Saturday, June 17, 2006

Killing kids

Someone on Smirking Chimp this morning described Dick the Slimy as "a fat sack of moral sewage." Very hard to disagree with that. But tell me, how is it that a Vice President with poll ratings approaching below zero manages to hang on to the job? Remember Spiro Agnew, he of "nattering nabobs of negativism" fame who left the Vice Presidency in disgrace? Agnew now looks like a paragon of virtue compared to Dick the Slimy. What magic does Cheney possess? Will he ever be held accountable for his crimes, including treason?

I am willing to concede that in a situation like Iraq, where we have too few troops facing a civilian population that does not want them there, it is difficult to tell who is an enemy and who is not and they might become trigger happy. I understand that mistakes can be made. I can see how even women and old men in wheel chairs might be suspect. But little children? Our troops cannot distinguish between little children and terrorists or members of the insurgency? In the Haditha "incident" small children were found dead. It was said in at least one of the reports that I saw that they died of bullet wounds to the head. Perhaps that is untrue. But they certainly were found dead, and even if this is the result of someone throwing a hand grenade into a room full of people they had to have known were civilianst and might very well be children there is still no excuse. If this is regarded as standard operating procedure it only emphasizes that we should not be there doing such things in the first place. And there can be no doubt that the children killed at Haditha were not the only children killed in this terrible and unnecessary "war."

What is far worse, of course, are the thousands of children who died as a result of our sanctions against Iraq (some estimates run as high as 500,000). Now we are doing the same thing to Palestinians and threatening to do it to Iran. This is morally unnacceptable. Absolutely.

The Israelis are particularly adept at murdering children. Witness the recent shelling of a Palestinian family have a picnic on the beach in which 3 children were killed (they deny responsibility of course). They even have had snipers killing children. They should be good at it as they have been doing it for years (lots of practice). Why should they bother about children, they'll only grow up to be Palestinian adults. This whole business is so absolutely disgusting if there was something worse than war crimes it would easily qualify. I wonder how well you sleep, knowing you murdered a child (and for what)?

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