Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [28]
Recently on Nightline, they were interviewing an Iraqi woman who is pro-American and teaches English. She said that things are so bad now since the American invasion, she sometimes wishes Saddam were still in power. Her sentiment seems widespread. Twenty years of living under a brutal dictator—and after only ninety days of living under the Americans—they want Saddam back! Jeez, how bad a houseguest have we been?
It seems that the crazy clerics are succeeding in filling the vacuum left by Saddam and now it’s “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” time in Iraq. The Bush administration continually postpones turning control of the country over to the Iraqi people whom they’ve liberated. Why is that?
Because they know that if elections were held today, the people would democratically vote to stop having democracy and to give the country over to some rabid fundamentalist. Already women are living in fear for their lives if they don’t “cover up,” and anyone who sells alcohol or shows movies is facing execution. Woo hoo! Freedom! Democracy! Liberation!
I can’t wait to see who we’re going to free next around the world!
#5 Whopper with Freedom Fries (and American Cheese): “The French are not on our side and they may be our enemy!”
When you’re into Tourette’s lying, a number of things can happen. For instance, you’re telling so many lies, you forget which lie you’re telling, or which one you’re supposed to be telling, or who you’re telling it to, or if you’ve already told this person, or maybe you told it slightly differently before and you’re trying your damnedest to make sure the stories match and then you have to get everybody who has joined you in the serial lying all on the same page and before you know it you’re so jimmie-jammed up and spinning yourself into such a mess that your only recourse, your only way out, is to blame someone else.
Enter France.
When you need a scapegoat, when you need a worthy whipping boy, you really can’t do better than the country of France. And that’s who the Bush pundits went after, accusing the French of being an “Axis of Weasels.” All this was done to distract the American public from the real rats who were in Washington.
France had decided not to support any rush to war in Iraq. It tried to convince the United States to let the weapons inspectors do their job. The French minister of foreign affairs, Dominique de Villepin, spoke eloquently at the United Nations as the war began:
Make no mistake about it: the choice is indeed between two visions of the world. To those who choose to use force and think they can resolve the world’s complexity through swift and preventive action, we offer in contrast determined action over time. For today, to ensure our security, all the dimensions of the problem must be taken into account: both the manifold crises and their many facets, including cultural and religious. Nothing lasting in international relations can be built therefore without dialogue and respect for the other, without exigency and abiding by principles, especially for the democracies that must set the example. To ignore this is to run the risk of misunderstanding, radicalization and spiraling violence. This is even more true in the Middle East, an area of fractures and ancient conflicts where stability must be a major objective for us.
During the first Gulf War, the United States had the support of an actual coalition of powerful allies. But when it came to Gulf War- The Sequel, most of those countries weren’t so eager to sign up. Bush and his crack team of diplomats were left with a not-so-broad, not-so-daunting forty-nine-member “Coalition of the Willing.” Most of these were countries (such as Tonga, Azerbaijan, and Palau) who always get picked last for United Nations volleyball games and will NEVER get invited to the Prom (not even by their desperate cousins). They’re pathetically