Thank you, Phlux, for sharing those very deep thoughts. My constant worry and obervation is that people become more and more indifferent careless about anything and question less and less anything at all, starting with everyday issues. And the more they will keep watching TV and kept fed with horr pictures and overloaded with information the more acute will the problem become.
Up to now the ony answe I got to is to be aware, excercise your freewill, team up with people alike and try to make aware people around you. But as much as you can take a horse to water but cannot make it drink and prevent someone giving up liberty for a feeling of security (B, Franklin, the qute goes on - do not deserve either) or prevents rats from swimming back to a sinking ship (W Churchill - related to the probable "echo bubble" on the stock market), I accept seing the apparent world for what it seems being and whereever it may be heading.
Below is an article I thought might be of interest, eve though it discusses a different aspect of that tragedy.
All the very best to everyone.
Youri
Emerging Markets Datafile
May 14, 2004
THE MOSCOW TIMES
RUSSIA
ENGLISH
Global Eye, THE MOSCOW TIMES
Chris Floyd
RUSSIA
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The decapitation of American citizen Nick Berg at the hands of
the
Jordanian terrorist Abu Zarqawi was a shattering act of barbarism. What
is
perhaps equally disturbing is the fact that George W. Bush could have
prevented it -- but refused to do so.
Long before the war, Zarqawi and his band of non-Iraqi
extremists had
a camp in northern Iraq, in territory controlled by U.S.-backed Kurdish
armies, who had wrested it from the hands of Saddam Hussein. American
military and intelligence forces had a free hand to operate there;
indeed,
anti-Saddam Iraqi exiles also held open meetings in the territory, safe
from the reach of the dictator.
As NBC television reported months ago, American forces
pinpointed
Zarqawi's location in June 2002. They prepared an attack plan that
would
have destroyed this al-Qaida associate and his terrorist band. But
their
request to strike was turned down -- twice -- by the White House. Why?
Because such a strike would have muddied the waters in the Regime's
carefully calibrated public relations effort to foment war fever
against
Saddam's regime.
At every turn, Bush and his top officials painted a picture of
Saddam
Hussein as a powerful dictator able to threaten the entire world. At
every
turn, they implied, insinuated and sometimes openly declared that he
was in
league with al-Qaida. But this fictional portrait would have been
undermined by a raid on Zarqawi, which would have exposed the truth:
that
Saddam was a crippled, toothless despot who had lost control of much of
his
own land and couldn't even threaten vast enemy armies within his own
borders -- much less threaten his neighbors or the rest of the world.
It
would have also exposed the fact that the only al-Qaida agents
operating on
Iraqi soil were in areas controlled by America's allies.
Bush could have easily destroyed this barbaric al-Qaida cell,
but he
chose instead to focus on his long-planned invasion of Iraq: a country
that
had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on America but was itself
a
target of al-Qaida's hatred. Not only was Zarqawi allowed to live and
thrive, but massive resources were also diverted from the battle
against
Osama bin Laden in order to launch an unprovoked war of conquest and
occupation in the most volatile region on Earth.
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Email the Opinion Page Editor The entirely predictable results
of this
strategic and moral folly are plain to see. Iraq has been reduced to a
state of chaos, where Islamic extremism has free rein for the first
time.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban and al-Qaida have made a strong comeback,
controlling large swathes of territory and operating with impunity
throughout the land. Indeed, al-Qaida has launched more terrorist
attacks
around the world in the past two years than in the whole of its
previous
history. And just last month, Bush officials told us that it is "almost
inevitable" that al-Qaida will strike America again, this time with a
radioactive "dirty bomb." (Perhaps in time for the election?) Like
Zarqawi,
bin Laden has thrived on Bush's obsession with Iraq, which long
predated
the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and had nothing to do with the "war on
terrorism" -- or indeed any desire to "liberate" the Iraqi people from
Saddam Hussein.
As we've noted here many times, the plan to invade Iraq was set
out
long ago, in September 2000, by a group called Project for the New
American
Century, whose members included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul
Wolfowitz and many others now in the top ranks of government. PNAC
declared
publicly that Iraq must be conquered in order to establish an American
military presence in the heart of the oil-rich Middle East. The issue
of
Saddam's thuggish regime was irrelevant to this larger goal, they said.
Here is a direct quote: "The United States has for decades sought to
play a
more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved
conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a
substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of
the
regime of Saddam Hussein."
The Bush Regime was always going to invade and occupy Iraq, no
matter
what. It is central to its geopolitical strategy of ensuring what it
calls
"American dominance" of world affairs in the coming decades. The Sept.
11
attacks gave it an opportunity to galvanize -- and manipulate -- public
opinion in support of this long-held goal. But as we have clearly seen,
the
real war on terror -- the one focused on capturing or eliminating
al-Qaida
terrorists like Zarqawi and bin Laden -- has been given short shrift
while
the Bush Regime pursues the "bigger prize" of controlling Iraq.
Now the Regime and its apologists have seized on this latest
atrocity
to continue their heinous and deliberate policy of conflating the Iraqi
people with al-Qaida. They've used it to deflect attention from the
Regime's war crimes in the prisons of Iraq, where the U.S. military's
own
intelligence officers say that an astounding 70 to 90 percent of the
captives have been wrongfully imprisoned, The Wall Street Journal
reports.
Yet the war crime apologists are now declaring that the act of these
foreign al-Qaida terrorists justifies the torture and abuse of innocent
Iraqis.
Nick Berg went to Iraq in search of "business opportunities"
offered
by the Bush Team's "reconstruction" of the country they have destroyed.
Zarqawi, who could have been eliminated long ago, was "liberated" by
Bush's
Iraqi invasion to roam the country, thriving on the postwar chaos.
Their
fatal encounter is a paradigm of Bush's entire misbegotten enterprise
in
Iraq: a tragic, senseless, unnecessary waste.
Copyright 2004 THE MOSCOW TIMES all rights reserved as distributed by
WorldSources, Inc.
