Looking Through the Bottle

[Daveparts]

Looking Through the Bottle
By David Glenn Cox




If you look through a telescope you can see way off into the heavens, If you look through a microscope you can view the minute. However if look through your television set you’ll see only what they want you to see. If look through a bottle you can see what ever you want to see, distorted shapes and refracted light. Twisted images that if failing to amuse can simply be changed by turning the bottle. For if this is your reality then you control the spin. This world is your oyster
But it is a fantasy world subject to change not by facts but by how you hold the bottle up to the light.

The recent killing of Iraqi citizens by Blackwater contractors is case in point. If you look through the bottle this way Iraq is a sovereign nation but if you turn it another way. "Blackwater's independent contractors acted lawfully and appropriately in response to a hostile attack in Baghdad on Sunday," said a statement from the North Carolina Company, as reported by CNN on its website. "Blackwater regrets any loss of life, but this convoy was violently attacked by armed insurgents, not civilians, and our people did their job to defend human life."


I’m sorry, I thought the Iraqi’s were in charge here? This statement made less than 24 hrs after the shooting and says in effect, case closed. Blackwater sees no need for an investigation let alone charges and speaks from the docket with the voice of a prosecutor not a plaintiff. They are a contractor not the government but this is Iraq the sovereign entity and we look through the bottle a little differently here.

Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, telephoned Nuri al-Maliki, Iraq's prime minister, on Monday to express regret over the death of innocent civilians.
US and Iraqi sources said the shooting erupted after a bomb exploded near a US diplomatic convoy, but a US government incident report said armed men fired on the convoy and Blackwater guards responded.

Ms Rice agrees with Blackwater no need for an investigation, case closed even after she admitted to the deaths of innocent civilians. They did after all they have an unnamed Iraqi source who also said it happen just the way Blackwater says it did. You can remove the electrodes from his genitals now.

It is agreed armed men fired on the convoy, a car bomb is technically fired on by armed men. But an infant riding in a car with his parents being considered a combatenant is bit of a stretch. Blackwater said on Monday that it had received no official notice from Iraq's interior ministry. The toll from the shooting rose to nineteen civilians and one policeman - on Tuesday, according to a local hospital medic. No, I guess the Prime Minister going on national television and calling the President of the United States wouldn’t be official would it? Oh, wait Blackwater was waiting to hear from the US government they didn’t get the official notice about sovereignty either.

Riad Kahwaji, director of the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military analysis was quoted as saying: "Only the party that brought them into Iraq can take them out of Iraq - and that is the US." He continued that under their contracts "neither Blackwater nor the other companies are obliged to obtain a license from Iraq".

But wait Riad, Iraq is a sovereign country, right? Isn’t it? That’s what I keep hearing that’s what George Herbert Hoover Bush keeps saying. We’ve liberated them they are free! To do as they’re told. Meanwhile General Pinocchio and Iraq ambassador Ryan Crocker (no euphemism needed) are in London to give a repeat performance of their smash one day engagement “How we won the war and didn’t tell the resistance.”

Against the backdrop of Blackwater’s machine gun music I doubt the show was a hit.
Ending as it did like the 1812 overture with car bomb explosions and marauding mercenary massacres. Prime Minister Gordon Brown must have sat chin in palm waiting for the fat lady to sing the surge sonata so he could thank them for coming and rush them back out the door.

"In light of a serious security incident involving a US embassy protective detail in the Mansour District of Baghdad, the embassy has suspended official US government civilian ground movements outside the International Zone and throughout Iraq," the notice said. "This suspension is in effect in order to assess mission security and procedures, as well as a possible increased threat to personnel travelling with security details outside the International Zone," said the notice.

What about the surge sir? Remember the surge, about how things were so much better?

Kahwaji said: "The chances are they are going to stay. Because a lot of the foreign companies and contractors that are rebuilding Iraq rely totally on these Western, or US-based, security companies. "They don't have any confidence in the Iraqi police and the Iraqi security services."

See it all depends on how you look through the bottle. Iraq is a sovereign country that has others making their decisions for them. Iraq is free and as a reward US diplomats travel in military convoys and face death from the freed Iraqi’s. Keep looking because the surge is working so well the mercenaries are considered essential.

Meanwhile in the trifecta of lost wars Plan Columbia marches on, five billion dollars a year to fight drug trafficking in Columbia thirty billion and six years. Attack helicopters new weapons and training for the Colombian military but all is for naught. And in a recent government report the administration explained the reason why, Hugo Chavez won’t help us.

Yes, look through that bottle and point it at the light and you can see now how it’s all Venezuela’s fault. The DEA maintains Venezuela isn’t doing enough to stop transshipments of narcotics. Of course if Plan Columbia were working the drugs wouldn’t reach Venezuela in the first place, but that’s looking outside the bottle.

This administration plans and guides its course exclusively by looking through the bottle. To see things, as they want to see them always willing to hand the bottle to anyone else whom wishes to look. That way the argument is always about what is seen through the bottle and never the reality. The administration has the luxury of existence through fantasy. To proclaim the noble death or the brave sacrifice while never feeling the truth or acknowledging the truth or feeling the truth.

The blind cannot see but those who look at the world through bottles can see, but just don’t want to.