of murdering children, toddlers and infants through designed and orchestrated neglect.
The murder was not done because of "brutal, U.S.-backed U.N. sanctions". The sanctions regime allowed for food and medicine to be provided. And medicine was provided. It just wasn't distributed or used.
No, those children died because of the willful, perverse, feckless, callous, supercilious and sneering repudiation of moral clarity by Morford and his ilk. Those children were, effectively, killed IN HIS NAME.