by Robert Crisman - Vol 3 Issue 33

Let’s see: looking back, it was all supposed to be such a cakewalk according to Bush and the rest of those bibdribbling, neocon nitwits.

The game plan: blast into Iraq and knock-off Saddam, then rip off the oil and pretend to the world the Iraqis all liked it. We’d get the job done in 12 minutes or so, turn the place over to Rip ’Em & Clip ’Em, Cheney’s old contracting firm, and then head for Iran or some other Rogue State that’s not North Korea…

Nobody’d get hurt but the bad guys. Iraqis would love us and renounce Mohammed or some fucking thing. Americans could finally Stand Tall once again. These Colors Don’t Run and all that good shit.

Well, guess what. It didn’t go quite like that. Here’s some of the stuff that the media airbrushed from sight in those first weeks of war:

We went in there in March of 2003 and slammed up the sand trail toward Baghdad, and bam! We thought those guys would roll over, but no! The fuckers shot back! And some of our guys were getting knocked off! The supply lines were getting chewed up! Who wrote this script! Back in D.C., Rummy the Dummy was clearing his throat. Reporters were asking, hey, what the fuck? and he huffed, well, er, no, we didn’t say cakewalk… Look, trust us, we’ll get ‘em.

And by God they did. They went to Plan B: bribe Saddam’s generals. Sufian "The Dog" al-Tikriti was one. Agents went in with big bags of loot and resettlement offers: Corona del Mar, some farm in Virginia, you name it, you got it. Tikriti said, Yeah! Why fight the Big Dog? Next thing you know, those crack Republican Guards were dumped south of Baghdad with popguns to stop the invaders. Out in the desert, no cover, no nothing. It was a duckshoot, and that’s all she wrote for Baghdad and Saddam Hussein. Sufian, meanwhile, slunk down the ratline.

If the guard had stayed put inside Baghdad, like even a brain-damaged sump-goat would have known was the smart thing to do, it would have been Stalingrad South: house-to-house fighting forever and body bags winging back home by the planeload to cities and hamlets in all 50 states—and millions of people marching on D.C. with torches and nooses and castrating shears.

That may happen yet.

Back then, though, Bush skated. The U.S. breezed into Baghdad, pulled down some statues, and called it a win. Bush, dressed in a flight suit to look like a badass, strutted in front of the cameras and crowed it was "Mission Accomplished!"

Just goes to show: the dipstick was still smoking crack.

DEMOCRACY, BABY, RIGHT UP YOUR …

Anyway, now they’re in Baghdad—and it’s Party Time, right? You should’ve heard Bremer, the putz Bush appointed Head White Boy In Charge: The Iraqi people are free! Democracy, baby! Brad, Angelina and Jennifer Lopez! Popcorn and crack hos! Just line up and vote to fork over your oil and—what’s that you say? You wanna vote for the Shi-ites? You mean like those clerical guys they got in Iran? Listen, my friend, you can stick that Khomeini shit right up your ass! We’ve got the guy picked. You know, Ahmad Chalabi, Rummy’s old buddy. And—yeah, we know he’s wanted for bank fraud in Jordan and hasn’t even been in Iraq since 1813, but fuck it, it’s him or some other ratsucking bandit, you got it?

Democracy, baby, American-style, and—Hey! What was that? That noise? Jesus Christ! They blew up the what? And the other one too? Good God! Get our guys out there, man, quick! Search all the houses! Yeah, we know the troops were due to go home, but fuck that! Bush wants those pipelines as safe as a baby in church!

Bremer was frothing. How did this happen? Saddam is behind this! It’s gotta be him! The people all love us! Sure we ransack their houses and shoot into crowds—but we give their kids candy! Tootsie Roll pops! And—what’s that you say? How does he get the word out? Secret codes, smoke signals, some fucking thing! It’s gotta be him! Look at the Brits down in Basra, all those Shi-ites and shit; no trouble there. They’re walking around in their shorts, for Chrissake, and—what did you say? Six Brits were what? A crowd chased them into a building and did what to their ass? The whole fucking town? Jesus, don’t tell me! And—what? They’re offing our guys every day now? Hit-and-runs, drive-bys, snipers on rooftops? Car bombs and—missiles? And—pipelines? They’re blowing up pipelines?

Sweet Jesus in heaven, we’ve got a war on our hands!

UP WHOSE ASS?

Bremer had bounced into Baghdad in May of ‘03, decked out in a gray suit and stomp boots, and a raj hat and swagger stick too. He should’ve come dressed as Bozo the Clown. Bush had said, look, we’re here to win hearts and minds; let’s get this "sovereignty" show on the road. We’ll, uh, hand back the power, to our guys, the stooges, you know? Bremer announced an "interim government" soon to be formed—headed by Rummy’s embezzler, Chalabi.

Ayatollah Sistani, the top Shia cleric, went, what? He sat Bremer down to tell him the time: Ahmad Challabi? Why not John Gotti? Too bad he’s dead, huh? Fuck all that shit! We want elections! And then you can get down the road. Either that or we stick that swagger stick right up your ass.

Sistani didn’t really say that. Still, since Bremer limped home in ’04, you notice how funny he walks…

He just didn’t get it. In June he’d proclaimed that the U.S. would "retain control"—of the army, the oil wells, piplines, etc.—after "sovereignty" was passed to Iraqis. Security, dig it? We wanna go home and all that, but, you know…

Then in December he said no elections until after the U.S. had theirs in November the following year. When Bush steals that one, he figured, maybe these assholes will get off my back.

Finally, in March of ’04 he announced that those bases the U.S. was building—14 of the fuckers all over the country—were, well, for keeps. You should have heard him: Well, yeah, they’re forever, but… Hey, man, don’t sweat it! We’ll need Iraqis to cook and sweep up for our guys there. It’s a job program, look at it that way!

That, as they say, was the ballgame. Iraq put the boots to his ass.

Fallujah. Those charred chunks of meat that they hung from that bridge. Then Mosul, the oil-rich city contested by Arabs and Kurds in the north. They both went boom.

Fallujah. Those charred chunks of meat that they hung from that bridge. Then Mosul, the oil-rich city contested by Arabs and Kurds in the north. They both went boom.

And then Bagdhad, Najaf, Nasiriyya and Kut. They went boom boom boom—and, these were Shias, led by Muqtada al-Sadr, Sistani’s rival.

Shias, man, damn! These were the people that Wolfewitz said would be throwing us flowers and kisses for getting Saddam off their back.

As if they’d be too dumb to know that the U.S. invaded in order to pick Iraq clean…

Yeah man, up Bremer’s ass. Some swagger stick, huh?

FUCKED

Iraq was on fire from Mosul to Basra through April ’04. Bush flipped a coin: shit or go blind. Then Cheney slapped him and shoved him back out to explain that the war’s going great.

Sure, look at Najaf. That fight to the death in the graveyard and all… But hey, though, we won that one, right?

Oh hell yeah, we won… And Sadr chilled out, for fights down the road if that’s what it came to. You notice he kept all his guns…

Sistani was happy. See what the Shias can do, George? Now, those elections. Better get cracking, my man.

Bush, though, is dumber than Bremer. He thought he’d dicked it. The Shias are out of the way! Let’s get those Sunnis!

The U.S. destroyed Fallujah. Bush came in his pants. That’s that for those fuckers, right?

Well, er, ah, no. The U.S. would kill twenty—and 100 would pick up a gun. Thousands more streamed through the borders to fight. The whole Sunni Triangle now: Nightmare Alley, a day-by-day death trap for U.S. GIs and marines.

Morale hit the skids. The troops were getting their asses shot off; two, four, ten, sometimes 20 a day, damn near every day, on and on. The total is closing in fast on 2,000, with over 15,000 wounded. Part of the problem: the Pentagon shorted the soldiers on good stuff like armor, combat gear, vehicles, and so forth. Told them to scavenge the dumps for tin cans and shit like that… But then, what the hell, insurgents started building bigger bombs that tore through the new armor they had…

The generals were sweating. Our forces, stretched thin! Bush told the soldiers, as soon as your tour’s up, surprise! you get to stay in Iraq!

In June of ’04, in a basement somewhere, with paper bags over their heads, U.S. officials transferred "sovereignty" over to the guys they’d picked out, most likely winos. Then they slunk back to their compound, turned on the tv, and watched George Bush bleat about all of that wonderful progress we’re making.

Sistani just waited.

STILL FUCKED

Meanwhile, back at the ranch down in Crawford, things have gone quickly from sugar to shit. Folks now are waking up fast to the fact that Bush is a lying, skank bastard.

Iraqis love us! We’ll free them up! We’ll keep you safe from Osama! All that crap.

Remember the WMDs? Those interviews in Baghdad: WMDs? No, we haven’t found any yet, does that make your week? Yeah, yeah, we know, those Pez dispensers were lying around at that one place. The guy said there’d be anthrax, how did we know? Yeah, a friend of Challabi’s, said that he’d worked at their nuke plant or something. Well, yeah, we paid him. He needed a loan to get out of the country. We’re trying to help here and—huh? Well, uh, yeah, Rummy says keep on looking…

Then, the Downing Street memo. So much for that shit.

And that Hearts and Minds gargle? The Abu Ghraib tortures killed that one dead.

Meanwhile, the bill for the war’s up to $93 trillion a day. The U.S. can’t pay it. The economy’s tanking. Bush keeps on floating these i.o.u. notes to China…

And—Cindy Sheehan! One of those woman whose son was blown up. She went down to Crawford to sit down with George—who wouldn’t come out of his basement, the chickenshit bitch. Except to fly out to Palm Springs or somewhere, and then go on tv and try to pretend that she hadn’t fucked up his vacation.

He’s back in D.C. now with new worry lines on his forehead. Sheehan still wants to talk to his ass and she’ll be in D.C. in September, her and thousands of women just like her, with hundreds of thousands of others.

Your polls, George! The basement! Senate Republicans jumping like rats off the ship! Who’s left in your corner? The oil pigs, of course. Rush Limbaugh, the draft-dodging dopefiend. The Christian assassin, old Pat What’s-his-name…

Nothing but flag-waving droolers and nazis, my man, psychos with spittle flecking on their shirtfronts who still wipe their asses with rocks!

The rest of the world—forget it. They look at this war—the lies, the slaughter, the coffins shipped home that you keep off tv, the fact that you can’t find your butt with your hands—and they see that you and your cronies are not just a gaggle of death apes in suits, but inept, bumbling rumpkins as well.

And now, to top it, Iraq’s constitution! Your capstone to Progress! True, you wanted the Sunnis in on the deal; then you could tell us Iraqis are one happy family or something, nestled at last in the arms of Big Oil… Too bad the Shias and Kurds said fuck you.

Sistani got what he wanted, alright, and so did the Kurds: autonomy, after the coming elections. You gritted your teeth and said bravo, but geez, George, I hear your sphinctor; it’s cracking!

Autonomy for Kurds? Your good buddy Turkey wants that like mestacisized cancer. And the Shias? How long do you think it will take them to snuggle up close to Iran?

Which reminds me: weren’t you supposed to be wrapping up downtown Tehran about now? And then on to—well, not Pyongyang– Damascus! Or somewhere…

Now, George, you’re closing on nowhere… There’s a reason your daddy stayed out of Baghdad that first time around…

NO MORE FUCKING AROUND

We really need to get rid of George Bush. He might o.d. on crack or trip on a shoelace and blow us all up.

But the anti-war movement? Well, gee, I don’t know…

Millions marched in the days leading up to the war. But since then, not much but peeps.

What’s the deal? Well, look at the leaders: the gray, geese-like hippies-cum-yuppies and Birkenstock mamas of whatever gender–the last flaccid wheeze of the ’60s—who in 2004 went and handcuffed the movement to Kerry’s electoral campaign. Goatsmoking boneheads...

John Kerry voted to give Bush his war.

Of course, on the stump he changed up: Hey, okay, we made a mistake. We went in alone with our dick hanging out. We need a figleaf! The United Nations, some goddamned thing… And, well, as long as we’re in there, we need lots more troops…

What a worthless cocksucker!

Note to the antiwar movement: get rid of the geese and bust loose from the Dems. Start hating the bastards who sent the troops into Iraq.

Also, get with the other folks Bush has fucked over. That’s most of us, man, in one way or other. Like those Black folks starving and drowning in old New Orleans while federal relief, dismantled by Bush to pay for the war, is coming too little and way, way too late.

And­—oh yea, when, Bush finally blased on down there to scope out the wreckage, he toured Mississippi—and skipped New Orleans! Too many black folks packed tight in one spot must have scared him...

See, it’s not just the war. It’s the racism brother—along with lost jobs and wage cuts; the energy thefts and corporate scams; environmental rape; vets getting screwed on their pensions and health care; ripoff drug prices; and the attempted Social Security swindle. It’s the Christian goosesteppers, the Patriot Act—the U.S. is now a police state, my man—as well as attacks on our public school system, abortion rights, welfare, the arts, Charles Darwin–hell, rational thought–the list just gets longer. And sitting on top of this shitheap—its crowning glory—George Bush, who doesn’t give one rusty fuck about poor folks or black folks or immigrants or anyone else except white guys with money—unless they’re gay, then, fuck them too.

It’s what we get in a system designed to keep top dogs on top.

I can hear the antiwar goatsmokers now: You sound like a commie! Gasp! Shiver! Shake! If we came off like that, those honkies with money would hate us!

They hate us now, you dumb motherfuckers! And not ‘cause we’re nasty; it has to do with the fact that we’re breathing… They think it’s their air!

Commie, huh? Wow. You mean like those old cats who made revolutions? Well, what the fuck, if that’s what it takes. Whatever. It’s time to get busy.