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Jan. 14, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
13:15
958 Iraqicide

The endless lies and pomposities of empire...

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Good morning, everybody.
It's Steph. I hope that you're doing well.
It is 10.46 a.m.
on January the 14th, 2008, and I would like to read an article about Iraq, as I am wont to do from time to time, just so that we can keep the suffering in our mind's eye So that we can understand what it is that we're fighting against and why it is worth spending so much time and energy to oppose this monstrous death machine of the state.
So this is an article from Salon.com.
The author's name is Glenn Greenwald, and it was published Friday, January 11, 2008, 9-18.
The grave Iranian threat to world peace.
Iran is a dangerous threat to world peace.
A rogue nation with religious fanatics as leaders who constantly threaten other countries with war.
And then there's a bunch of YouTube videos of American presidents threatening the other countries with war.
When asked if he would authorize a U.S. strike on Iran's nuclear facilities that were being used to develop dangerous weapons, California Republican Duncan Hunter said he would, in the unlikely situation that there were no other options.
I would authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons if there was no other way to preempt those particular centrifuges.
Hunter said at Tuesday's GOP presidential debate sponsored by CNN, Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani warned of the dangers of a preemptive strike.
Part of the premise of talking to Iran has to be that they have to know very clearly that it is unacceptable to the United States that they have nuclear power, he said.
I think it could be done with conventional weapons, but you can't rule out anything and you shouldn't take any options off the table, Giuliani said.
In other news, Bush yesterday, while in Israel, threatened Iran again.
Also yesterday, we dropped 40,000 more pounds of bombs on Iraq in a 10-minute time frame.
In some circles, it's a cause for celebration and vindication that the completely optional war we started only resulted in the violent deaths of 150,000 Iraqi innocent civilians through mid-2006.
With the overall number of, quote, excess deaths at 400,000 and the displacement of 4 million human beings, as Juan Cole points out.
There is also the question of how many Iraqis have sustained significant or crippling injuries from the same violence that has left so many dead.
For U.S. troops, the ratio is nearly 4,000 killed to nearly 10,000 severely wounded, or 2.5 times.
If the same held true for Iraqi civilians in the war, and if it is true that 250,000 have now been killed, it would equal 625,000 severely wounded.
Just me interrupting the article for a second.
I don't believe that that is, in fact, the case, because...
The Americans have access to top-notch medical care, some of which is not even available in the United States.
They get airlifted to Germany, that sort of crucial first hour after an injury.
They have the best doctors in the world all over them with the most advanced equipment.
That's not the case with Iraqis, who don't have many doctors left, but most of them have left.
To continue, this gentleman quoting Juan Cole.
One of the arguments warmongers gave for overthrowing Saddam Hussein was that his regime was responsible for the violent deaths of some 300,000 civilians between 1968 and 2003.
That estimate now appears exaggerated since the number of bodies in mass graves has not borne it out.
But what is tragic is that in four and a half short years, a foreign military occupation has unleashed killing on a scale achieved by the murderous Saddam Hussein regime only over decades.
Bush did not kill all those people directly, of course, but he did indirectly cause them to be killed since these are excess deaths beyond what you would have expected if there had been no invasion and occupation.
I am often struck by how clueless the American public is to the vast destruction we have wrought on Iraq and its people, directly or indirectly.
It strikes me as a bitter joke that four million are displaced, often facing hunger and disease, and the right-wing periodicals and presidential candidates are talking about how the surge has turned things around.
For whom? How many orphans have we created?
How many widows?
How many people who weep and cry every night while trying to fall asleep on straw mats?
I estimate on the basis of a UN study of refugees in Syria that as many as 600,000 or 700,000 Baghdadis were ethnically cleansed from the capital under the nose of the American troops implementing the surge.
This is back to the article as a whole.
The reason we basically block out from our public discourse the effects our behavior has on innocent human beings, the reason, for instance, we don't bother to count Iraqi victims and the reason we exempt Our own behavior from any sort of scrutiny, other than the most self-absorbed, is because that's the only way that propaganda can be sustained.
Freedom is on the march.
We're liberating them. They're so grateful, winning hearts and minds.
Is there anyone who could make a list of all the pros and cons from our invasion of Iraq and, while including the hundreds of thousands of innocent dead human beings and the four million who are displaced, argue that it was worth it?
What kind of moral depravity would allow that argument to be made?
Just listen to the repulsive laughter and boisterous cheers in the first video from the GOP South Carolina debate crowd, where swaggering tough guy slash draft avoider Fred Thompson, pathetically reading from cue cards, mocks Islam and issues playground war taunts.
It is as adolescent as it is depraved.
Yet that is the rotted soul of today's Republican Party and much of our cheering press corps.
Not that it really matters much, but the threats of that sort, like the ones issued all year by Bush to invade Iran, are clear violations of the UN Charter, which, as a treaty to which we are a party, happens to be, yawn, binding law in the US pursuant to our Constitution's Article 6.
Quote, all members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner of inconsistence with the purposes of the United Nations.
And one of the leading GOP candidates is now speaking openly about having permanent bases in Iraq for a hundred years.
Exactly what we swore to the world we wouldn't do prior to our invasion while marking as Arab street paranoids those who believed that was our intention.
Of course, Iran is ruled by warmongering militants and religious fanatics who are a grave threat to world peace and threaten other nations.
And there's two updates here.
One is, I forgot this, says the gentleman, and it's from the Drudge Report.
It is a news item title.
Huckabee warns Iran, be prepared to see gates of hell.
Update two, Noam Schreiber at the New Republic says, quote, Mitt Romney sounded like a smart technocrat last night.
His comments about the recent near-confrontation with Iran were detailed and impressive, like this.
Of the six candidates, only Ron Paul said he thought the incident was being blown out of proportion.
Let's put it in perspective.
We have five small speedboats attacking the U.S. Navy with a destroyer.
They could take care of those speedboats in about five seconds.
And here, we're ready to start World War III over this...
You know, there are people in this administration and in Washington, D.C. that are looking for the chance to bomb Iran, the 10-term Texas congressman said.
I'm worrying about the policy of why we're looking for a justification.
I mean, we're already, with our CIA being involved in trying to overthrow that government, and now we don't need another war.
And this incident should not be thrown out of proportion to the point where we're getting ready to attack Iran over this, Paul said.
Romney responded to that claim by saying, I think Congressman Paul should not be reading as many of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad press releases.
Just like the way people who doubted the grave Iraqi threat and who opposed starting a war with Iraq were pro-Saddam.
That's real impressive.
And this is the state.
This is the corruption that occurs in the state when you become imperialistic.
This is the lies, the prevarications, the obfuscations, the hypocrisies, the falsehoods, the propaganda, the mealymouth self-justifications, the smarmy schoolyard attacks that constantly occur when you become an imperial power.
When you kill and rape and slaughter and gas and bomb and torture, you get a sick kind of moral infection in your very soul, and you then must become, and we see this all the time, those who are confronting their parents on lies and hypocrisies inflicted upon them as children, Where parents set up these moral rules that they themselves never once followed.
And you see this all the time with your parents.
They just come up with these mealy-mast, endless excuses.
Around, oh, it never happened, or you imagined it, or it was for your own good, or you were a difficult kid, or I was tired, or I had a hard life, or your dad left me.
It's just this constant self-praise that occurs with the worst that's ever being said by the parent, is that, well, you know, I tried to make the best of a difficult situation, and so on.
But, of course, the difficult situation that...
Was occurring, was also far more so occurring for the child, who had no choice in creating that situation.
But that kind of tolerance was never, ever given to us as children, right?
Parents come up with all the excuses in the world for why they did grievous wrong, verbal, physical abuse.
But when we were children, none of that tolerance and forgiveness and understanding of trying to make the best of a difficult situation and judge not, lest ye be judged, none of that was ever applied to us.
I mean, Good heavens.
We were just punished for our transgressions, most of which were invented.
But that same kind of hypocrisy poisons the body politic when you go around murdering hundreds of thousands of foreigners and having a base.
Of course they're going to be in Iraq forever, at least until the empire collapses.
They've been in Japan for 65 years, and Japan doesn't even have any oil.
I mean, of course they're going to be in Iraq forever.
There was never any doubt of that, never any question.
If they were building permanent bases in 2004, of course they were going to be there forever.
And of course they can't say that.
And of course you can't put pictures of Iraqi dead on the cover of your newspaper.
I mean, if they found bodies of broken, blown-ups, splattered, half-buried into walls, femurs of children scattered all over the road, if they found pictures of that and put it on the front cover and said, results of American bombing campaign...
What would happen? People would rear up.
They would go nuts.
They would shriek and scream, unpatriotic, supporting the enemy in the pocket of the Islamofascists.
I mean, this is part of the thesis I'm working on in the RTR, that we are each other's slave masters, but this is the horror that goes on when there's so much lying and violence that is at the root of our society that the moment you speak the truth, You are viciously attacked by those other people who are in fact suffering from the truth.
I mean, the blowback that's going to occur from this is going to occur against the average citizen, not against the leaders.
So, we cheer on those who are ensuring our own danger, and we attack those who will speak the truth.
That's one of the board members at Free Domain Radio.
Has as his signature line, he who would speak the truth must keep one foot in the stirrup.
That is quite true.
But I just wanted to point out that all of this stuff is very, very intertwined.
That the mealy-mouthed self-justifications, moral pomposity, and posturing of the leaders is only possible because it happens within our families first.
And it can only be undone by morally examining the imperialism of our children that was evidenced by our families when we were growing up.
So thank you so much for listening.
I look forward to your donations.
I hope that you're having a wonderful, wonderful week.
And I guess count down to the symposium.
I will see you guys in less than a week who are coming.
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