[Newspoetry] Is "Raid" a WMD?

[Donald L Emerick]

Yeah, but the important thing is the propaganda value of the claim... which
is that it continues to intimidate those who would baldly assert, much as I
do, that:

(a) no such weapons exist, or else the nature of the proofs before the war
would have been more convincing, instead of the flimsy allegations, that
amounted, at most to suspicions and hunches, which do not even rise to a
level adequate to form a reasonably well informed probable cause;

(b) some such BCW-related products will inevitably be found, because Iraq is
not wholly lacking in industrial processes, and, quite often, the same
agents could be used in fertilizers and pesticides, for instance, or in the
manufacture of many other products (which says something more about the need
for a better Green Peace treaty, than about the need for a foolish and vain
glorious war in the desert sands);

(c) some such BC-agents will inevitably be detected near military training
facilities because military commanders would be derelict (according to the
wisdom of military trainers, but not according to me) in this day and age if
they did not "expose" their troops to such substances during training and
teach them how to use their BC-protective suits, kits, and measures
    << indeed, I watched a US military training exercise on PBS showing
somewhat how low-level US soldiers were
     trained, by such "exposures" exercises -- but that would not prove the
US, which is rather hostile the most hostile
    major government in the world to the very idea of Ban-the-BCW treaties,
by the way
        [[it is a rather oxymoronic idea that anything that Bush does would
reduce the BCW threat to
        the future world populations --- I mean, how can we claim BCW are
illegal WMD
        when we know damn well that we have an arsenal of them far larger
than what exists
        in all of the rest of the nations of the world --
            but little things like substantial inconsistencies in US policy
and practice,
            in the Arms Control-Disarmament area, are never even discussed
by the media, in general]]>>; and

(d) the rather blatantly foolish attempt to portray BCW protective suits,
found at any hospitals around the world, as if, when found in Iraq, Iraq was
therefore preparing for BCW warfare -- a foolishness that I thought was
nearly idiotic, but which apparently did not stop the yammerheads of the
right-wing, such as Fox and CNN, for going on for hours and maybe days about
this so-called evidence, which would not have been any more admissible in
any court of law, than the so-called evidence of the fact that person P
breathed air, many times a minute, and performed other bodily functions....
but the idea of any kind of standard for journalistic "evidence" is not
going to ruin the idea of profit-making for such media...

There is nothing much left to objectivity, as far as the general public
goes: they get their news from the media equivalents of the National
Inquirer, which never cared much for the idea of responsible truth, but only
for a crass sensationalism which drives viewership up higher, even if only
temporarily.

Now, if we were dealing with an addictive phenomena, which I think we are,
then we know that the public will soon become non-responsive to the current
war symbolics, and the brazen primate responses that it has elicited, much
as the fear-masters in DC had hoped...  which will then force, if not cause,
the media hell-hounds to seek out yet another new thrilling story to
hyper-inflate for a few weeks...  for the fear-masters and
thrill-sexploiting media can not afford to risk the advent of any form of
rational reform, such as might glimmer even in the eye of the worst addict
now and then...

The game becomes this question: can you predict the kind of hyper-inflated
story that will have to follow this war story?  Can you predict who will be
slimed and pilloried?  Can you get on the blood-trail before the other
hell-hounds do, raise the cry of the banshee out on the moors, and thus earn
the credits (bucks) for having pursued the story first?

Our public does not know how to approach the question of rational conduct,
so far as the news media is concerned.  We teach nothing, or very little, in
our schools that teaches children about propaganda, because such teaching
threaten "religion" and "government."   Oh, yes, we tell them that other
governments lie to their people, but we tell them this is because those
governments are bad.  We do not teach them that all governments constantly
try to lie to the people, that governments fear truth more than they fear
anything else, and that governments will do about anything to distract the
people from questions of what is truth.  We do not teach our children, or
dare mention to our people, that governments of all kinds -- public,
religious, corporate -- are all one kind of thing: institutions designed to
further the career ambitions of some persons or classes of persons, in a way
that perpetuates their rules over other people.  And, people look at you
strangely when you try to suggest that all these kinds of leaderships differ
only slightly from one another, or that leadership cadres, quite
demonstrably, generally have no special skills such as would merit the ways
in which they liberally over-compensate themselves, by over-valuing what
they themselves do (contribute to society), and under-compensate all others
in society.

But, now, though I sound like an anarchist, I assure you that I am not.
Before a patient can recover from a deadly disease, he goes through a
therapy program -- begins to recognize the truth of his circumstances and
prospects, accepts his own role in precipitating, usually, the harms of such
self-fulfilling circumstances and prospects... I imagine here a seven-step
program, to overcome resentment and denial... even if most people are
chowderheads like me... but this will have to be the end of my words on this
for now...  If I keep on talking, you will have many goods reasons to know
for sure what you may only suspect for now, that I do not know much what I
am talking about (which fact never stops me from talking)...

thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick