A swarm of new destruction
Operation Swarmer represents the biggest offensive on Iraqi soil since the invasion in search of Wielders of Mass Deception in 2003. As they conquered Baghdad and the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down with the help of a liberator tank, oil installations were protected but buildings of antiquity their treasures were left to looters and brigands to plunder.
No greater treasure than oil
We haughtily sniffed at the Philistines of our Modern Age who having a long history that stretches back a long 250 years as a nation forgot to secure treasures that date more than ten times 250 years into the past.
Nevertheless, one can conceitedly surmise that they were protecting treasures of the deep that date back even billions of years – Oil!
Somehow, if oil is a fossil fuel, I can only wonder how much would have had to go to waste in decay, sedimentation and precipitation to offer so much oil – sometimes I cannot muster enough faith to believe to Darwinism.
The whole thing blows my mind, I would rather be a simpleton of the creation story, and the miraculous can more believable.
However, I would contend that there was an eternity of time between the beginning and when the earth was found null and void. Eternity past could very well be billions of years of passage of time – the earth is as old as you want it to be.
From Baghdad to Berlin
Having suffered the plunder of the Museums in Baghdad, I thought to myself, the only other place top see Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian and Mesopotamian culture would now have to be the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Then on Larry King Live early this morning a number of commentators had a few things to say, but I did wonder how history had been twisted when a Christopher Hitchens of Vanity Fair vain-gloriously misrepresented some facts.
- That Iraq was under a greater danger of a civil war under Saddam Hussein as his regime was already imploding.
- That Iraq is no more occupied since it has an Iraqi head of state.
- That military might would handle the insurgency just as the Sadr Army was succumbed in 2004.
- That the Al Qaeda operatives working in Iraq arrived long before the coalition forces invaded.
The red blood of roses
I think it is time we fully document and journal the events in Iraq before other people blinkered by some unconscionable partisan loyalty rewrite the events before our eyes – misrepresenting the red blood of the innocent lives lost as the colour of roses in their bloom.
Yesterday also, a whole programme on Newsnight documented in some detail the mismanagement of moneys meant for the reconstruction of Iraq to the tune of $50 billion. This is looking like an American “Oil for Food” type of scandal that enthusiastic senator-persecutors of the UN have not taken note of.
In what can be cynical viewed as a poll-boosting exercise reminiscent of when Clinton bombed Yugoslavia whilst the Monica Lewinsky scandal captured the imagination of the American People, Operation Swarmer is riding on comparatives and superlatives with the hope the those rock bottom ratings of the President get a nudge upwards.
History lost to the present
It is however with interest that this exercise is taking place in Samarra where the force of occupation and incumbency failed to prevent the destruction of one of the holiest Islamic shrines.
It also shows that heritage and history plays more significance in the matter for preventing internecine violence leading to a possible civil war.
It is probable that flushing insurgents out of Samarra would snuff out the purveyors of violence, but it would not rebuild the shrine.
That shrine would also not get rebuilt is moneys are corruptly disbursed to political personnel who are allegedly lining their pockets better than an African chieftain his hands in the bank vault.
Such great ruin we behold
The fact is helicopter gunships and all that artillery do not daintily miss out infrastructure and innocent people as the culprits are being searched out.
After the operation is over such great ruin would we behold as the quest to prevent a civil war that has unravelled as a result of our pre-emptive war.
The division of a united people
The parallel with Yugoslavia is stark from the fact that Marshall Tito kept six constituent nations together as one and it all broke apart as Slobodan Milosevic stoked the embers of nationalism.
Iraqis who were Iraqi nationals under Saddam Hussein are now Kurds, Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims.
The bizarre case of a branch of religion in schism for 1,400 years being synonymous with a tribe and a location and exacerbated by Western equality in representation democracy simply accentuates the divides and does nothing for unity.
Iraq is one big and opened Pandora’s Box and God help us if we ever find the lid and get the strength to shut it up tight.
