I Read The News Today, Oh-Boy…

Looks like things are heating up over in Saudi Arabia now and the “War on Terror” shifts direction. I can’t help but think that someone wanted to put some pressure on the Saudi Royal Family, and this suicide bombing incident will certainly accomplish that. In the aftermath, oil prices soared today, benefitting both the Saudis and the oil companies.

Elsewhere, raids in the Gaza strip by the Israelis have killed three Palestinians and wounded twenty more. The people there are in fear for their lives, and are being threatened with containment and detention in their homes, which would, in effect, force them to move or be destroyed along with their homes in actions that seem reminiscent of the Highland Clearances.

All these months of propaganda work � the WMD threat, the Osama link, the “liberation” of the Iraqi people, the importance of keeping WMD-making materials from terrorist hands � none of that has yet to produce a single thing it promised beyond the fact of war itself. Over one hundred American soldiers, and untold thousands of Iraqi civilians, are now dead. Media coverage of the war, which is now being called “the Battle of Iraq, not the War,” Senator Fritz Hollings summed up the absurdity of it all: “I saw President Bush on that aircraft carrier in the Pacific yesterday. Incidentally, that’s the closest he’s ever got to the war in Vietnam.” By the way, they kept that aircraft carrier circling in the ocean for over 30 hours at a cost of around US$1 million even though it was a relatively short distance to get him to where he needed to go, just so he could “arrive at the appointed time.” More likely, the footage will be replayed over and over again like a movie trailer during the upcoming presidential campaign.

And no one has yet mentioned the role the Iraqi women will play in the “new government.” Out of approximately 600 participants who are in discussions about what form that government will take, only 6 are women… this in a country in which 55 percent of the population is female. They’ve been made aware of the problem inherent in their skewed numbers, but whether anything will be done about it remains to be seen.