Posted by pancho from pool0039.cvx25-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net (209.179.216.39) on Saturday, December 14, 2002 at 7:58AM :
The way we've responded to the plight of the few Christian Assyrians America has allowed us to reach suggests we'd discovered a lost tribe of them somewhere living in Stone Age squalor.
Let's send them some clothes to cover their tribal nakedness...some clean water in place of the ditch water they've been drinking...some medicine to use instead of rattling bones at the diseased.
You'd think we'd discovered a lost tribe and had taken it upon ourselves to bring them the simple basic comforts of modern living...when the truth is quite different.
The people we've been "helping" are the citizens of a country this country of ours has been slicing and dicing for a few decades now. OUR country brought them to this stage of ruin and deprivation...Iraq was a wealthy nation before we intervened...so was Iran. Israel was Palestine, and Jews and Muslims lived there in peace until we intervened and set the entire region to murdering each other. Israel was Palestine when Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen were cooking innocent Jews who till then had never harmed anyone. Who's the "savage"?
If we would seriously help "our" people in Iraq we would demand the United States stop doing things not even Nazi Germany did. But to play along on the one hand...then shed crock tears on the other and send TREES fer chrissakes is adding insult to severe injury.
If someone brings a mangled body into the hospital and cries out, "what can we do"? Only to have the attending surgeon administer cough syrup...we would be justified in doubting the staffs credentials or common sense.
Iraq doesn't need "aid" from overseas...Iraq needs to be allowed access to its own resources...they've already shown they know what to do. And as far as blaming a country for unnecessary and pointless wars...and the murder of its own citizens and the illegal jails and warped judicial system...the United States is the LAST country to criticize anyone else...especially when you consider our rich and privilieged background.
For Americans to act the part of Hottentots is far more damning than for Iraqis...but then maybe not...the evidence certainly suggests the opposite.
-- pancho
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