Perhaps these guys just like guns

Robert Fisk has some ideas about what Bush should see in Iraq when he visits this week (next week?).

(the Independent is now trying to charge for Fisk’s stories, which is why I’m directing you to a Pakistani newspaper for the same story. Sheesh.). Of course Bush will do none of those things, but you have to wonder how he’ll manage to do it without having to confront a single Iraqi, who might embarrass him by not playing his part (I say his because Iraqi women are rapidly disappearing behind the veil, as Allah intended).

Since writing my last email, I’ve gotten more and more pissed at Bush’s visit to Auschwitz which, thanks to KTEH’s near-constant fundraising knocking the BBC World broadcast off the air yet again this weekend, I have been fortunate not to see any pictures of, or I’d really have lost it. I thought I was being fairly restrained this week (for once) when the commandant of Guantanamo talked about setting up a death row and execution room in our little corner of Cuba, and I didn’t say anything about building furnaces to dispose of the bodies. I wouldn’t have been so restrained if I’d known Bush was going to go to another concentration camp and say Never again while weeping big ole tears. Yeah fine, it’s not on the same scale, yeah yeah disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer, but it’s still a concentration camp in which people are incarcerated indeterminately without benefit of law or trial.

The US has introduced a program of gun registration in Iraq. Has John Ashcroft been told? Today was the first day on which Iraqis were invited to register or turn in their weapons. No takers. I will give the following quote (from the Daily Telegraph) without comment: "It is difficult to know why the Iraqis have not responded," an American officer said at one police station. "We are here to help them clean up the city, but perhaps these guys just like guns."

Not all the protesters at Evian were negative. For ex: A Belgian student wearing a Jacques Chirac rubber mask said he was there to celebrate the amount of "good dope coming out of Afghanistan" since the war. For some people, the bong is not half empty, but half full.

At Evian, Bush had some wacky plan about stopping terrorism and WMDs. It seems to involve the US being authorized to stop any ships it wants to, and something about controlling all civil uses of radioactive materials--such as x-ray machines. When x-ray machines are outlawed, only outlaws will have x-ray machines.